My first real smartphone was an Android. I purchased the first Samsung Galaxy S device, the Samsung Vibrant. I fell in love with how much you could customize it - so much more than any other phone I had ever owned. At the time, I wasn't exactly sure what open-sourced meant, or how different Android was from iOS, an operating system I had never used at the time. It was only after I had the pleasure of using iOS as my daily driver did I truly understand how much more freedom you had on Android than you did on iOS when it came to customizing the look and feel of your device. I truly do believe that when it comes to personalization, Android takes the cake over any mobile platform available currently.
But having all of that freedom to customize means nothing if you don't take the time to actually do anything about it. When I was younger and didn't have as much responsibility on my plate, sure. I had day in and day out to customize the heck out of my Android, and you better believe that I did. I changed wallpapers, themes, launchers, ringtones, icons... just about everything that you could change, I would spend all day changing until I got it to look just right. Even then, I would always find something else to change. It was fun to me, but it was also very time consuming. Once I became a parent and got a full-time job, I hardly had any time to sleep, let alone change my Android. Somewhere along the line, I pretty much had the most disorganized and ugly Android device I could imagine having. As apps got deleted and added and my homescreen got all jumbled, there was just a point where I stopped caring. I was too busy working on other things to be that picky about it. That's probably why iOS became so attractive to me - I couldn't really mess it up. It always just looks like iOS; clean and uniform.
Although I didn't switch to Android for the customization features, it is something that comes with the OS. It would seem like it's easy enough to maintain a beautiful homescreen, but as often as I flash ROMs I have to start from scratch each time. It's not exactly fun anymore, and also not completely necessary. I will usually just throw the most important apps on my homescreen usually and just leave it as such.
But just today I happened to stumble across a new app that's currently in beta that makes theming a hundred times easier than it was before, and that app is called Themer.
Themer is amazingly simple. It's a launcher that has beautiful themes readily available for you, and it completely themes your home screens at the push of a button. For a beta application, it works really well. I'm really enjoying my time messing with themes. It even has a convincing iOS 7 theme, for those of you who may have switched from iOS to Android and want to get a piece of that iOS 7 action. But so far, Themer has about 74 themes that I can count right now, and the themes themselves are customizable. So far I've used about three themes today, all of which function well and have yet to falter on my HTC One.
It's also super easy to switch your themes. Once you open your app drawer, the Themer icon is in the upper right hand corner of the drawer. Click it, find a new theme, hit "Apply" and voila! The theme is downloaded and applied to your phone, easy as one, two, three!
I'm still testing out themes to find which one my favorite is, but seriously, Themer has become the beautiful-screen-lover-without-a-whole-lot-of-time's dream. I'm still surprised at how well it works, especially for being in beta. To test Themer, all you need is to visit their website, grab a code, install the app from the Google Play Store and enter in your code. Then you can test Themer out for yourself and see how easy it is to switch and use beautiful themes with very little effort on your part.
Seriously though, my phone looks better than it ever has and I didn't even have to do anything but press a couple of buttons. If I had to recommend any application to try out right now, this would be the one. Themer uses a very cool concept, and I can't wait to see how the app comes along in time.
