This launcher was made for your dual-screen Android handheld

The Android handheld world is full of double-screen devices, like the Retroid Pocket Duo Lite Plus and AYN Thor. Anbernic even has a new one that could start shipping in December. While these devices already come with an Android frontend, you don’t have to settle for what came pre-installed. Enter Blip, a new Android launcher made for both single- and double-screen gaming.

As reported by Retro Dodo, a Spanish software engineer known as Endika is working on a new Android launcher called Blip. The frontend is designed to split the screen for games meant to be played on two displays, just as you would expect. In the case of single-screen experiences, the launcher will instead show things like game art, instruction booklets, or game info on the lower screen.

Blip will have a couple of interesting features, one being RetroAchievements (a community-driven platform that brings achievement systems to retro games) support. It will also have RomM (a self-hosted app for scanning, organizing, and playing your ROM collection) support. However, you’ll have to pay a one-time fee to unlock these features.

Endika is said to be working on a feature called Blip Cloud. This feature will let you back up your saves and syncs them between different devices. Users will reportedly get up to 100MB of storage for free once it’s available. Blip Cloud is currently in private beta, but it appears the service will be coming soon.

Additionally, you’ll be able to customize the frontend with nine different themes:

A theme here is not a colour swap: colour, shape, typeface, surface and the sounds the interface makes all belong to it. The 16 bit one squares every corner and was built for the handhelds made to look like [they are from] 1994 — run it on one and the shelf finally matches the shell in your hands. Deck goes slate on near-black blue with a selection that inverts what it picks. Every theme is free, each in light and dark.

Blip supports nine different languages: English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, and simplified Chinese. The launcher will work with AYN (Thor and Odin handhelds), Retroid (Pocket handhelds), AYANEO (Android Pocket handhelds), and Anbernic (Android RG handhelds) devices. It’s also compatible with phones, tablets, and other devices that run Android 12 or later. Blip is available right now on the Google Play Store.