The Microsoft Launcher Challenge: Promises, Reality, Future (Premium)

I’m going to keep using Microsoft Launcher: I like how easily and thoroughly you can customize the user interface, especially. But the integrated experiences with Windows 10 aren’t yet available, so I’ll have to revisit those capabilities whenever they do arrive.

Before getting to that latter bit, let me discuss the customization stuff a bit more.

As I noted up-front in this series, the ability to thoroughly customize the Android user experience is one of the key draws of Microsoft Launcher. And yes, it really can be overwhelming, as you can almost literally customize every aspect of this launcher.

Some of it hasn’t been completely obvious, at least not to me. Despite going over every single option in Microsoft Launcher settings, there were two items that eluded me. As is so often the case, simply reaching out to people provided some answers.

The first is the old-fashioned “button” that appears in the middle of the Microsoft Launcher dock by default. Selecting this button brings up the app drawer, showing you all the apps on your phone. But this button also takes up valuable on-screen real estate, and in stock Android, you just swipe up for the app drawer, leaving that space available for another app shortcut.

I mentioned this issue while discussing Microsoft Launcher on Windows Weekly this week, and a viewer provided the answer: You can tap and hold on this button to access a context menu which provides a Remove (or whatever) item. Nice.

The other was access to the Google app’s feed, which is found by swiping to the left from the first home screen in stock Android. I actually semi-rely on this feed to find reading material (which I share to Pocket) and it’s been fine-tuned over months (if not years) by usage. But Microsoft Launcher, like most third-party launchers, replaces Google’s feed with its own. Which I find less useful.

I asked about this one on Twitter. And was told that while you can’t actually replace the Microsoft feed with Google’s, there’s a workaround: You can add the Google app’s Feed widget to the Microsoft feed. And tapping that brings up the normal Google feed. It’s one extra tap, but it works. I’ll take it.

The lesson from these two episodes, I guess, is that the Microsoft Launcher has its own way to doing things sometimes. And while it’s not always obvious at first, there is usually a way to get where you want to go. Ongoing experience using this thing, and really playing around with its options, will help. Also, asking for help never hurts, either.

With regards to the wider strategy aspects of Microsoft Launcher, you may recall a rather disjointed series of cross-device announcements that were all loosely tied to Microsoft 365 during the Build 2018 Day 2 keynote.

Microsoft general manager Shilpa Ranaganathan, who heads the firm’s cross-device experiences team, came out to discuss what she called “seamless customer experiences across phone and PC.” Among them, of course, was Microsoft Launcher.

“[Google’s] ecosystem allows us to create a fully customized experience for your Android phone,” she said. “We have a Microsoft Launcher bringing our signature, fluent, and productive customer-first experience to your Android device.”

Ranaganathan made two Microsoft Launcher announcements during her discussion. First, the software giant is creating an enterprise version of Microsoft Launcher, or at least supporting the existing software in the enterprise. (It’s not clear yet.) And second, Microsoft Launcher was picking up support for Timeline, the “go back in time” productivity feature that first debuted in Windows 10 version 1803.

“Satya [Nadella] talked about the fact that we’re really focused on making the phone a great second screen for your PC,” she said. “Joe [Belfiore] talked about how Timeline on PC is the easiest, most natural, and simplest way for a customer to get access to their shared activities across devices … We will be bringing that exact same experience to your iPhone and your Android devices as well.”

Let’s pause for a moment to discuss how that will work. As she said those words, the slide shown on stage noted that Timeline on iPhone would require the user to use Microsoft Edge, which one might think would limit the activities to web history. But as it turns out, Microsoft’s Office mobile and other productivity apps will support Timeline as well. And the Timeline view you see from Edge is, in fact, the full Timeline view, including activities you performed in other apps. You just have to run the show from Edge.

On Android, of course, Timeline can be far more integrated and natural, assuming, of course, that you use the Microsoft Launcher. If so, it should work much like it does in Windows 10. That is, virtually everything you do on Android should make its way into Timeline. And thus into your timeline, so to speak.

This evolution of Timeline, she added, would flip the script and make your PC the “perfect second screen for your phone,” reflecting more accurately, I think, how many people work today.

Anyway, in a demo, Ranaganathan showed how Timeline would one day work on Android via the Microsoft Launcher, noting that it would “exactly duplicate” the Timeline that the user saw on their PC.

This was the inspiration for my ongoing Microsoft Launcher experiment: I wanted to see whether having Microsoft’s cross-devices productivity experiences extend to my phone would be useful.

(She discussed other cross-device experiences, too, like the Your Phone app that is coming to Windows 10. But I’m focused on the Microsoft Launcher here.)

To be clear, Ranaganathan did present this as a future feature, as something she wished she had had access to for that day’s presentation. And a recent review of the Microsoft blog post that describes this functionality, now about a month and a half old, subtly notes that while Timeline access via Microsoft Edge on iPhone was available “now,” the Microsoft Launcher on Android “will” support this functionality. No time-frame is provided.

We’re still waiting. I’m on the beta version of Microsoft Launcher, which should provide early access to new features. And there have certainly been some recent updates, including one that added some new Microsoft Family features. But no Timeline, not yet.

In the interests of giving Microsoft Launcher a fair shake, I’m going to keep using it, and wait for Timeline support to come. In the meantime, I feel like there’s still more customization secrets to learn. And truth is, I like it. Though in its current state, I’m not sure there’s a huge advantage to using it over, say, Google’s Pixel launcher. The promise, of course, is that that will change.