Paper

A launcher that reads like a page.

Paper makes a Pixel feel like an e-paper reader. Grayscale everywhere, a grainy paper surface instead of a wallpaper, and a home screen that reads like a book’s table of contents — and actually lets you read a book on it.

The Embedded AI Engineer 7%

The Embedded AI Engineer · 7%

14:25
Friday, July 31

  • Files
  • WhatsApp 2
  • Signal
Notes → close the loops
Agent sourcesnew page

· ask, and it answers on this page ·

try  “when should I leave for the dentist?”

or  “add a task: email the Hort”

august · 357k tokens · ≈ $0.59

a scripted demo — swipe the page; tap the book to turn it, and the clock page keeps your place.
the agent sheet needs your own Gemini key on a real phone

The secretary

Two flips left of home, a quiet secretary answers in ink.

A full agent in a Linux sandbox — it browses, runs code, reads your calendar — with questions in the margin voice and answers typeset like the book. Speak instead of typing, if you like.

Its memory is a git repository you own. The secretary reads its knowledge from your repos and, when you tell it something lasting, writes it back — your life, versioned in markdown, on your own GitHub. Nothing sits in anyone else’s database.

Hand it the day’s notes and it returns a ledger: loops closed with researched answers, or reduced to one clear decision. Say research … and it disappears for a few minutes and comes back with a report.

Read this before you buy for the secretary

It runs on your own Gemini API key, and there is no version where it doesn’t. You create the key at Google AI Studio, paste it into Paper’s settings, and Google bills you directly for what you ask — Paper never sees the traffic and takes no cut. Knowledge repositories mean git repositories you own and push to.

That makes this half of Paper a tinkerer’s feature, and it’s sold as one. If handling an API key isn’t something you want to do, buy Paper for the pages — the launcher, the book, the index, the quiet — and leave the agent switched off, where it ships.

What it does
Reader-style home
Big serif clock set in Literata, the date, your favorite apps as a short text list. No icons, no widgets, no icon grid.
A book above the clock
Pick an .epub — five lines at a time. Tap right to turn the page, left to go back. Your position is remembered; the EPUB parsing is built in.
The whole page, when you want it
Swipe right and the same book fills the screen, with the book’s own contents to jump by chapter. It shares one position with the pane above the clock, so putting it down leaves the five lines on the same word.
App index, not app drawer
Swipe up: every app as a line of text with section letters in the margin, an A–Z strip for fast scrolling, and a search where Enter launches the top hit.
System-wide grayscale
Toggles Android’s built-in color correction so the whole phone is gray, lock screen included. One adb grant, once — the phone can even issue it to itself.
Paper, not pixels
A static grain shader on every surface, a Bayer dither for bitmaps, a warm-gray day palette and an OLED-friendly “dark ink” night mode.
Paper as wallpaper
One tap renders the grain as your home and lock wallpaper, so system transitions never flash your old one. Another tap seeds Material You from the paper tone, so even the keyboard matches the page.
A page while charging
A dim clock page as the screensaver — the phone rests as quietly as it works.
Everything else — one toggle each
Weather line
The sky’s one-liner, resting under the clock.
Calendar line
16:00 · dentist — the next thing, nothing more.
Screen time
“1h 40m on the screen today,” said plainly.
Correspondence
Messages arrive as letters on the page; reply inline, in text.
Unread marks
A small count beside a favorite. No red. No badge.
Notes
One sheet that keeps itself — and can be handed whole to the secretary.
Timers in search
Type “4m tea” in the index. That’s the timer app.
Contacts in search
Call or text straight from the app index.
The pause
Three seconds of blank paper between the reflex and the app. Most reflex-opens don’t survive it.
App budgets
“Out of pages for today” — a budget spent in minutes, not willpower.
Evening mode
After 21:00 the page turns to ink and non-favorites wait until morning.
The Sunday letter
Your week, written as a letter — not a dashboard.
Read to unlock
The app index opens after a page of your book.
Almanac
The moon’s phase, in a line.
Motto
One sentence of your choosing, under the favorites.
Volume-key pages
The volume buttons turn the book’s pages, reader-style.

Every one of them ships turned off. Paper does nothing until you ask.

Deliberately absent

No icons. No widgets. No animations. No analytics.

The point is what isn’t here. E-paper does not shimmer — which is why nothing on this page moves, either.

How the pieces work
The grain
An AGSL runtime shader — static two-octave value noise. Nothing animates.
The book
An EPUB is a zip of XHTML: unzipped, read in spine order, tags stripped to prose, reflowed to the screen. Pagination measures real text layout, so pages never cut mid-word.
The gray
Android’s accessibility daltonizer in monochromacy mode, flipped through WRITE_SECURE_SETTINGS — the same switch the OS uses, so the lock screen grays too.
The index
LauncherApps and the HOME role — every launchable activity as a line of text, work-profile apps marked with a small ʹ.
The keyboard’s color
Material You reads its palette from the wallpaper and falls back to stock blue on neutral paper — so Paper seeds the system palette with the paper tone directly.
The secretary
A managed agent in a hosted sandbox, its knowledge cloned from your git repositories on every question and written back when you tell it something lasting. A small proxy of your own keeps every credential off the phone.
Get Paper
$6.99

Bought once, like a book. No subscription, no trial that expires, no second tier to unlock — every feature on this page is in the app you buy.

Get it on Google Play →

Android 13 or newer. Built for Pixels — the grain shader needs API 33.

What you buy is the launcher. The pages, the book, the index, the paper — all of it works the moment you install it, with nothing to configure and no account to make.

Two things ask something of you. System-wide grayscale needs one permission Android only grants over a cable — or from the phone to itself in about five minutes, which Paper walks you through. And the secretary needs your own Gemini API key, billed to you by Google: a tinkerer’s feature, off by default, and no part of what makes Paper worth using otherwise.

Nothing is collected. No analytics, no accounts, no advertising, no crash reports — the app has nowhere to send anything. The privacy policy is one short page, and it is the whole story.