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How Shalom Home Keeps Android App and Contact Tiles in Place

ROCI built Shalom Home for his grandfather with large fixed tiles, protected setup, and on-device voice actions. Here is how it works and what its reported tests do—and do not—show.
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Shalom Home is an Android launcher ROCI built for his grandfather, Shalom, after icons and a call shortcut kept moving or disappearing following accidental long-presses and swipes. It replaces the usual flexible home screen with large, fixed app and contact tiles, a PIN-protected setup area, and a voice-request flow that announces an action before starting a three-second cancellation countdown. The design is a response to one family member’s needs, not a claim of broad accessibility testing.

Why ROCI built a different home screen

The problem was not that Shalom’s phone lacked apps; it was that ordinary home-screen gestures made important shortcuts easy to disturb. A long press or swipe could move or remove an icon, including a shortcut for calling someone. Shalom Home is designed to make the everyday screen less editable while keeping common tasks visible.

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ROCI describes the main page as large, fixed tiles for apps and contacts. A separate setup area is protected by a PIN, so changing the arrangement is separated from ordinary use. A second page holds selected direct-dial shortcuts and widgets. Setup is available in Hebrew and English, according to the project article.

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How the layout reduces accidental changes

  • Fixed tiles: Apps and contacts appear as large buttons rather than as a conventional grid that can be rearranged with a long press.
  • Protected setup: Configuration is placed behind a PIN instead of being exposed as part of routine navigation.
  • A separate utility page: Direct-dial shortcuts and widgets have their own page, apart from the principal app-and-contact screen.

This approach trades some flexibility for a more stable everyday layout. ROCI presents it as a solution tailored to his grandfather; the project account does not establish formal accessibility compliance or show that the design has been evaluated with a wider group of users.

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What happens when someone makes a voice request

Shalom Home combines a fast keyword route with a language-model fallback. In ROCI’s description, audio from the microphone is transcribed by Whisper small using whisper.cpp. The app first tries a fuzzy matcher for Hebrew keywords. When the request is unclear, it sends the transcription to Gemma 3 1B through llama.cpp. The described actions include calling a contact and opening an app.

  1. The user taps the voice-request button and speaks.
  2. Whisper small transcribes the audio on the phone.
  3. A fuzzy Hebrew keyword matcher handles requests it recognizes directly; an unclear request can be passed to Gemma 3 1B.
  4. Before acting, the interface announces the proposed action and shows a three-second countdown with a large cancel control.

ROCI says model output is constrained to known contact or app identifiers, or “none.” He also describes adding an initial yes-or-no check for whether the utterance is a request at all, after a model once misread “what time is it?” as an action. These are safeguards in the developer’s account, not proof of a formal safety guarantee; the countdown and cancel control still matter because speech recognition and intent interpretation can be wrong.

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The project account says voice contacts are supported for up to 30 contacts. That is a described capacity, not an independently tested limit.

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What the reported tests and timings show

ROCI says he generated Hebrew and French test phrases with neural text-to-speech and ran them through the pipeline in test mode using a fake contact named “Michal.” He gives examples where the keyword matcher or Gemma selected the intended test action, and a small-talk phrase that was ignored after the request check was added. This is a developer-described test setup, not a controlled evaluation of real-world recognition accuracy.

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On his emulator, ROCI reports keyword requests taking about one second and Gemma requests taking two to six seconds. He also says shortening the audio context reduced transcription of a two-second command from 25 to 45 seconds to about one second on his test emulator. These figures describe his particular development tests; they are not benchmarks for other phones or users.

What runs on the phone—and what the privacy claim means

ROCI describes the launcher as a Kotlin and Jetpack Compose app with native wrappers for whisper.cpp and llama.cpp. He reports a 190MB Whisper small download and an 800MB four-bit Gemma 3 1B download during setup; both models then run on the phone’s CPU. He gives a mid-range Galaxy A with 6GB of RAM as an example device that ran them, but does not define a minimum specification or a supported-device list.

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His privacy statement is explicit: “His voice and his contacts never leave the device, and nothing needs an internet connection after setup.” That is the author’s description of this implementation. It should not be read as independent verification of the app’s data handling. The reported one-time model downloads also mean the no-internet claim applies after setup, not to obtaining the models in the first place.

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Why emulator results did not settle device compatibility

ROCI reports two differences that appeared on a real Samsung Galaxy after emulator testing. The widget picker crashed when widgets were grouped by app name; he says he changed the grouping to package name. Samsung also reported that the default home app had no shortcut permission, so he added a fallback that opens the Contacts shortcut screen. These fixes illustrate that Android behavior can vary by device and software environment; they do not amount to a comprehensive compatibility assessment.

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The project account does not establish a supported Android-version range, installation procedure, current release status, or compatibility list. Readers should not assume that the launcher will behave identically on every Android phone based on the emulator and Samsung examples alone.

Who Shalom Home is for

Its clearest fit is someone who benefits from a stable screen with prominent shortcuts and less opportunity to rearrange them accidentally, especially when a family member is willing to configure and maintain the phone. The voice flow may help with calling or opening apps, but the author’s test examples do not establish recognition reliability for a particular person, accent, or language outside the described phrases.

Shalom Home is best understood as a family-built launcher with local speech processing, protective interface choices, and promising but limited developer-reported testing—not as a universally validated senior-phone solution. The author’s account supports reusing a capable Android phone, but does not establish a minimum device requirement or a reason to buy a new one.

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