Much of this made possible by the plethora of third party home launcher apps that are out there and one of the latest has just reached a non-beta status. This summer, an unfinished version of the launcher was discovered by way of a Google+ group for beta testers. You still have access of course to your app drawer, but instead of a horizontal scroll with all of the icons in whatever order you have them in your normal launcher, Arrow places everything in alphabetical order automatically and in a vertical scroll instead, with letters to denote where you are in the list.
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The launcher itself looks similar to iOS 9, however, it’s clearly not an iOS 9 clone. You can set any of these as your default screen and rearrange them as needed.
In fact, surprisingly enough, the only real Microsoft integration in the launcher seems to be the addition of Bing wallpapers. Microsoft is in a similar boat.
It certainly makes sense that Microsoft is embracing cross-platform development, with Windows Phone not being as popular as the company probably would have liked.
To be clear, Arrow is a Microsoft Garage project for the time being.
Microsoft is launching yet another Android-exclusive app, but this one is created to give users a new user interface for finding apps, contacts and more. It’s not even the first Android app to emerge from this idea tank – previous Garage efforts have included an Android lock screen called Next and an Android Wear search assistant Torque, for example.
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In today’s dispatch from our freaky future, Microsoft has released Arrow, a free app that seeks to improve the experience on phones and tablets powered by Android, the Google OS that competes with Microsoft’s own Windows 10 Mobile OS.
