Tempo

An ultra-minimal Android launcher: airy washi paper, Japanese typography, no distractions.

⬇ Download the latest APK

Why this exists

I doom-scroll. A lot. I went looking for a way out, and the best one I could come up with was to lock myself out, a launcher that blocks the apps for good. Not "hidden until I cave," not "back in a tap." For good. I mean it. And yes, the whole thing is in Japanese, a language I can't speak, because friction is the point.

eddiegulay

Tempo is a home-screen replacement built around one idea: peace, no distractions. It tells the time, finds an app, and shows your notifications on a calm, paper-cream canvas with a single vermillion accent — and when you want to leave the launcher entirely, it has two full-screen modes to leave it for: 集中 (a clock and nothing else) and 鍛錬 (a workout timer).

     

_{Home (ホーム)  ·  Search (検索)  ·  Notifications (通知)}

Features

• Home: a faint sumi-e ensō behind a large mincho clock, the date in vertical Reiwa-era kanji (令和八年・六月十七日・水曜日), a live spoken-style reading (午後九時一分), and a single 静 ("stillness") seal. The corner is set vertically (縦書き) in Japanese and horizontally in English — stacking Latin letters one per line is a ransom note, not typography.
• Search (検索): live-filtered list of every installed app (work-profile apps included), with a scale-up launch animation and a long-press menu (app info / hide / uninstall). With contacts access, a name or number shows matching people with Call, Message, and WhatsApp. Without it, the same query is handed to Phone, Contacts, WhatsApp, or Google. Tempo does not read the call log. The hidden-apps page, the theme toggle and the language picker live in this screen's header.
• The blockade (the whole point): hide an app and it's gone for 10 days, no take-backs. A confirmation spells out the commitment, a live countdown shows the time remaining, and while an app is blocked its notifications are suppressed system-wide too. The ledger is included in Android Auto Backup, so on most devices uninstalling and reinstalling Tempo doesn't reset the timer — best-effort, not tamper-proof, and it needs no permission at all.
• Notifications (通知): your real notifications, tap to open, swipe to dismiss, ordered by the system ranking, minus anything from a blocked app.
• Calendar (予定): your real agenda, read from the device calendar provider — the same place the Google Calendar app syncs into. The next event replaces the date in Home's corner, set vertically in Japanese. Add and edit events in place, on a 栞 wheel rather than a Material date picker. Every write asks first, because a calendar is not private state: what Tempo saves reaches your other devices and anyone invited.
• 集中 (Focus): a landscape clock and a Pomodoro, full-bleed, no dock, no system bars. The screen stays awake only while it is on screen.
• 鍛錬 (Training): a workout timer where the ensō is the countdown — the brushed circle closes as the interval runs out, which you can read from arm's length in a way you cannot read a two-digit number. Seven workout shapes (circuits, AMRAP, for-time, EMOM, fixed sets), nine built-in routines including the benchmark workouts people actually train, a routine builder, and records with personal bests and a training-load view. Nothing advances past a rep-based exercise on its own — you press 済 when you are done. A workout you cut short is recorded as what it was rather than discarded.
• Japanese and English: the app is Japanese by default and by design (see above). English is there because a first-launch screen that explains what Tempo is about to read — every notification on your phone — is not consent if you cannot read it. Choose on that first screen, or later from the Search header. Japanese is unchanged: every Japanese string is the one that shipped before.
• Paper / Sumi themes: a one-tap toggle between washi cream and warm charcoal, persisted.
• Ink, not ripples: everything you press settles into the shape of the control it belongs to, in the theme's own ink, and fades out more slowly than it comes in. Material's default draws a grey rectangle from a colour scheme this app never sets.
• A well-behaved launcher: HOME-press always returns to a clean home, a lifecycle-aware minute clock (no idle wakeups), default-home onboarding, edge-to-edge insets, predictive back, and accessible controls.

Usage

Tempo has three main screens plus two full-screen modes, reached from the floating dock pill at the bottom of every screen. There is no settings page, no widgets, no folders. That's the point — the handful of choices there are (theme, language) live in the Search header.

• Set it as your home app. Press Home and pick Tempo, or long-press the dock pill (it glows vermillion until Tempo is your default) to jump to the system picker.
• Home (ホーム): a minute-aligned mincho clock with a spoken-style kanji reading, the date in vertical Reiwa-era kanji, the faint ensō, and the 静 seal. Back and the Home button always return here.
• Search (検索): type any part of an app's name or package to live-filter. Tap a row (or press Go to launch the top hit) to open it; long-press for app info / hide / uninstall. The header carries the hidden-apps button, the theme toggle and the language picker.
• Block an app (the point). Hide an app from the long-press menu or the hidden-apps page (the eye-off button in the Search header). You'll confirm a 10-day commitment, and from then on the app is gone from Search and its notifications are suppressed. Tap it on the hidden-apps page to see the countdown; it can only be restored once the 10 days are up.
• Notifications (通知): grant notification access once (tap タップして許可); then tap a row to open it or swipe either way to dismiss it.
• Calendar (予定): tap Home's top-right corner. There is no dock tab for it, because a home screen should stay a home screen. Grant calendar access when asked; every add, edit and delete restates what it is about to do and waits to be told yes.
• 集中 / 鍛錬: long-press the Home clock to choose a mode, or tap the dumbbell in the dock to go straight to 鍛錬. Both take the whole window; Back leaves them.
• Theme: tap the sun/moon icon in the Search header to toggle Paper ⇄ Sumi; your choice is saved.
• Language: tap the globe in the Search header and pick 日本語 or English. It is a picker rather than a toggle, and each option is written in its own language — guess wrong on a blind switch and you may not be able to read the control that would put it back.

→ Full walkthrough, gesture reference, and FAQ: docs/USER_GUIDE.md.

Tech stack

• Kotlin + Jetpack Compose (Material 3): the entire UI is Compose, drawn edge-to-edge.
• MVVM: a LauncherViewModel over the launcher's repositories (apps, theme, notifications, blockade, calendar), and a separate GymViewModel for 鍛錬 that constructs nothing until the feature is first opened — a home app's onCreate runs on every HOME press, and a user who never trains should never pay for a database they do not have.
• Jetpack DataStore for settings; LauncherApps for a live app inventory; a NotificationListenerService for real notifications (and for suppressing blocked apps').
• The blockade ledger lives in app-private storage and is included in Android Auto Backup, so a reinstall restores an active block before the app first runs. It carries a monotonic lastSeen high-water mark, and "now" is max(systemClock, lastSeen), so winding the system clock back cannot shorten a block. This replaced an earlier shared-storage mirror that needed All-files access — a very broad permission to buy a best-effort guarantee that backup already provides. It is best-effort either way: a determined user can disable backup, and guaranteed enforcement would need Device Owner provisioning.
• 鍛錬's store is SQLite through the platform SQLiteOpenHelper rather than Room, which would need KSP and a dependency. minSdk 29 pins SQLite 3.28, so every migration is additive and irreversible: no STRICT, no RETURNING, no DROP COLUMN.
• Localisation is a Kotlin table, not res/values-en. A third of the user-visible strings live in the domain layer, which has no Context, and reading a string resource in a unit test needs Robolectric. The table is an interface with one implementation per language, so a missing translation is a compile error — where Android resources fall back to the default language silently, which here would mean shipping Japanese to an English user. Numbers, dates and counters are a separate Formats layer, because 一分三十秒 is not a phrase, it is a function over 90.
• No DI framework, no third-party UI libraries, just AndroidX.

Build & run

Requirements: JDK 17+ and the Android SDK (compileSdk 36, minSdk 29 — Android 10 and up). CI builds on JDK 21.

git clone https://github.com/eddiegulay/tempo.git
cd tempo
./gradlew assembleDebug          # build the debug APK
./gradlew installDebug           # build + install on a connected device/emulator
./gradlew testDebugUnitTest      # run unit tests

# the gate every change has to pass — this is what CI runs
./gradlew assembleDebug lintDebug testDebugUnitTest

The suite is ~1,500 plain JUnit tests and no instrumentation, which is deliberate: the copy, the timeline arithmetic and the progression rules are all pure Kotlin so they can be checked on the JVM in seconds. Several tests read the source text rather than calling into it — they pin facts a compiler cannot, such as "no page holds a Japanese string literal outside the table", "no screen draws the training-load ratio", and "GymViewModel's init stays last in the class body".

Open the project in Android Studio (latest stable) and let it sync; local.properties is generated for you and is intentionally git-ignored.

Using it as your launcher

Once installed, press Home and pick Tempo. The first screen asks for the two accesses it needs — the home-app role and notification access — and explains what each is for before asking; pick your language there if Japanese is not one you read. App search needs no permission, and the calendar asks only when you first open 予定. See the Usage section above or the full User Guide for the complete walkthrough.

Project layout

app/src/main/java/io/eddiegulay/tempo/
├─ MainActivity.kt              # HOME activity; owns the ViewModels + lifecycle
├─ LauncherViewModel.kt         # single source of launcher UI state
├─ data/                        # AppRepository, ThemeRepository (DataStore), BlockadeRepository, JapaneseDate
├─ notification/                # listener service (+ blocked-app suppression), store, repository
├─ calendar/                    # provider access, models, write outcomes
├─ i18n/                        # the string table: one file per namespace, plus Formats
├─ gym/                         # 鍛錬's domain: models, timeline, cues, progression
│  ├─ data/                     # SQLite schema, store, migrations, the seeded catalogue
│  ├─ session/                  # timeline compiler, session machine, reconciliation
│  └─ cue/                      # speech, tones, haptics, and the disarm matrix
└─ ui/                          # Compose screens, Dock, dialogs, theme
   ├─ gym/                      # 鍛錬's pages
   │  └─ session/               # the live player
   └─ theme/                    # palette, type, shapes, the ink press indication

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Please read CONTRIBUTING.md and the Code of Conduct. Bug reports and feature requests go through the issue templates.

Credits

• The app logo is the kanji 拍 ("beat", a single-character reading of tempo) set in Hiragino Mincho, in the same vermillion as the home seal. The master asset is art/logo/tempo_logo.svg; the Android adaptive icon (vector foreground
  • washi gradient background + themed monochrome layer) is generated from the same glyph outline.
• The cover art (art/cover/tempo_cover.svg) sets the same 拍 glyph inside a hand-drawn sumi-e ensō on the washi ground, with the 静 seal — the app's palette and type, composed around the negative space (ma) the launcher is built on.
• The visual direction was prototyped in Claude Design and implemented natively here.
• Display fonts: Shippori Mincho (clock, date, app names, 静 seal) and Zen Kaku Gothic New (notification copy, romaji), from Google Fonts under the SIL Open Font License, bundled under app/src/main/res/font so the design renders with its intended type rather than the platform Noto CJK fallback.

License

MIT © 2026 Eddie Gulay