[Release] HomeSpike v1.0 — a real home screen for Ubuntu Touch (multi-page, dock, drag-to-reorder, three placement modes, true multitasking)

Zer0

Source / install: https://github.com/TeamIDE/HomeSpikev1 · License: GPL-2.0-or-later

What it is

HomeSpike is a fullscreen home surface for Ubuntu Touch (Lomiri) that replaces "drawer-as-default" with what most people actually expect from a phone: a wallpapered home grid you land on after unlock, swipeable pages of icons, an iOS-style dock, and an edit mode where you long-press to drag icons around or remove them. New apps you install auto-add to your last page. The Lomiri drawer is still there (the patched long-press inside it gives you an "Add to HomeSpike?" prompt), but it's no longer the first thing you see.

It ships three placement modes so you can lay icons out the way you actually want: auto-fill (icons reflow with no gaps), snap-to-grid (place on any cell, gaps allowed), or place-anywhere (drop wherever, overlaps OK). Each mode keeps its own saved layout — switching modes never destroys the previous arrangement.

It also fixes a fundamental gap in Lomiri's staged mode (the phone form factor): there was no "show desktop" concept at all — Lomiri's design assumed one app always fills the screen. Tapping the Ubuntu logo (BFB) or the new spread home button now reliably returns you to HomeSpike, with the running apps still alive in the background. Real multitasking with a real home screen.

I built it because Ubuntu Touch in 2014 made a bet on "scopes as cards" replacing home screens with widgets, and that bet hasn't aged well. Every other mobile Linux shell since (Plasma Mobile, Phosh, even Android-via-Halium) has done the opposite. After daily-driving UT on a OnePlus Nord N100 and finding myself wanting somewhere to put apps in an order I chose, I stopped wishing for it and wrote it.

How it works

It's all QML on top of stock Lomiri — no shell fork. HomeSpike loads as a Loader inside Lomiri's own Stage.qml, replacing the original Wallpaper element. Because it lives in the lomiri process and isn't a separate application surface, it never appears in the app spread, never needs autostart, and never has a .desktop file.

The four Lomiri files we touch (Shell.qml, Stage.qml, Stage/Spread/Spread.qml, Launcher/Drawer.qml) are shipped as full replacement copies under app/lomiri-overrides/ — install is plain backup-and-replace, no sed. Original files are kept as .orig and uninstall.sh cleanly reverts. Installer is idempotent and OTA-survivable (re-run after a system update).

For "go home" to actually work, HomeSpike teaches the stage a new concept: a homeShown flag that promotes the HomeSpike Loader above the app delegates on demand (BFB / spread home button) and demotes it again when an app gains focus. Without this, Lomiri's staged appDelegate state insisted on rendering the focused app full-size even when minimised, hiding HomeSpike. There's a small Mir-focus-echo grace window so the previous app's lingering focus state doesn't immediately flip the overlay back off.

HomeSpike itself reuses Lomiri's own primitives instead of reinventing: app inventory comes from AppDrawerModel (the same model the drawer uses), wallpaper comes from AccountsService.backgroundFile (the same one Settings writes when you change wallpaper), icons render with LomiriShape (same rounded-rect tile primitive). State (per-mode layouts, dock contents, hidden apps, page count, dock settings) persists to ~/.config/home-spike/home-spike.conf via Qt.labs.Settings. The Drawer→HomeSpike "add" is a file-inbox the running HomeSpike polls every 1.5 seconds — no D-Bus dance, just a file.

Features

Multi-page swipeable home (1–5 pages, configurable)

Optional iOS-style dock at the bottom (max 5 apps, persistent across pages, adjustable plate height). When the dock is on, Lomiri's left launcher panel auto-collapses so HomeSpike owns the full screen.

Three placement modes with independent saved layouts:

Auto-fill (reflow, no gaps)

Snap to grid (place on cells, gaps allowed, swap on collision)

Place anywhere (drop anywhere on the page, overlaps allowed)

Edit mode (long-press): drag-to-reorder, drag-to-edge auto-flips page, X-badge removes an icon (stays installed, just hidden from home)

Drag between dock and grid in both directions

True multitasking + reliable home: BFB or the spread home button always returns to HomeSpike; running apps stay alive in the background and resume instantly when re-tapped

Home button in the right-swipe app spread — tap to return to HomeSpike without minimising each app individually

Wallpaper inherits whatever you set in Settings → Background

New installs auto-append to the last page (snap → first free cell; place-anywhere skips, since it's intentionally manual)

Long-press an app in the swipe-left drawer → "Add to HomeSpike?" prompt → it appears on your home within ~2 seconds

Per-arch portable — no qmlscene wrapper script, no arch-specific paths; HomeSpike runs inside lomiri so it picks up whatever Lomiri sees

Tested on

OnePlus Nord N100 (billie2), Ubuntu Touch 24.04 noble. The design is generic to Lomiri 24.04 — should work on every device on that channel. If you try it on something else, please let me know.

How to install

Currently distributed as a self-hosted installer (not OpenStore — see "Why not OpenStore" below). Phone connected via adb, developer mode on:

git clone https://github.com/TeamIDE/HomeSpikev1.git
cd HomeSpikev1
PIN=<your-phablet-sudo-pin> ./deploy/install.sh

To revert:

PIN=<your-phablet-sudo-pin> ./deploy/uninstall.sh

Why not OpenStore

OpenStore ships Click packages, which are AppArmor-sandboxed and explicitly cannot modify system files, remount / rw, or hook into Lomiri's shell QML — i.e., every single thing that makes HomeSpike the home rather than an app you open. A confined Click version would just be "HomeSpike Launcher: an app drawer you have to tap to enter," which loses 90% of the value. So this ships as a self-hosted installer for now. A clean long-term answer is upstreaming the home-surface mechanism into Lomiri proper — I'd like to do that once the design has settled in real-world use.

Caveats up front

Modifies four Lomiri shell files. Read install.sh before running. Backups are made for each (.orig next to the live file); uninstall.sh restores them.

OTA wipes overrides. Re-run install.sh after any system update. Takes a couple seconds.

Iterating on the overrides logs you out to the greeter. Lomiri caches QML aggressively, so the dev refresh path pkills lomiri — you'll see the greeter, unlock to continue. Normal use (just running HomeSpike) doesn't restart anything.

Removes the OpenStore-link long-press in the drawer. That gesture now goes to "Add to HomeSpike?" instead. Can be restored as a different gesture later if there's demand.

No widget API yet. This release is the home surface itself. A widget system (with a real provider API) is the next milestone — the current QML is the scaffolding for an eventual ImGui+Lua reimplementation that'll host third-party widgets behind the same load-point.

Source + issues

GitHub: https://github.com/TeamIDE/HomeSpikev1

License: GPL-2.0-or-later. No warranty. PRs welcome — especially "tested on <your device>" confirmations and Lomiri-version-drift fixes for the override copies.

TL;DR

"I wanted a home screen on Ubuntu Touch. UT doesn't really have one — the drawer is the default surface and there's no place to arrange icons how you want. So I wrote one. It's a QML tree loaded inside Lomiri's own Stage.qml + four small Lomiri shell-file overrides. Multi-page, dock, drag-to-reorder, three layout modes (auto-fill / snap-to-grid / place-anywhere — each with its own saved layout), long-press in the system drawer adds apps to it, spread gets a home button, BFB minimises any open app and reveals HomeSpike — true multitasking with a real home screen. Backups + uninstaller included. Source linked below."

Zer0

Keneda

@Zer0 said:

OpenStore ships Click packages, which are AppArmor-sandboxed and explicitly cannot modify system files, remount / rw, or hook into Lomiri's shell QML

Well, That's half true.
You can publish applications not sandboxed, that can write to system files, see Ubuntu Touch Tweak Tool for instance.
But you have to ask for that and your files need to be reviewed by UT Devs.

But sure if you can deal with UBPorts Devs to merge your work to Ubuntu Touch that would be the best.

projectmoon

Can this be installed alongside Lomiri Plus from the Ambot Installer?

Zer0

@Keneda i did not know this. thanks

Zer0

@projectmoon I wouldn't try. This is only for ut vanilla. best case its buggy. worst case it bricks and the uninstaller doesn't help

projectmoon

@Zer0 I would assume so, yes.

Linus67

@Zer0 said:

HomeSpike is a fullscreen home surface for Ubuntu Touch (Lomiri) that replaces "drawer-as-default" with what most people actually expect from a phone: a wallpapered home grid you land on after unlock, swipeable pages of icons, an iOS-style dock, and an edit mode where you long-press to drag icons around or remove them. New apps you install auto-add to your last page. The Lomiri drawer is still there (the patched long-press inside it gives you an "Add to HomeSpike?" prompt), but it's no longer the first thing you see.

I disagree with the argument: "....with what most people actually expect from a phone.

The current user interface design of UT is very good. It offers some suggestions for improvements to the organization of apps (divider lines, pages, spacing). Visibility of the status bar.

In the case of Ubuntu Touch, attempting to copy Android or iPhone concepts can only result in poor imitations. Nobody wants that.

kugiigi

@projectmoon I'm pretty sure no
But it would be nice if this is packaged as Ambot/Jerk package so that it's easy for me to try.

Personally I'm not interested with a "proper" home screen but it would be interesting to see which ones can be implemented in the app drawer. I want to see how well the icon positioning works. My solution in Lomiri Plus isn't polished

Zer0

@Linus67 that's fair, and that's the point, this is for the people who do want it. The whole value of open source is choice: you run it how you like, I run it how I like. Up to now everyone was locked into one default that a lot of newcomers find confusing, especially coming from Android or iPhone. This is for those folks.
I don't really need to justify it, but a concrete example: my wife flat-out refused to use UT. The iOS style layout is for her. Something like this is exactly what gets non technical people to adopt it. Back when UT first launched I bought a Nexus 4 and 7 to run it, and the UI lost me inside a month, I went back to an iPhone. So I get being opinionated about your setup. This clearly isn't for you, and that's completely fine. It's an option, not a replacement.

Linus67

@Zer0
Absolutely no one will ever stick with Ubuntu Touch because it works similarly to an iPhone or Android device.
These people are also abandoning GrapheneOS even though it’s very similar to Android or iPhone.
To stick with Ubuntu Touch, it’s not enough to simply switch operating systems. It’s similar to Linux. So we should focus on the 5% of Linux users.
There are iPhone and Android people, Illy, Lavazza, BMW, and Porsche people. Today this, tomorrow that... Those aren’t real changes.
The only thing you can change in life is your mindset; the physical aspects will inevitably follow. Isn’t that exactly how it is?

brenno.almeida

@Zer0 Nice iniciative, to me there is some nice ideas in your effort, will try in a spare phone in the near future. Its always good to have options, design choices should evolve and enable users to use their device as they wish.

I would suggest having your work as an unconfined click app, so you can reach more users. There are other launchers and apps that modify Lomiri so should be doable.

Thanks for your work

Zer0

@Linus67 fair enough. im part of that 5% too and i can make UT do whatever i want. honestly i think the default ui is rough, thats why i made this. but thats just my take, not me saying everyone has to agree. its an option for people who want it. you dont and thats fine. point of UT is we each set it up how we like.

Zer0

@brenno.almeida Hey I'd appreciate the feedback!

Linus67

@Zer0 I installed HomeSpike v1.0 on a Pixel 3a running 24.04-1.3 rc. My respect for the work, but there’s still a lot to do before it works really well. As an app in the OpenStore—perfect!
I still find it to be a bit of an overlap in user interface concepts. The launcher already covers 90% of standard daily use. I think a moderate restructuring of the existing app drawer would make more sense.

Zer0

@Linus67 hey thanks for the feedback. i just added a system setting menu where you can turn it on and off. I just did some reading on how to get this ready for open store so that will be coming soon. also did some bug fix. v2 will have this fearure along with widgets and folders i hope. lol

Linus67

@Zer0 Turning it on and off or using it as an app sounds great. A lot of people will love it.
I have a Pixel 3a as a test device. Moving apps around is a bit clunky. A video would be the best way to explain this. I had a bit of trouble installing V1. Is version 2 available yet?
How can I update it?

Linus67

@Zer0 I'm sure you're familiar with this initiative as well:

Issue #127€2000

Personally, I prefer this solution. Instead of sorting strictly by alphabet, it should be possible to create custom categories.

Communication
Development
Tools
News
Education
Games
Favorites (fixiert) Like the iphon allway visible bar.

A way to pin a Favorites category (at the top or bottom)

And if anyone wants it, a toggle (App Drawer as Home Screen always on)

Zer0

@Linus67 nope. I haven't seen that

Keneda

@Linus67 said:

The current user interface design of UT is very good.

It is.

But if you hang in there since a long time, what @zer0 try to achieve is a long demand from some part of UT users.
And "home apps" like Launcher Modular or Home, got lot of downloads (xenial versions disappeared but had thousands).

So it is very good, but that doesn't mean adding possibilities for people who want more personalization is not a good way to make UI better for some people.