Paper is an Android home screen: grey text on a paper surface, with no icons, no badges and nothing that moves, so nothing on the screen is bidding for you. What is left is the thing you picked the phone up to do, and a book to read when it turns out you didn’t.
Try it here The launcher itself, running in this page. Swipe it, or tap a name below to turn to another of its pages. The Embedded AI Engineer · 7%
tap the right of the book to turn a page · write on the notes sheet.
three of Paper's pages, with scripted answers. The app also has the index, the shelf, the settings and a dozen optional lines.
the whole app, in the order you meet it
Point Paper at an .epub and it joins the shelf. Pick another and the first one waits exactly where you left it:
mid-sentence, mid-page, months later. Covers come out of the book itself, dithered to eight greys the way an e-reader prints a picture. A book without one gets its title set on a blank board, which is what a plain binding looks like anyway.
Reach it by long-pressing the page you are reading, or from the reader’s own footer. Everything here is text and paper: no store, no account, no library that lives on someone else’s server.
Colour is how a screen shouts.
A red dot on a green icon is not decoration; it is a claim on your attention, made by someone who is paid when it works. Paper takes the colour away, the whole phone and the lock screen with it, and most of the pull goes too. What is left is words, and words wait their turn.
Every one of them ships turned off. Paper does nothing until you ask.
No icons. No widgets. No animations. No analytics.
Nothing is collected about you, there is no account, and the app cannot show you an advertisement because there is nowhere to put one. E-paper does not shimmer, which is why nothing on this page moves, either.
Paper is finished and in testing. Before it can go on sale, Google wants twelve people to have used it for a fortnight — so twelve people get it before anyone can buy it.
You need an Android 13 phone you are willing to make boring, and the Google account email you use on it, because that is how Play lets a tester in. You get the paid app for nothing, and you keep it.
What is actually useful back: which gesture you reached for that was not there, and what made you put the phone down and pick your old launcher back up. Bug reports are welcome. Silence is fine too, and still counts.
The form writes an email in your own mail app and sends nothing on its own. This site has no server to send it to, which is also why there is no list you have to be removed from later.
Bought once, like a book. No subscription, no trial that expires, no second tier to unlock. Every feature on this page is in the app you buy.
In closed testing now, and short of testers: Google wants twelve people to have run it for a fortnight before it can be sold. Ask for a copy and you get it free.
Android 13 or newer, any make; the grain shader needs API 33.
What you buy is the launcher. The pages, the book, the index, the paper: all of it works the moment you install it, with nothing to configure and no account to make.
Nothing is collected. No analytics, no accounts, no advertising, no crash reports. The app has nowhere to send anything. The privacy policy is one short page, and it is the whole story.
Set in Literata (SIL OFL). No cookies, no trackers, nobody watching.