Have you ever spent a little time checking out the Google Feed on your Android phone? That additional screen that appears when you side swipe from your home screens? I did. I thought it was a great idea to provide a source of information that I could curate and customize for what was important to me. I spent some time giving it a chance. I worked with customizing it, thinking I could boil things down to what I was actually interested in.
It was a disappointment, repeatedly. Yes, it was nice to see my teams scores, weather and shipping notices in one place. And that’s pretty much where the good stuff ended. Try as I might, I kept getting articles pop up from sources I attempted to remove and topics I wanted excluded. I could mess with the settings repeatedly and it never worked. I won’t rant about the specific topics or sources. But clearly something isn’t right when 3 of twenty plus articles have even a headline of interest and many are duplicates from different ‘sources’.
I decided to get rid of it. I became determined to remove Google Feed from my phone. I despise a feature that fills an entire screen but makes itself irrelevant by ignoring my choices and customization. At first I stumbled around with my searches thinking that I could somehow turn off the feed. I found only one solution. The only solution I could find was replace the ‘launcher’.
What’s the launcher? It’s the user interface (UI for short) that sets out the screens, like the home screens and app drawers or folders. The launcher is the app in Android that is responsible for making Google Feed a part of the experience in stock android.
They all come with their own unique concepts, some with unique and worthwhile wall papers, some with extra features available at a premium. Here’s one of many articles that lists some of the launchers.
I tried six and finally settled on Evie Launcher because it resembled stock Android, was able to copy over my Google Now launcher settings and had a very small learning curve.
There are a lot of launchers that allow for a lot of customization so you can claim your individuality and do not provide Google Feed. So if you’re like me, tired of the Google Feed irritating promise of something that it just doesn’t deliver, try experimenting with a different launcher.
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