Want the iOS 7 look on Android? Check out iLauncher

Android fans that are intrigued by the look and feel of iOS 7 can get a similar experience though iLauncher. The software, found in the Google Play Store, changes the entire Android home screen interface to one that looks nearly identical to Apple's iOS 7. There's no parallax effect for the background but iLauncher does include the zooming animations that are making some iOS 7 users a bit queasy; luckily, you can disable that on Android.

After watching this video demonstration, I decided to spend the $2.06 for iLauncher to give it a spin. It's actually quite good, complete with the iOS "jiggle" for app movement and badge notifications on some of the more prominent apps such as Messenger and Gmail.

You can also have either four or five icon rows, for example, and it supports folders as well. There's even a companion app to get the iOS 7 notifications pane if you want that too. I'm not a fan of that in iOS 7 so I don't plan to add that.

The biggest downside here is that you lose the ability to add widgets to your Android home screens. You can still add shortcuts though. I might be able to live with that because I'm not a big widget user. I use Google Now far more than widgets and that still works through Touchless Controls on my Moto X; scrolling up from the home button also brings me right to Google Now.

Surely someone reading this - likely most of you - are asking the question: "Why would anyone want to make their Android device look like iOS 7?" Personally, I use both mobile platforms on a daily basis, so my thought is to try bringing some user interface consistency between the two. Will I keep using iLauncher? I'll figure that out over time, of course.

And surprisingly, I'm not the only one interested in an iOS 7 launcher: The app already has between 10,000 and 50,000 installs per the Google Play store.

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By Kevin C. Tofel

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