Hyperion is a new launcher by the makers of Substratum

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Some XDA users—especially theme aficionados—will agree that Substratum has been one of the best things to happen to Android development in years. With the demise of the CyanogenMod theme engine, the community needed an alternative. Substratum isn’t perfect, but it can be used on pretty much every unrooted Android Oreo device and rooted Android Pie device. The developers of Substratum are now back with another project: a highly-customizable launcher called Hyperion which definitely deserves some of our attention.

At first glance, Hyperion doesn’t look that different from other offerings like Nova Launcher and Action Launcher. They’re all highly customizable, fully featured launchers meant to let the user choose their own style. But Hyperion shines in its own way. It features Material Theme elements customized to the developers’ design language, giving it a bit of personality, and it brings a slew of features, like full desktop, dock, icon, grid, animation, and app drawer customization, which allows you to give it a personality of your own. It’s also pretty lightweight, and while it does have a paid version, the free version works wonders.

The list of features includes:

Full customization and coloring for the desktop, Google search widget, dock, folder background, and weather widget

Supports adaptive icons, notification dots, app shortcuts, and more

Fully tweak the desktop, dock and drawer interface, grid, and widgets

Customize app opening animations

Set up gestures in the home screen

Hyperion Launcher running on Android 9 Pie.

In its current state, it’s probably a hard sell from something like Nova Launcher in terms of features and customization capabilities. It also lacks certain Android Pie-specific features other alternatives like the Google Pixel Launcher has, such as full support for the new app opening animation. But then again, this is the first public version, and it should get a lot better with time. I’ve personally been using Hyperion as my main launcher for the past few days and I haven’t felt compelled to switch back to Nova Launcher Prime. So we’d suggest you try it out.

Hyperion Launcher is now available in the Play Store, and you can download it now. If you like it, then consider buying the ‘plus’ version which includes more features.