First run & onboarding

Starting the tour

Right after you install Tailwind Launcher, a “Tailwind Launcher” icon appears in the app drawer of whatever launcher you’re currently using. Tapping it starts the welcome tour. Once Tailwind Launcher becomes your default home app, that same icon instead opens Tailwind’s own Settings, and the tour doesn’t run from it again.

This icon is the only way in on a fresh install: a launcher app doesn’t get an app-drawer icon of its own the way an ordinary app does, so without this one, nothing on your phone would otherwise show it exists. And the phone doesn’t otherwise prompt you to switch — since Android 10, some app always holds the default-home role, so there’s never a vacancy for the system to offer to fill.

You can run the tour again any time from Settings → About → “Replay welcome tour” — this always skips the final step asking you to become the default home app, even if you aren’t currently.

Under the hood

A launcher declares the intent filters that make it a home screen but, deliberately, not the separate ones that would earn it an icon in an app drawer — correct behavior for a launcher a phone ships with, but a dead end for one you sideload or install from a store, since nothing on the phone would otherwise show it exists. Tailwind Launcher’s welcome screen carries an extra, ordinary launch intent for exactly this reason.

What the tour covers

The tour has up to four steps, in order: a short carousel introducing drawer search, drawer home, swipe gestures, and Settings customization; a checklist of five optional permissions; a screen asking about crash and usage reporting; and finally the ask to make Tailwind Launcher your default home app.

Skip on the carousel jumps straight to the permissions checklist. Each permission row — Notification dots, Accessibility service, Contacts, Calendar, and Usage access — shows why it’s useful and a button to grant it. Granting Contacts or Calendar happens right there and also turns on the matching drawer search source, so the grant produces a visible change; the other three open the relevant system Settings screen instead. Nothing here is required — the checklist’s “Done” button is enabled from the moment it appears, so you can move on having granted nothing at all.

The last step asks you to make Tailwind Launcher your default home app, with a button that raises Android’s own confirmation. If you reach this step already holding that role, it shows nothing and finishes on its own — Android launches your new home app the instant you grant the role, so being back in the tour at all means you’re already done.

Crash and usage reporting consent

The consent step asks whether to send crash reports and usage data, with Accept and Decline buttons. Nothing is collected until you answer, and if you decline or back out of the tour without reaching this step, both stay off. Accepting turns both on at once; declining leaves both off. Afterward, Settings → Privacy has two independent switches, “Send crash reports” and “Send usage data,” so you can turn either back on or off on its own. By default this collection only runs in the version of the app distributed to users, not a build compiled for local development.

Backing out of the tour before reaching this step — pressing home, say, or getting pulled into another app — leaves both switches unanswered rather than recording a decline; the consent step runs again the next time you start or replay the tour.

Turning “Send usage data” off takes effect immediately. Turning “Send crash reports” off doesn’t take effect until the next time you start Tailwind Launcher.

Limits

The tour only starts from a tap — the drawer icon or the Settings row — and never launches on its own. Rotating your phone mid-tour keeps your place, but leaving for another app by pressing Home rather than Back does not: coming back starts the tour over from the beginning, since nothing about your progress is saved across a real exit.

The “Tailwind Launcher” drawer icon stays in place permanently rather than disappearing once Tailwind Launcher becomes your default home app. Hiding it once Tailwind Launcher is the default would be a trap: if you later switched to a different launcher, Tailwind Launcher would stop running at that exact moment and could never turn its own icon back on to let you switch back. Leaving the icon in place costs one drawer slot and avoids that dead end.