A couple of weeks ago, we took a look at Nova, a new launcher for Ice Cream Sandwich devices that brings some nice features over the stock offering. Another new launcher designed for Android 4.0, dubbed Apex, landed in the Store this morning and it, too, is pretty incredible. I spent some time playing around with it earlier today; here is a quick look at what Apex has to offer.

Apex is definitely heavy on features, including:

  • Customizable homescreen grid size and up to 9 homescreens
  • Scrollable dock with up to 7 icons per page and up to 5 pages
  • Infinite & elastic scrolling (homescreen, drawer and dock)
  • Fancy transition effects (tablet, cube, etc.)
  • Hide elements as you want (persistent search bar, status bar, or even the dock)
  • Customizable icons and labels for shortcuts and folders
  • Choose different folder preview styles and background
  • Multiple drawer styles (transparent/opaque, horizontal/vertical, paginated/continuous)
  • Drawer apps sorting (title, install date, mostly used)
  • Hide apps from the drawer
  • Lock your desktop to prevent accidental changes
  • Enjoy homescreen gestures (pinch, swipe up/down, double tap)
  • Backup/restore settings and data
  • Optimized for both phones and tablets
  • Lots of other customization options!

As you can see, it brings a lot of worthy features to Android 4.0 handsets - but it's not without flaw.

The biggest downfall of this launcher is that it can't add widgets from the tray to the homescreen without manually being pushed to the system partition. Sure, that's not a huge deal, but I'm just not sure why the dev didn't just have the app request root access, much like Nova launcher does.

Despite that one downfall, Apex is the new default launcher on my Galaxy Nexus. It's fast, fluid, and offers a ton of features without an overwhelming amount of bloat. If the dev adds full root support, this launcher will probably be pretty close to perfect.

Update: Here's the wallpaper from the screenshots/video:

Here are the widgets: