I decided to give Omni Swipe a try this past week and overall I do like it. It’s definitely not your usual launcher in that it doesn’t replace your launcher of choice. It’s an app that delivers quick access to your fav apps, contacts, and settings. It runs on top of your fav launcher.I tested this app on my Alcatel One Touch Idol 3 running Android Lollipop 5.0.2 and the Nova Launcher.
PERFORMANCE & USE
When you first install Omni Swipe, you’re presented with some quick instructions and you’re off and running. To access the app simply slide your finger diagonally from either corner of your HOME screen (not your phone’s display) and you’re presented with a lovely interface in the shape of a wheel that you swipe up or down to access various shortcuts.
The wheel is broken down into 3 sections, Interact, Favorites, and Toolbox.
- Favorites is for apps that you can change to the ones you need quick access to.
- Interact is the same as Favorites but for your contacts.
- Toolbox is dedicated to your settings including system shortcuts you would usually have in your notification drawer above and also a crazy little function called “Boost” clears your memory to free up some ram if you need.
All three sections contain 9 apps, contacts, and tools that you can swap out as you need. It’s nice having the items that are usually tucked away in my notification drawer or buried in menus easily accessible with a simple swipe of my thumb.
Omni Swipes adopts the Iphone style of adding and removing icons by simply tapping and holding till an “x” appears on all the icons.
The settings gives you even more flexibility with Omni Swipe like changing the Interact section to Recent Apps, enabling Tap Assist if you’re having trouble launching the app from the corners, and you can even change how you launch Omni Swipe all together along with other settings. You can also exclude certain apps from being shut down when you “Boost”.
Omni Swipe looks good and is simple to use. Depending on your mobile lifestyle, it could honestly replace your launcher especially since you can change the theme to suit your home screen but I found it indeed works best alongside it. However, it does have some quirks.
CONS
Launching the app by sliding from either corner of your screen frequently causes the phone to simply slide to the next screen instead of launching the app. This is an obvious problem that Omni Swipe makes up for by giving users the ability to tap a floating dot on your screen instead of swipe which you can enable in the settings. The problem with that is that dot is rather persistent. It stays on even when i’m on the phone which inadvertently causes me to accidentally hang up the phone when it turns my screen on.
On my device, there’s some lag when opening the app, it appears it’s due to the way they implemented ads on the app by having this hanging little diamond that appears first then the app launches from the corner. It adds about a second to launching the app but at least the ads are hidden and can only be accessed by sliding down the little hanging diamond to see any of them. Nice but I can’t wait for a paid version that allows me to get rid of it so I can have a truly fast launch.
The biggest problem I have with this app is also a very convenient feature it does automatically which is detect when it’s gestures might interfere with your experience in other apps and it will keep itself off when you’re using those apps but it doesn’t do it well and when I have the Floating dot enabled, it wouldn’t’ do it all. The dot would stays right there in the corner where my game controls are for certain games. Absolute madness! >_< You can go into the settings and tell it which apps to avoid being on in but it would better if it simply saw that I was in an app and didn’t launch at all.
I had it installed when I was trying to record some mobile gaming for a for the Idol 3 review and it drove me bunkers.
Omni Swipe popped in while I was trying to play Implosion >.<
CONCLUSION
All in all, if you don’t mind spending a little time to set this up, I think it’s a great app especially for large screen devices like a tablet or phablet. Omni Swipe gives you fast access to your most important apps and settings and it does it with ease despite a few shortcomings.
