DAP Launcher: Retro Music Home

DAP Launcher rebuilds your player's home screen as a piece of hi-fi gear. Seven looks: analog amp with VU meters, tape deck, turntable, VFD CD player, FM radio, clear cassette and HD tiles.

It is a launcher, not another music player: it shows the music apps you actually use, launches them from the deck, and then mirrors and controls whatever is playing.

What it does
• Puts your music apps on the deck and keeps the rest in the app tray.
• Reads whatever is playing (any app that publishes a media session): title, artist, cover art and a real progress bar.
• Play, pause, skip and scrub from the home screen, and from your player's hardware keys.
• Shows the current app's play queue when the app exposes one.
• Hide apps you never open, search across all of them, and switch looks whenever you like.
• Four of the looks let you pick your own colours and save them as presets.

Works on Android digital audio players and on phones: FiiO, HiBy, Shanling, iBasso, Sony and any other device on Android 9 or newer. Developed and tested on a FiiO M21. Not affiliated with or endorsed by any of these companies.

Good to know
• Setting it as your home app gives it the home button; a couple of taps put your old launcher back.
• Reading what is playing needs notification access, which you grant once from inside the app. That is the only permission it asks for.
• It is a home screen, not a player: it does not decode, stream or store music. Your player app keeps doing that.

Ten languages, with an in-app language picker, so you can run it in any of them whatever your device is set to.

No ads, no accounts, no analytics and no internet permission at all. Nothing you do ever leaves your device.

One honest note: the VU needles and the cassette reels move for the vibe. They react to whether something is playing, not to the actual sound. A real level meter would need microphone or audio-capture permission, and I didn't want the app asking for that just to decorate a screen. So enjoy the motion for what it is: honest eye candy, not a spectrum analyzer.