Import & export

What gets saved

Export configuration saves your whole setup — every setting, plus the full home-screen layout: pages, page order, icon positions, folders, widgets, the hotseat, and which page is the work-profile page. It’s saved to a single zip file through the system file picker, so you choose where it goes.

Import configuration reads that file back, on the same device or a different one. Picking a file to import replaces your current setup with it, and Tailwind Launcher restarts to apply the change.

Under the hood

The archive holds a real snapshot of the home-screen database and the real preferences file, described by a small manifest. Importing checks the archive’s contents against an allowlist of expected file names before touching anything on the device — the same check doubles as a guard against a maliciously crafted zip. The new files are then staged, the process is killed, and the swap happens during the next start, before anything opens the database. The pending import is marked as in progress before the first file is swapped into place, so a swap that dies partway through isn’t retried on the next start — no crash loop on a half-written setup.

What doesn’t come along

An export is tied to the layout database’s own internal format, so a backup made under a very different version of that format may not import cleanly. A widget’s own internal configuration — anything you set up inside the widget itself, rather than through this launcher — doesn’t travel; only its placement on the home screen does. Work-profile items in the archive are dropped on import if the target device has no work profile.

The archive also leaves out your contact search data — the ranking built from who you contact and star, and any remembered choices for which number or address to use for a contact.

Limits

Export configuration always saves settings and the home-screen layout together — there’s no option to save only one of the two.