Arrow is too rigid in a platform that is all about customization, and the inability to freely and accurately modify most of your homescreen is obnoxious. But despite the application being simpler than Picturesque, it offers even less of an incentive to actually have it. I do appreciate that Microsoft did not plaster Bing all over the UI like they did with Picturesque, and instead relegated that to optional wallpapers. Microsoft has even added a way to easily debug the application, and they have included a menu to send them suggestions directly.Īs of now, this application doesn’t offer anything special. Arrow is still in beta, so much of this will probably be corrected. On CyanogenMod 12.1, this was not an issue and it performed just fine. On a TouchWiz ROM, I did notice that it took extra milliseconds to fire up applications and to go back - just enough to make it noticeable. Performance is good, but not as good as a lightweight launcher. So how good is this new launcher, exactly? This, coupled with their Picturesque lockscreen, allows your phone to have as much Microsoft as possible. Their latest Arrow Launcher seems to be an attempt at that - while the company is trying to overtake common services with their app alternatives, Arrow provides a homescreen to tie it altogether. Microsoft seems to be approaching Android with brute, misdirected development and plenty of unorganized output, and if they want their tactical incursion to work out, they need something to coordinate all their efforts. But even then, some apps like Hyperlapse redeem the computing giant through great quality. While their Office suite managed to bring some of the document-editing excellence to mobile, attempts at entering one’s interface through apps like Picturesque proved to be pointless failures. Microsoft’s Android expansion has been well received on the productivity front, but not so much in terms of original applications.
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