Poco F1 launcher now available for MIUI smartphones: Here’s what it offers

Poco F1 also comes with its own Poco launcher, which is now available for other MIUI phones via an official APK file

New Delhi | August 24, 2018 10:29 AM IST

3 min read

Poco F1 smartphone has a price of Rs 20,999 going up Rs 29,999. The Poco launcher is now available for other MIUI phones. In this image, Poco F1 and the app drawer.

Xiaomi sub-brand Pocophone launched the Poco F1 on August 22, which is a smartphone with flagship-like specifications for a price of under Rs 30,000. Poco F1 also comes with its own Poco launcher, though it runs the MIUI 9.6 on top of Android Oreo 8.1. Xiaomi has now made the Poco launcher available for other MIUI phones via an official APK file.

Poco had promised that the launcher will be made available on the Google Play Store as well, though this is supposed to be a beta version. There’s no word on when the Poco launcher’s stable version will be added to the Play Store. The interesting thing about the Poco launcher is that has an app drawer, which has traditionally been absent on Xiaomi’s MIUI-based phones.

Poco launcher’s app drawer also comes with the option of categorising apps based on their functions and features, rather than relying on folders for this. So all communications apps can appear in one tab in this app drawer. Poco launcher’s app drawer also lets users locate apps based on the colour of the app icon. The search bar is at the bottom of the app drawer in this.

Xiaomi has posted the Poco launcher on the official MIUI form, and those who are interested can download the same from the website. Users can replace the default launchers by going to Setting>Installed Apps> Choose the System Launcher and Click on the uninstall updates.

However, the post notes that despite installing the Poco launcher, users might not get some features. For all features of Poco launcher one will need to flash the zip file via recovery mode. Only those users who are well-versed in this recovery mode method should attempt this. The post also says that MIUI forum is not responsible for damage to the smartphone, if something goes wrong when installing the Poco launcher via this method.

Poco F1 starts at Rs 20,999 going up to Rs 29,999 for the premium Kevlar variant. The phone runs the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor and the highest variant offers 8GB RAM and 256GB storage. It will be Flipkart and Mi.com exclusive with sales starting August 29 at 12 noon.

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