openlauncher

Open Launcher is an Android home screen replacement built specifically for aftermarket car head units, the Android tablets that get installed in a car's dashboard in place of the factory stereo. Most aftermarket head units run a generic Android build, so their default launchers are designed for phones rather than cars. This project replaces that launcher with one designed to look and feel like factory dash software.

The design philosophy is offline-first. Car head units are typically not connected to Wi-Fi most of the time since they rely on your phone's CarPlay or Android Auto for navigation. Open Launcher is built around that assumption: speed, compass, trip meter, and day/night switching all work without an internet connection. Weather widgets hide cleanly when offline rather than showing broken boxes.

The home screen is a drag-and-drop grid where each widget pane can be moved, resized, and stacked. The widget library includes car-specific tools: a music player that detects CarPlay or Android Auto and switches to shortcut mode automatically, an FM/AM radio display with presets, a GPS speedometer, an altimeter, a trip meter with a hidden 0-to-100 acceleration timer, a soundboard with assignable pads, a weather card, and a CPU/memory monitor for checking whether the head unit is overheating on a long drive.

The day/night theme engine offers four modes, including a sunset mode that switches at local sunrise and sunset using offline location math, which is useful for head units that cannot read the car's headlight signal directly. Accent color, background, fonts, text scale, and UI scale are all adjustable from the settings menu.

The project is open source under the MIT license and explicitly welcomes testing across different head unit models, since hardware compatibility varies widely in the aftermarket car audio space.