The Ultimate Setup Guide to Android

This guide aims to give you a seamless and almost perfect Android experience. Whether you have purchased a new phone, or are simply refreshing an old one with a new look, you will find that this guide just works.

This is a link to the ZIP containing all these apps for Flashing or installation.

Starting off, with the launcher, the ultimate part of the home experience. Most OEMs (phone manufacturers screw up the entire experience, filling it with bloat, weird stuff and frankly just a bad looking UI, looking at you, Samsung, Huawei and Xiaomi). The only pure Android launcher is the Pixel Launcher by Google but it is only available on Pixel phones. Google did release it on the Play Store, but as anybody will quickly find out, it's really limited, and doesn't even let you change the icon packs! That sucks for a launcher, but fear not, because the brave developers over at XDA have bought good tidings, in the form of Ruthless Pixel Launcher (a play on the name rootless).

# Launcher

**Ruthless Pixel Launcher**

https://labs.xda-developers.com/store/app/com.ruthless.nexuslauncher

The Ruthless Pixel Launcher has a ton of features, icon pack support, A great look, Red AND blue versions and HUGE customization options. I mean you can even change the color of the Google Search Bar, get rid of it or make it transparent.
Since it's by XDA folks, it will keep getting updated
Interestingly enough you can change the search provider of the Google Bar to Bing or DuckDuckGo, although why anybody would do that is a mystery. All in all, this is the launcher to go for, a step above the actual Pixel Launcher.

running Ruthless with stock icons

# Icon Pack

Icon packs are a really important part of Android customization. While the stock icons are usually alright, you do lose out a bit on the looks aspect. I mean like seriously, icon packs are beautiful. Here's an image of my Ruthless Pixel Launcher screen running the stock icons.

Now for the packs

1. **Voxel**

This pack has nice Windows 10-ish style square icons, which adapt the color from the original icon. Looks beautiful and retro ish at the same time. Also the largest libraries of app icons so for uniformity, this wins more points.

2.**Whicons**

This pack will work great if you have a flagship sort of phone that has an AMOLED screen. (Pro tip to find out, turn the lights off and open a black screen on the phone. If no light is coming from the phone, it is an AMOLED display. Amoleds have better colors and deeper blacks) because when the screen displays black, it turns the display off in those parts. So for white icons, the screen looks absolutely beautiful and also results in power savings by switching parts of the display off.

The next step in your phone customization comes the most important thing on your phone. Apps. Now that the look and feel are sorted, you will find a large number of pre installed apps from your manufacturer. Some of it maybe Bloat, but some stuff is genuinely useful. However we at The Silicon River don't honestly care about that so we went ahead and made a guide to get rid of the shit apps on your Phone and use better ones.

Starting off with the basic functions:

**Phone App**

Google Phone: The dialer from Google makes for a pure experience, with your automatic Google contacts practically built in and decent-ish spam protection. The app is clean, and set to Material! Nothing could be wanted, other than call recording and we will have a guide to cover that soon!


**Messaging**

Google Messages: Also called Android messages, we advise to stick with the basic Google apps here because of their impressive UI and useful features, far better than your OEM messaging app. With Gmail like swipe archiving and RCS support being added soon. Also it offers one click OTP copying if you are into that sort of thing.

**Web Browser**

Brave: Instead of Chrome, but similar enough you won't know the difference. Brave is a fork of Chromium on Android and is basically identical to Chrome, except it offers native ad blocking and tracker blocking, which are features that are a must in the checklist of any browser. Being built in natively means it doesn't hog down performance and generally feels faster than Chrome on a day to day usage even though the UI is identical. You probably won't notice the difference except the icon and the name.

**Camera**

Stock, or Google Camera: Stock is your best bet on new phones, that is, until they release a Google Camera port. Yes we are again going Google, but there's a reason. There software stuff is so darn good sometimes! Google Camera is the ultimate camera seen till now, a port of the Pixel's Camera. When Google says "The Best camera on a smartphone" they didn't only mean hardware. Their software has the best modes I have ever seen, and it will do wonders even for old phones.

**Video Streaming**

YouTube Vanced: YouTube should have a category of its own, it's the biggest streaming site on the planet. But the stock YouTube app has loads of defects and, well ads. Loads and loads of ads. Ads in the beginning, ads in the middle, and then paid partnerships by the channel itself. While we can't do anything about the paid partnerships, YouTube Ad(Vanced) basically gets rid of YouTube Ads, both on the home screen and in videos, gets you dark mode, and YouTube Premium, which allows YouTube playback when in another app or when phone is closed! It's a great app and requires some configuration so we will have a guide up for that soon! To get the guide in your inbox, subscribe to the newsletter!

**Reading List**

Pocket: The best app we have ever seen to save anything you come across but don't have time to read at the moment. Can be used in all apps using the Share button, and syncs to your Chrome Extension and is built in in FireFox. Pocket downloads all the articles in your reading list for offline use. You can't go wrong with this one!

**Gallery**

Google Photos: Once again, because who doesn't like unlimited high quality storage of photos online, so that you never run out of space? Plus it's a private little social network sorta thing, and the AI is legitimately useful. It saves your photos categorized by the locations and the people in them. Yes the facial recognition of Google bands together images of the same people and allows you quick access to their photos. Also it bands things together, and showed photos of birthday parties together, or ruins. Even posters Jesus this thing is smart. Plus Google Lens allows you to take a photo of a clothing item or a photo of text and get the text or a link to the clothing item you like. Really useful

**Weather**
Overdrop: It's powered by Dark Sky, the hyperlocal weather service and has THE best looking UI of any weather app out there. It's even more beautiful than the original Dark Sky app and has nice features like AMOLED widgets.

**Calendar**
Google Calendar: Syncs to your Gmail and Google Trips and stuff so don't need anything else in Life.

**News**
Feedly: It's a nice app and don't get me wrong, the UI just works and looks pretty decent, but it does leave a lot to be desired. It has a lot of "artificial feel" to it as compared to our next app, but it makes up for it by a lot of advanced features, such as prior loadup, which means you don't even need to wait for a page to load, just click on a link and it opens instantaneously.

Flipboard: It has a much more "news reading" feel than Feedly. Swiping up changes the page with a great animation that makes you want to continue reading, and you can often get the gist of an article without even opening it.

Google News: This list would be incomplete if we didn't include Google News. While it has a glaring issue, in which it assumes that whatever people who live near you like, you will like to, which will end up giving you weird news suggestions, if you train it enough it will work for you. Not the best app, but a pretty good one.

**Wallpapers**

Backdrop: This is hands down THE best wallpaper app on Android, yet. An extremely pleasing Material UI, amazing wallpapers and fast and easy setting methods. It's so great that I would highly recommend buying the pro version, as I have done. It doesn't have limits on except a few wallpapers but the purchase, is worth it.

**Keyboard**

GBoard: Yes, back to Google because Swift key is progressively getting worse day by day. And typing on GBoard feels much more natural than typing on Swift key. I am literally typing this using that and it feels great. It's not a mechanical keyboard, but it blows all the other keyboards out of the water.

**Notepad**

Google Keep: A darn good app, and feels great with material UI, fast and optimized. Also works great with everything Google, so if you have something like a Google Home, it will save your shopping list to this app, so you can dictate it to your Home at your home (pun intended) and access the list at the store.

**To Do List**

Ike: Ike is based on Dwight D. Eisenhower's To:Do system and shares his nickname too. It gives you the ability to place the task in 4 grids which really help in deciding what to do when, based on whether the task is important and or urgent. You can place them in Fit In, Back burner Focus or Goals and it will really help you to organize your work.

**File Explorer**

ES File Explorer: A must for any Android modder but the UI is not great, considering that the free app is overloaded with bloaty ads that will slow your phone down. You can buy the pro version or install an ad blocker but as far as File Explorer's go, there just isn't any good alternative with the same amount of features.

**Chat**

WhatsApp: The ubiquitous Facebook owned platform is a must. It apparently respects your privacy (huge shocker for something now owned by Facebook) but it's still a must because everyone uses it. Speed and stuff is not great but this is a sort of app you have to have or you are going to miss out tremendously.

Telegram X: A better, faster and newer version of the Telegram app, with full encryption and privacy, ultra fast messaging and support for huge SuperChannels where you can add 10,000 people. Telegram is what we at The Silicon River use for daily communication and it works much more seamlessly than What's app or Slack.

**Reddit**

Official Reddit App: After all this is the implementation by the company so its secure and gives you proper notifications. But this just doesn't work for a lot of people. Reddit doesn't exactly get many awards for UX design so you might wanna go for the other one, because this one is way too buggy too.

Ready for Reddit: Preloading, so that when you don't have an internet connection it will allow you to browse Reddit's front page. That feature alone helps so much that it's enough to feature this App here.

**Dictation**

Otter Voice Notes: If you are a college student or just write stuff in hard copy, or need to record something spoken and transcribe it, Otter Voice Notes should be your go to tool. Pretty accurate according to our testing and a great UI to go with it. The free version offer 600 minutes of free transcription so that should be enough, but the pro version isn't too expensive either.

**Ebook Reading**

Google Play Books: While not a fan of reading on a phone, the night mode and the fact that you carry a phone everywhere really helps. Google Play Books allows you to upload your EPUBs or PDFs for later reading, syncs seamlessly between the web, iOS, and Android and has Material Design. What more could you want?

**Music**

Google Play Music: If you haven't realized yet, we are like huge fans of Google's good apps. Google Play Music allows you to upload your MP3s (50,000 of them) to Play Music and listen to them for free! And if downloading your own is to much hassle, the subscription worth $1 or 99 Rupees allows you to access a library of 40 million songs second only to Apple Music. The UI is not great and will be phased
out but you can change it with an Xposed Module called XGPM and then it looks pretty great.

**Journalling**

Diaro: Many people say that Day One Journal is much much better, but while yes the UI is great, we at The Silicon River do not place functionality over UI. Dairo offers you folders, tags and a pretty close UI. Also web support which is a deal breaker for Journalling apps. Day One won't have web support and Dairo also allows you to set a pin. It's just so much better.

So there. That was our ultimate Android guide to get you up and running on your Android phone quickly. Hope you liked it. Peace Out.