How to turn your Android into an iPhone

We always want what we don’t have, it’s purely a matter of psychology. Regardless of your material possessions, you’re likely to be fascinated by what your neighbor has. In the case of phones not everybody in the world can switch smartphones as if they were putting on a new pair of shoes, but if you have an Android and you like the look of Apple’s iOS, you can always turn to a launcher. IO Launcher can do just that: swap the look and layout of your Android interface for that of iOS 8. But you know the saying “fine feathers don’t make fine birds…”

This launcher has a lot in common with the popular KK Launcher, except the latter doesn’t include the Apple theme, at least not for free. IO Launcher makes use of some of the visual features of Android Lollipop, so you need to have that version of the operating system installed for all the changes to be applied correctly. Once you get the app, it checks all the apps you have on your device, and then redistributes them into themed subfolders and adds several widgets that by default will be spread over three screens.

The changes are very obvious – or at least the purely aesthetic ones are: a new set of icons, new border transparency styles, a different font, and a background that can be customized from the shortcut to the Theme Store. If you dig around in the three screens you’ll see loads more: a widget that displays the amount of RAM available at any time, an integrated temporary file cleaner, and all the shortcuts from the upper drop-down bar built right into your home screen.

Certain changes are a bit silly if you’re not trying to trick anyone, such as the one that replaces your Chrome icon with a Safari one, but besides those details you’re such to want to leave it installed for a good while. It hardly affects performance at all (we’ve tested it on a Nexus 4 that’s more than two years old), and the transitions are disguised well enough to avoid the sensation of having installed a heavy launcher.

The best thing is that IO Launcher doesn’t stop at simulating iOS 8: from its theme shop you can get lots more looks, many of them free, and even customize certain changes done en masse to keep certain aspects of each of the themes.