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As Android live wallpapers are becoming more prevalent, and developers are doing more with them, a question coming up more and more is how to hide the home screen icons temporarily while the user interacts with the wallpaper.

For this to work, the icons would have to be removed temporarily – not just made invisible, since a tap on an invisible icon would still run the app.

Also, it would be ideal to have a universal solution that works across customs launchers, not just the Android stock launcher.

This question was already asked on StackOverflow, and the answer was that you cannot do this. But this is clearly not correct, as there are at least two programs on Android Market that do exactly this: Show Off (Your Live Wallpaper) and The Cleaner (Show Wallpaper)

Is there a way to hide Android home screen icons, and then later put them back in place?

Community
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Mountains
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  • The answer is correct, you probably just misunderstood it. You **can't** hide the icons/widgets from the launcher (the only exception is that you write your own). What you **can** do is create an activity in your app with the live wallpaper as the background and nothing else *(thats what these apps do)*. – user287351 Jan 19 '12 at 23:43
  • Are you certain that those apps are hiding the icons, rather than just displaying the wallpaper? That would accomplish the same effect, right? – Zenanon Jan 19 '12 at 23:47

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You can launch an activty which backgroung will be your live walpaper, and finish the activty upon touch... Just a thought...

Edit: 1st comment answer: Preventing the delay:

You should be more "gentle" in the onCreate() method...

Try creating the minimum as possible in the onCreate(), like, just displaying the basic background... in the end of the onCreate function, set an alarm (i.e. by AlarmManager) to call some BroadcastReceiver/Activity after half a second or so (with AlarmManager) to set the rest of the live wallpaper graphics... that way you don't have to worry about the delay.

GalDude33
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  • I've edited the answer and added a solution for the delay problem, I don't see why would it be problematic with the OpenGL, but I'm not a OpenGL expert so I cant assure you about it. – GalDude33 Jan 20 '12 at 16:48
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Try using the zoom gesture as you would to zoom in on a web page (reverse pinch). And you guessed it, the opposite makes everything come back.

David R
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This would have to be a completely new launcher. This is not possible without this I don't think. Sorry. However; to be absolutely sure though you'd have to look at the Launcher2 package in the android source and look through files like Homescreen.java. I'll look into it later on 2.3.3 for you and see what I find.

JoxTraex
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