How To Best Organize Your Android Apps (Hide Crapware!)

So you're trying to find an app on your Android phone, but that launcher can be mighty imposing. When you get a long list of apps, it can be hard to find what you're looking for quickly. There are no pages to use as an easy mental bookmark to find them. In all seriousness, how many apps do you launch on a daily basis? Probably not many, and there's no reason to have the cruft getting in the way.  
 
This can be doubly hard when it's a new app, and you don't know the icon. We often find ourselves scrolling along silently going through the alphabet to find that new app. What if you've got a lot of bloatware stuck on the phone? There are a number of apps and techniques that can help you better organize your apps. 

Read on as we help you keep things straight in your app list. 
 

Just search

If all you need to do is launch an app, not make a shortcut, you can just run a search to find it. On android phones with hardware search buttons, you just have to tap that button, and start typing. If your phone has a hardware keyboard, then it's even easier. Just pop open, if it isn't already, and start typing. The default action in Android is to initiate a search. If there's no hardware keyboard, and no search button (like the Dell Streak), just leave a Google search widget on the home screen.  

However you are initiating the search, you may have to allow apps to be indexed. This is not needed on some builds of Android. Go into the main system settings, then to Search and select Searchable items. In this menu, make sure Apps is checked. Typing a search query from the Android home screen will bring up a list of possible suggestions, among them apps. 

Android 2.2 users have another way to find their apps through search. When you place a search box widget, you are offered a choice of what it will search by default. By choosing Apps, it will only return results that match your installed apps. None of the other irrelevance content will show up. 

Organize the launcher with dxTop

Android will keep a full list of all the apps you have installed in the application launcher (sometimes called the drawer). But you probably don't need all those apps assaulting your eyes. A home screen replacement in the Market called dxTop offers a multitude of ways to organize your app launcher.  

The app drawer will look very similar to the stock version when you first look at it, but pressing the menu button opens up some interesting avenues of customization. The Change View option gives you display choices like Alphabetical  (the default), categories, latest install date, largest sixe, and hidden applications. Let's take a closer look at that last one first. If you long press on any app, then release it in it's place, you will get a context menu. You can open its Market page, hide it, or do nothing. If you choose to hide it, you will no longer see it in the launcher. This is great for hiding those pre-installed crapware applications. If you accidentally hide something, just change your view to Hidden apps, and you can use the same long-press to change it back to non-hidden.  

Categories is great as well. You can set a series of categories and add apps to them. These functions are access with the same long-press trick from before. Your categories are shown as drop down menus within the launcher. The category can be changed at any time. If you just need to find a new app you just installed, use the Latest install date view. This will just put your apps in a single column list that is organized with the newest apps at the top.  

We don't want to sell dxTop short, though. It is a perfectly capable home screen replacement with more features than just launcher organization. It has five home screen panels arranged in a diamond for faster navigating. The entire interface is also skinnable with themes and icon packs. It will run you $2.99 in the Market, but we are impressed with the feature set for that price. 

Use a few widgets

So maybe you just don't want to go in the app drawer. If that's the case there are a few ways to use widgets to organize you apps for easy access. We mentioned Folder Organizer a while back, and it is especially pertinent to this discussion. This app allows you to set a series of labels that the app uses to make live folder widgets on your home screen.  

For instance, if you want to have a folder for all your multimedia apps, you can add that tag to some apps within the Folder Organizer interface. Then, on the home screen just add the Folder Organizer folder widget and select the multimedia tag. You can also choose a widget that just displays a panel with the apps in that tag spread across it like regular app shortcuts, but it will change live as you alter your tags. 

Now, you might be wondering why this is so great, since you could just do this with folders (albeit more tediously). For one, you can have overlapping labels. So if an app is tagged as multimedia and work, it would show up in both folders on your home screen.  

Apps can also be starred, just like in Gmail to mark them as important. You can place a folder of starred apps, or use the star button in any Folder Organizer folder to bring starred apps in it to the top. Overall, it s great way to easily keep your apps easily accessible. The full version will run you €0.99 in the Market. 

If the folder paradigm isn't doing it for you, and you just can't stand pawing through your app drawer anymore, take a look at Launch-X Pro. This app will create scrollable widgets on the home screen that can be populated with up to 49 shortcuts. Launch-X will use a tidy 4x1 widget to list your choices. It doesn't even have to be apps, you can choose contacts or shortcuts as well. 

You've got your choice of a few different arrangements of icons and buttons for moving through the pages.  The app looks nice, and does its job well. Though, it doesn't have the advanced sorting options you find in the less attractive Folder Organizer. Still, it's worth a look at €0.99 in the Market. 

The way we see it, if you're going to be stuck with crapware apps on your phone, you should at least have some options to keep them out of your way. The launcher in Android is usually crowded enough as it is without these unwelcome gatecrashers. Making it a habit to search for apps is good in some instances, but having a real organization scheme in the launcher via a home replacement, or a series of widgets is quicker. Let us know how you keep track of you apps.