MG4 Simple Launcher is a simple custom home launcher designed for the MG4 head unit (1920×720, landscape). It reuses the original SAIC launcher artwork so it fits visually with the system, while providing a minimal, focused home screen.
- Swipeable home: a horizontal carousel (
ViewPager2) between the launcher home and a charging points page, with an optional shortcuts grid in between. A SAIC-style bar indicator at the bottom centre shows the current page, and you choose which page the launcher opens on. - Three favorite cards (home): three vertical cards, each launching one app of your choice. Tap a card to open its app; long-press to assign or change it.
- Six-tile home (optional): the same three columns counted as halves, for six smaller favourites instead of three large cards. The first three keep their slots, so switching arrangements leaves your apps where you left them. Off by default — turn it on in Settings.
- Fourth column (home):
- All apps (top card): every launchable app, in a grid.
- Dock (bottom card): two small slots side by side, set to Android's Files and Settings to begin with and changeable like any other slot. Drawn flatter than the cards above it, so it reads as a shelf rather than as a fourth favourite.
- More than apps on a tile: besides an installed app, a slot can hold an Android settings screen (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, mobile data, display, apps), one of the launcher's own screens, or one of the vehicle's own screens found on the car itself — charge management, the cameras, the climate panels. The emergency-call screens are deliberately never offered: opened outside a real call they show a call in progress while nobody has been dialled.
- Charging points: the nearest stations of one network, from Open Charge Map, with a full-screen map, a detail panel for the station you pick, and a send to the car's navigator button. See below.
- Shortcuts grid (optional page): eight assignable tiles for the apps that don't fit on the three home cards. Tap to launch, long-press to change or clear a tile. Off by default — turn it on in Settings.
- Settings: launch page, optional features, update checks, and the technical screens. Reached from the button on the charging points page.
- System apps: inside the All apps drawer, the header carries a System apps
button (only system apps,
FLAG_SYSTEM) next to a back button. - App info shortcut: long-press any app in the All apps or System apps drawer to jump straight to Android's app-details screen (permissions, storage, uninstall).
- Over-the-air updates: the launcher can check for a new build and install it itself, on a stable or a beta channel.
- Downloads: the author's other apps for this car, listed with what is installed and what is not, and installed from here — the only way onto a head unit that has no store and no browser. See below.
- Light / dark theme: follows the system day/night mode automatically, using the original SAIC light and dark artwork.
- Persisted favorites: the three home cards and the eight grid tiles are saved across reboots, in separate slots that never overwrite each other.
Long-press one of the three big cards to open the app picker, then tap the app you want in that slot. Your choice is saved across reboots.
The charging points page lists the stations nearest to the car, taken from the Open Charge Map registry, and opens a full screen with a map when tapped.
On the card itself:
- The gear chooses which network the card lists: everything nearby, the motorway network, Superchargers open to non-Tesla vehicles, or fast DC. The choice is remembered.
- The battery figure on each row is the charge you would arrive with. It comes from the remaining range the car reports, the distance to the station and a consumption model, and it is coloured once it gets thin: amber at or below 15%, red at or below 5%. It is an estimate, and the card says so rather than hiding behind a ≈ sign.
- The card follows the car. The rows are redrawn every 200 m so the distances and the arrival figures stay honest while you drive, and the search itself runs again only after 10 km — Open Charge Map bans callers that poll it, and a station list does not change over a few hundred metres. The refresh button reads the list again straight away whatever the distance.
Tapping the card opens the full screen on the network the card was showing, with the same choices as tabs, a list on the left and an OpenStreetMap map on the right (through osmdroid — no Play Services, no Google Maps API key).
Pick a station and it is highlighted on the map, a line is drawn from the car, and a panel opens over the map with what Open Charge Map knows about it:
- The address, and the connectors broken down by kind and power — "2 × CCS (Type 2) 300 kW · 2 × Type 2 22 kW". A site's headline power often belongs to one bay out of several, which the breakdown makes plain.
- Whether the station is not simply open to anyone — private, or by arrangement. Nothing is said about public stations, or about the membership tariffs some networks record, because a padlock that turns out to be wrong costs a usable stop.
- The charge on arrival, corrected for the route when the factory navigator is guiding. Straight-line distance understates a drive, so the card multiplies it by a road factor; once the navigator is running, the launcher asks it for the real remaining distance and time instead of guessing, and the panel says when the figure is route-corrected. The correction is only ever applied when it makes the estimate more pessimistic.
- The button that hands the destination to the car's navigator.
Prices are deliberately absent. Open Charge Map carries them as free text, often missing and sometimes years old, and what you actually pay depends on the app you start the charge with.
Nothing is restricted to one country: the search follows the car, so it works abroad and, more usefully, across a border you are about to drive over.
Location comes from Android's own providers, and is followed for as long as the screen is open — the car marker moves with the vehicle, and points the way it is travelling once it is moving fast enough for the fix to carry a bearing. Parked, it shows a plain disc rather than an arrow in an invented direction. The list keeps the distances from when the search ran: re-querying on every fix is the polling Open Charge Map asks callers not to do.
The first fix after a cold start can take minutes when the car's own mobile data is off, because assisted GPS rides on that connection; the screen keeps looking as long as it is open and says so.
When the factory navigator is guiding, the charging page shows what it knows: the distance and the time still to go, and the charge you are expected to arrive with. The figures come from the vehicle's own adapter service rather than from a calculation of ours, so they agree with what the navigator is showing on its own screen. Without an active route the panel is not shown at all.
Stations carry a navigate action — an arrow on each row, and a button on the map once a station is selected. What happens next depends on what the vehicle has:
- Cars with the factory navigator. The destination is handed to the SAIC adapter service over Binder, exactly as the voice assistant does when asked to drive somewhere. The navigator receives the station's name and address and adds it either as a waypoint on the route in progress or as a new destination, the same choice it offers for any other point of interest.
- Cars without it, but with some map app installed. The launcher falls back to
a standard
geo:intent, and whichever app handles those opens with the station. - Neither. The navigate action is not shown at all, rather than offered and then failing.
Which cars have the factory navigator: it ships with the full infotainment
package — in Europe the MG4 trims that carry it are the higher ones (Luxury,
Trophy and above); the Standard and Comfort trims have no navigator, and for them
the fallback above applies. The launcher works this out by asking whether anything
on the vehicle can accept a destination, not by reading the model: build.prop
identifies the head unit, not the trim, so it cannot answer the question — and
checking the capability also gets the case of an owner who installed a map app of
their own.
Verified on a Trophy (R71 firmware) with the European Telenav navigator. The iGO and SAIC navigators shipped in other markets are recognised as well, but have not been tested.
A grid of eight tiles laid out as four columns of two, each with the same proportions as the half cards in the home page's fourth column.
- Tap a tile to launch its app. An empty tile opens the app picker.
- Long-press a filled tile to change the app or remove it, leaving the tile empty again.
The page is off unless you turn it on in Settings → Features: eight tiles are more than most people fill, and every app is one tap away on the All apps button anyway. Installations that already had shortcuts assigned keep the page when they update.
These eight slots are stored separately from the three home cards, so assigning an app here never disturbs the home page.
The other apps written for this car, reached from the button beside Settings on the charging points page. A head unit has no Play Store, no browser worth downloading from, and otherwise no way in at all short of carrying a USB stick out to the car — which is the whole reason this screen exists.
It is not a shop. The catalogue is one JSON file on the author's server with the binaries beside it. The screen lists what exists, says which of them this car already has and at what version, and offers to install or update the rest. Every download is checked against the hash published in the catalogue before Android is asked to install it — the same path the launcher's own updates take, and for the same reason: there is no store here to vouch for anything.
Reached from the button on the charging points page:
- Launch page: which of the pages the launcher opens on.
- Features: the shortcuts page, the six-tile home, whether to look for updates at launch, and the beta channel.
- Vehicle: which battery this car has — 51, 64 or 77 kWh, by the figure on the spec sheet. The arrival estimate cannot be worked out without it. Cars sold as 49 kWh are the 51 pack quoted as usable rather than gross, so they belong to the 51 entry; internally the launcher uses the usable energy of each pack, which is what the car can actually spend.
- Updates: the installed version, with a BETA mark beside it while you are on the pre-release channel, and a manual check.
- System: the technical details, and the diagnostics log.
The launcher checks a small manifest on the author's server and, when a newer build exists, offers to download and install it. Android asks for permission to install unknown apps the first time.
Joining the beta channel brings pre-release builds. Leaving it is not immediate: Android will not install an older stable build over a newer beta, so a car stays on the beta until a stable release overtakes it.
A screen of live, permission-free readings laid out in three columns: device model, Android version, build fingerprint and uptime, the installed launcher build and the WebView engine behind it, memory and storage, and the network — what is carrying the connection, the Wi-Fi link speed, and the mobile operator when the head unit's own SIM is the one online.
An on-device log, with a crash handler behind it. A head unit cannot be reached over adb, so when something goes wrong in the car this is the only way to find out what: it records what the launcher was doing, why a download or a position lookup failed, and the stack trace of a crash.
From here the log can be sent to the author as a report. It is worth saying why this exists rather than a copy button: there is nowhere on this head unit for copied text to go. No app of the car's own accepts a share — the firmware ships the Bluetooth stack with object push disabled — and there is no text field to paste into. Before sending, a dialogue says exactly what leaves the car (the log, the build, the model of the head unit, and that the log can contain position fixes) and asks for one line about what you were doing; nothing is sent until you confirm. The log can also simply be cleared.
Una guida video dedicata al pubblico italiano, che mostra il launcher in funzione sulla MG4:
MG4 Swipe, e le nuove APP compaiono!!!
🇬🇧 Italian-language video guide showing the launcher running on the MG4 head unit.
Standard Android project (Java, AGP 8.6, Gradle 8.7, minSdk 28 / targetSdk 34).
./gradlew assembleDebug
The debug APK is produced under app/build/outputs/apk/debug/.
JDK: Gradle 8.7 runs on JDK 17–21 and fails on newer ones with a bare
IllegalArgumentException: <version> from the Kotlin DSL compiler. Recent Android
Studio releases bundle a JBR newer than that, so set Settings → Build Tools →
Gradle → Gradle JDK (or JAVA_HOME on the command line) to a JDK 17 or 21.
Open Charge Map key: the charging features need an API key, read from a
git-ignored apikeys.properties at the project root:
OCM_API_KEY=your-key-here
Without it the launcher builds and runs; the charging card simply says the data is unavailable.
MG4 Simple Launcher is free software: you can redistribute it and modify it under
the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later, as published
by the Free Software Foundation. The full text is in LICENSE.
Copyright (C) 2026 Tommaso Vietina
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
In practice this means anyone may use this, change it and publish their own version — and a published version has to carry its source under the same licence. That is the whole intent: the work stays open for the people driving these cars.
What this licence does not cover: the graphic resources taken from the vehicle's own system software. They are not mine to license — see Graphic resources below. The licence applies to the code written for this project.
This project is provided for study and educational purposes only. It is an experimental, non-commercial project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or supported by SAIC, MG, or any vehicle manufacturer.
The software is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, express or implied. The author accepts no liability for any direct, indirect, incidental, or consequential damage of any kind — including but not limited to damage to the vehicle, its infotainment system, software, or data, loss of functionality, or safety-related consequences — arising from the installation or use of this app. You use it entirely at your own risk. Do not interact with the app while driving.
Sending a destination to the factory navigator, and reading anything the vehicle knows about itself, go through private SAIC system services that are not a published API. They were worked out by reading the firmware that is already on the car. They can stop working at any time, and every failure path in the launcher is built to fall back quietly rather than break.
This launcher deliberately reuses graphic resources taken from the vehicle's own system software — card backgrounds, tab artwork, switches, map pins — so that it looks and behaves like part of the native interface rather than a foreign app. That visual continuity is the point of the project.
Those resources are not licensed to this project. They remain the property of SAIC/MG and their respective owners, and are included here only so that the app can match the system on a vehicle that already contains them. No ownership is claimed over them, and their presence implies no permission, endorsement, or affiliation. Anyone who redistributes this project, or builds on it, does so under their own responsibility.
The same applies to trademarks and brand names, used here descriptively only.
Charging point data comes from Open Charge Map and is used under its terms; the attribution stays visible wherever results are shown. Map tiles come from OpenStreetMap contributors.
Questo progetto è fornito esclusivamente a scopo di studio ed educativo. È un progetto sperimentale, non commerciale, non affiliato né approvato o supportato da SAIC, MG o da alcun costruttore di veicoli.
Il software è fornito "così com'è", senza garanzie di alcun tipo, esplicite o implicite. L'autore non si assume alcuna responsabilità per qualsiasi danno diretto, indiretto, incidentale o consequenziale — incluso, a titolo esemplificativo, danni al veicolo, al sistema di infotainment, al software o ai dati, perdita di funzionalità o conseguenze relative alla sicurezza — derivante dall'installazione o dall'uso di questa app. L'utilizzo avviene interamente a proprio rischio. Non interagire con l'app durante la guida.
L'invio di una destinazione al navigatore di serie, e la lettura dei dati che l'auto conosce di sé, passano da servizi di sistema SAIC privati, che non sono un'API pubblica: sono stati ricavati leggendo il firmware già presente sul veicolo. Possono smettere di funzionare in qualsiasi momento, e ogni percorso di errore del launcher è costruito per ripiegare in silenzio anziché rompersi.
Il tasto di invio al navigatore compare solo sulle vetture che hanno qualcosa in grado di accettare una destinazione: il navigatore di serie, presente sugli allestimenti con infotainment completo (Luxury, Trophy e superiori) e non sulle versioni Standard e Comfort, oppure un'app di mappe installata dal proprietario.
Questo launcher riusa deliberatamente risorse grafiche prese dal software di sistema del veicolo — sfondi delle card, grafica dei tab, interruttori, segnaposto della mappa — perché appaia e si comporti come parte dell'interfaccia nativa e non come un'app estranea. Questa continuità visiva è lo scopo del progetto.
Tali risorse non sono concesse in licenza a questo progetto. Restano di proprietà di SAIC/MG e dei rispettivi titolari, e sono incluse qui solo affinché l'app possa uniformarsi al sistema su un veicolo che già le contiene. Non se ne rivendica la titolarità e la loro presenza non implica alcuna autorizzazione, approvazione o affiliazione. Chi ridistribuisce questo progetto, o vi costruisce sopra, lo fa sotto la propria responsabilità.
Lo stesso vale per marchi e nomi commerciali, qui usati a soli fini descrittivi.
I dati dei punti di ricarica provengono da Open Charge Map e sono usati secondo i suoi termini; l'attribuzione resta visibile ovunque i risultati vengano mostrati. Le mappe sono di OpenStreetMap e dei suoi contributori.