Modes & settings

Roost has two home behaviors, switchable in Settings → Home & Behavior → Home mode.

Curated

Pressing Home shows the full home surface: the robot mascot, a live greeting, a Sage-green VPN chip, an accent-tinted full-width hero card for the featured agent, then one uniform grid of tiles. Everything except the hero is the same tile — favorite apps, web apps, app shortcuts, Home Assistant scenes, and HTTP actions — with a Store tile at the tail for adding more. A filter chip row above the grid (All, plus a chip per kind present — Apps / Web / Shortcuts / HTTP / Scenes) narrows the tiles. Every tile carries the same three lines — a title, a metadata subtitle, and an action line — filled per kind: an app its category + "tap to open", a web tile its host, a shortcut "shortcut" + "tap to run", an HTTP tile METHOD · host + its fire state. Tapping the mascot or the hero card opens your agent. On boot, the agent app is foregrounded once — optionally behind a waking-up sequence.

This is the relaxed default — a normal launcher that happens to be built around one agent.

Appliance

Pressing Home shows a minimal ambient "at rest" face — just the mascot and greeting, like a robot's idle dock screen. A long-press anywhere reveals the tile grid for that visit only (it re-hides when you leave). On boot, the agent app is foregrounded once.

This is the "dedicated appliance" feel — the utilities are deliberately out of the way.

Settings

Settings open as a calm landing that drills into per-category screens — see The Settings screens for the full information architecture. The controls, wherever they now live:

Setting	What it does
Home mode	Curated vs Appliance (above).
Agent name	Names your agent (e.g. its username). The greeting becomes "<name> is home" and the mono status line reads "<name> · docked & charging · 87%". Blank falls back to "roost".
Featured agent app	Point the featured hero card at any installed app via a searchable app picker — icon + name, no package strings.
Restart agent app	Bounce the agent app cleanly when it needs a fresh start.
Auto-launch agent on boot	Foreground the agent app once after boot.
Keep screen on while docked	Hold Roost's window awake (pair with the stay_on_while_plugged_in global for a true always-on dock).
Accent tint	Honey, Slate, Sage, or Violet — recolors the mascot eyes, chips, glows, the Store tile, and monochrome tile icon glyphs live (full-color icons and health colors stay fixed).
Action density	How every home tile renders — a Slim list, Regular cards, or a Rich two-column grid. One home-wide setting; every tile reshapes together.
Launcher filters	Which per-kind filter chips (Apps / Web / Shortcuts / HTTP / Scenes) can appear above the tiles on the home.
Favorites	Which installed apps appear on the grid — a searchable app picker. They surface as APP tiles and are now manually orderable alongside everything else.
Web Apps	Add a name + URL that opens fullscreen in a WebView — self-host a Homarr / Homepage dashboard as a tile. https:// is auto-prefixed.
Action Buttons	Enable HTTP action tiles for the home grid, and manage Home Assistant accounts.
Match wallpaper to Roost	Paint a matching dock-dark wallpaper so Recents and app transitions stay on-theme.

The mono status line and greeting update live from a battery-change receiver, so charging state and % are never stale.

Why not a hard kiosk?

Android's Lock Task Mode can pin the phone to a single app, but then you can't reach your VPN client to bring a tunnel up, or your password manager to sign in. Roost is a curated launcher instead: it feels like a dedicated agent device, but the handful of apps the agent needs are always one tap (or one long-press) away.