Two releases went out since the last post — 1.4.3 and 1.4.4. This one is about
1.4.3: icon packs, a dock you can finally edit without leaving it, and a grid
that stopped rearranging itself when you least expected it.
## Icon packs, everywhere the launcher draws an icon
**What ships.** Point sqTile at any icon pack you already have installed from
Play, and it applies across the whole launcher — desktop, dock, app list.
Picking the pack is free. Pinning a single icon from it to one tile, and
giving the dock its own icon style so it stays monochrome under a colourful
pack, are Pro.
sqTile detects installed packs through the standard launcher intents and applies one pack across the desktop, dock and app list. Choosing the pack is free; pinning one icon to a single tile and giving the dock its own style remain Pro.
This is the one I kept putting off, and it turned out to be the whole
ballgame. Between packs, per-tile icons and per-tile colours, the desktop is
genuinely yours now instead of a theme I picked for you.
**The first version looked broken and wasn't.** Icon packs went through the
same glyph/silhouette pipeline as everything else, so a full-colour pack under
the "glyph" style turned straight back into a glyph — a coloured pack that,
switched on, looked exactly as dead as before. The fix is that pack art now
draws the way its author drew it, full stop, and skips the pipeline entirely.
The one exception is a pack that ships flat, white, single-tone glyphs on
purpose, expecting the launcher to tint them — that kind still gets tinted,
because handing it back untouched would mean a white shape floating with no
plate under it.
**The picker went blank on its own icons.** With a few packs installed, the
list runs into the thousands, and part of the grid just stopped rendering on
a real phone. My first attempt made it slower: I shrank the decode target,
which sounds like less work but isn't — the platform decodes the full PNG
either way, so downscaling after the fact just adds a second allocation. What
actually fixed it: skip the density upscale most decoders do by default,
resolve every resource name once instead of on every scroll, drop names the
pack declares but never ships, and cap the grid at three columns so only a
dozen or so thumbnails are ever decoding at once. Confusing what a bitmap
costs to *hold* with what it costs to *make* cost me an evening.
## I had it behind the paywall until the night before shipping
1.4.2 sat at over 60 installs a day and two Pro purchases. That is not a
sign that too little is locked — if people are leaving in the first session,
it does not matter what is behind the paywall, because they never get there.
Icon packs were planned as entirely Pro, right up until the night before this
release. Three things changed my mind, in order of how much they mattered:
packs are table stakes for a launcher now, not a premium extra, and a paywall
here reads as "this app charges for the basics"; it is also the worst
possible *moment* for a paywall, because picking a pack is one of the first
things anyone does after installing, on zero investment in the app; and
per-tile pinning is honestly better suited to Pro anyway — it is for someone
who already likes the desktop they built and wants to fuss over one tile,
which is a different person than someone still deciding whether to keep the
app at all.
The cost of the change was zero. The section was already its own locked
block in the settings screen, so flipping it open was deleting one wrapper,
not redesigning anything.
## Editing the dock without leaving it
Swapping an app in the dock used to be impossible to do directly — you
removed it with the X, then re-pinned from the app list, which dropped the
new app into the first free slot rather than the one you had just emptied.
In edit mode, a tap opens the picker and writes the replacement into that exact dock slot. Reordering follows the finger across a neighbour, while the dragged icon stays attached to the right app even as the slot indices change.
Now a tap on a slot in edit mode opens a picker that writes into exactly that
slot, and the nearest empty one shows a plain "+". Reordering updates live as
your finger crosses a neighbour, not just once you release — which sounds
simple and took four separate fixes to feel right: the drag gesture was
keyed on the very index it was changing, so it kept cancelling itself
mid-drag; a fast swipe could outrun the database write and grab the wrong
icon; the icon under your finger was keyed by *slot number*, so a reorder
kept the gesture but silently swapped which app it was dragging; and the
offset that compensates for the jump was applied a frame before the layout
knew about the new order, so icons visibly hopped a beat too early.
## One bad rule, four bugs that didn't look related
I spent one evening dragging tiles around on my own phone and hit four
different-looking bugs, all from the same desktop, all from the same root
cause.
Since the grid doubled from four columns to eight, a full-size tile snapped
to *even* positions. That reads as "aligned" only if every row above it has a
whole number of cell-heights — and one row of small, half-unit shortcut icons
under the clock was enough to push everything below it onto odd rows, where
"even" had stopped meaning anything at all. From there: a tile dragged into
an obviously empty gap would land a whole cell too far and shove a gallery
tile out of the way; a tile dropped halfway onto a neighbour would land on an
even row that nothing corrected, and sit there straddling two rows; a
sideways swap would end up shoving something *down* instead, because the
collision logic only knew how to push along a row; and a tile aimed at the
gap next to a small icon would instead snap to the neighbour a whole row
above it.
The drop resolver compares the pointer position with a whole-cell step from the tile's current origin and chooses the move that displaces fewer neighbours. Same-size neighbours swap; a farther drop shifts one column instead of cascading tiles across several rows.
The fix drops the even-position rule entirely. A drop now weighs two
candidate landings — the raw drop point, and a whole-cell step counted from
wherever the tile is already standing, not from the edge of the grid — and
whichever one moves fewer other tiles wins. One rule instead of four special
cases, and it happens to fix all four symptoms at once, because "move the
least" is what a sensible drop looks like in every one of them. Two
same-size tiles that land exactly on each other's footprint now swap
outright, restricted to actual neighbours after an on-device test showed a
drop two cells away flinging the tile in between four rows down for no
visible reason. The last of it — a one-frame flicker on drop — turned out to
be the same class of bug as the dock reorder above: the position offset was
compensated a frame late, so it briefly drew a whole cell off. Same fix,
applied the same way.
## Also in 1.4.3
- **Sharper photos in gallery tiles**, especially wide ones — the cache now
remembers the size it decoded a photo for, not just its address, so a
freshly added photo no longer inherits a thumbnail meant for a small
picker.
- **Uninstall an app straight from the app list**, long-press menu, instead
of three taps through system app info.
- Buttons, spinners and dialog captions no longer disappear when the accent
colour happens to match a role the theme never actually assigned to them.
- The app version now sits at the bottom of settings — for every support
message that starts with "which version are you on."
## What's next
Last post said icon packs were next. They're here. The honest answer this
time is 1.4.4, already out by the time this goes up: the launcher stops
painting over your wallpaper. [That one gets its own
post](https://www.gradomski.dev/posts/wallpaper-behind-the-grid.html).
---
sqTile is on [Google Play](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dev.gradomski.sqtilelauncher),
in English, Polish, German, Italian and Ukrainian. Free, with a single one-time Pro
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