Arrange your home screen

Describe the phone you want. Get it.

What this is

Oak apple can write down what your phone has and where everything sits, as an ordinary text file. You hand that file to an AI assistant along with a sentence about how you want your phone arranged, and it hands back a rearranged version. You open that on your phone, look at what it is about to do, and say yes.

That is the whole of it. Arranging a phone by hand takes twenty minutes of dragging; this takes a sentence and a couple of corrections afterwards.

The app never talks to the assistant, and the assistant never touches your phone. Two files cross a gap that neither side can see across. Oak apple has no account, no server and no idea that any AI exists — it opens a file you chose, and the only thing a file is ever allowed to do is move icons. It cannot install, remove, hide or open an app, and it changes no setting beyond the order things sit in.

The file lists only the apps anyone can already see on your phone. Apps you have hidden are never written to it and can never be placed by it, because a text file sitting in your Downloads that lists what you hid is exactly the thing this app exists to not create.

The three steps

1. Export. In Oak apple: Settings → Customisation → Layout → Export app list. Save it wherever you like — Downloads, Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox. It is called homescreen.md and it is plain text you can read yourself.
2. Ask. Open your assistant on a computer, attach that file, and paste the prompt below with your own description in it.
3. Import. Save the answer as a .md file, put it somewhere your phone can reach, then: Settings → Customisation → Layout → Import layout. Pick the file. Nothing is changed until you have seen what it will do — the screen before it lists how many apps move, which folders appear, and every name it did not recognise, quoted exactly as written. One row undoes the whole thing afterwards.

The prompt

Copy this, attach your exported homescreen.md, and replace the last line with what you actually want.

I want you to rearrange my Android home screen.

Attached is a file my launcher exported. Read it first. It lists every app on my
phone — the name I see under the icon, and the package name underneath that — and
it describes exactly how my home screen and app drawer are arranged right now. It
also explains the file format in full. Follow that format, not your own idea of it.

Give me back ONLY the layout, as one block I can save as a .md file. You do not
need to repeat the explanation or the app list. Start it like this:

    # Home screen layout
    version: 2
    sort: custom

and then the sections you have changed:

- "## Dock" — at most four apps, in order. The dock packs itself and centres what
  is in it, so never leave a blank there.
- "## Home 1", "## Home 2" and so on — one bullet per cell, four across, filling left to right
  and then down. A bullet that is just "." is a cell left deliberately empty. How many rows a
  home page has is measured on this phone — the "grid" line at the top of the file says it, for
  example "grid: 4 x 5" — and it is usually fewer than the six most phones show, because the
  clock takes the top of every page. Copy a page as it is; if it is taller, it is
  filled from the bottom up and the top rows that do not fit go into a folder called "Freja"
  (the launcher does this for you; see below). Write a page at its real height: a widget, or
  any row with no apps on it, is still a row, so write it as "." cells.
- "### Folder Work" under a page or the drawer puts a folder called Work in the next
  free cell. Write the word Folder as it is; the name comes after it. Its bullets are
  what is inside it, up to the next heading — so write a section's loose apps first
  and its folders last. Add "@7" to pin something to cell 7 — cell 0 is top left.
  Add "#RRGGBB" after a folder's name to colour its tile.
- A folder is only its apps. If you cannot see what is inside one (a closed folder
  in a screenshot), do not write it with empty bullets: ask me, or leave it out.
- "## Drawer" is the first drawer page; add "## Drawer 2", "## Drawer 3" and so on for
  more, twenty to a page. Each page keeps its own apps — a page you leave part full stays
  part full and the next page starts on the next page, so put a new heading where you want
  a new page rather than spacing things out. Within a page the drawer closes its own gaps.
  A folder in the drawer takes its apps out of the loose list; a folder on a home page does
  not, because the drawer is the complete list of everything on the phone.

A surface you do not write about is left exactly as it is. So if I only ask you to
fix my dock, only give me "## Dock".

Three rules I care about:

1. ONLY use names that appear in the app list in the attached file, spelled the way
   that file spells them. If I ask for something that is not on my phone, tell me
   so — do not invent a name. A name my launcher does not recognise places nothing
   and comes back to me as an error.
2. Leave holes. A page with every single cell filled looks like a machine did it.
   Real home screens have gaps in them, and so should this one.
3. Four to seven apps in a folder, not fifteen. Never a folder called "Other" or
   "More" — that is a folder nobody ever opens again.

Before you write the layout, tell me in two or three lines what you are planning to
do, so I can correct you first.

Here is what I want:

Anything you can describe, it can attempt: "work apps in one folder, everything social in another, and put the camera in the dock", or "first page is only what I open every day, the rest can live in the drawer", or "sort my drawer into folders by what things are for".

If you want to copy the phone you had before

Add this to the same prompt, and attach the screenshots too:

“I have also attached screenshots of my old phone's home screen. Reproduce it as closely as you can: one screenshot per page in order, and one for each folder I opened.”

Shoot one picture per home page in the order they come, and one of each folder with the folder open — a closed folder tile shows four tiny icons and a name, and four icons is not the folder. Two apps with near-identical icons, or a folder named with a single emoji, will land in the "not recognised" list rather than in the wrong place. That is deliberate: putting the wrong app somewhere is worse than leaving a cell empty, because you will not notice and you will live with it.

What an import will change

Two things worth knowing before you run one, so that neither is a surprise.

The clock keeps its place. It sits in a band above the grid and cannot be moved into it, so the top rows of a page copied from another phone have nowhere to land — a home page here has as many rows as fit under the clock on your screen, usually four or five, where most phones show six.

A page too tall fills from the bottom up: its last row lands on the last row here, and the top rows that do not fit go into a folder called "Freja", top right, together with any app that would have sat in that corner. It happens only when the page would otherwise not fit, and only as many rows as are too many. Most phones ship a home screen taller than this one, so this is the ordinary case rather than an edge case. Freja is an ordinary folder: rename it, empty it, drag things out of it. Nothing is ever thrown away for not fitting.

Putting it back

Undo import appears in Customisation → Layout after any import and puts your old arrangement back exactly as it was — every icon, every gap, every folder.

Restore default layout, in the same place, puts every icon back where a fresh install puts it. If you would rather do that from a file, a file whose whole content is this one line does the same thing:

Restore default layout

It only counts in a file that says nothing else. A layout file that happens to mention the phrase somewhere in its text is still a layout, and is applied as one.

What it will never do

• Touch an app you have hidden, or write one into the file.
• Install, remove, freeze or open anything.
• Change a code, the distress setting, or any setting outside the order of your icons.
• Talk to an AI by itself, or send anything anywhere. It opens a file. That is all it does.

A file that arrived from outside your phone gets to move icons, and nothing else. Anything in it that reads like an instruction is read as prose and ignored, because the app has no notion of an instruction to begin with — it reads names and positions, and nothing else is there to find.

When something does not land

"Not recognised" — the name did not match an app on your phone, or it matched more than one. Nothing was placed for it. The screen quotes the name exactly as your file spelled it, so you can find that line, correct it, and import again. Using the package name from the app list is the way to be certain.

"Named more than once" — an app sits in one place on the home screen, so the first mention won and the rest were left out. Usually it means an app was put both loose on a page and inside a folder.

"Did not fit" — there was no free cell left on the pages your file described. Those apps are still in the app drawer, where every app is.

The drawer layout does not appear — the app drawer is showing A to Z, which ignores any arrangement. Put it back to your own order in Customisation → App drawer, or put sort: custom in the file.

Contact

Jimmy E, contact@oak-apple.com