How to Change the Default Launcher on the Redmi Note 5

Xiaomi doesn’t make changing the default launcher as straightforward as some companies. Thankfully it is still possible so this tutorial will walk you through how to set a different launcher on the Redmi Note 5, Redmi Note 5 Plus, and the Redmi Note 5 Pro.

On most of your Android smartphones, the software goes out of its way to make sure you’re using the default launcher you want. For example, smartphones these days ship with one launcher installed out of the box so while that launcher is always chosen, it hasn’t actively been set as the default option. This means that when you go into the Play Store (or other sources) to install an application if it is a new launcher then it will bring up a prompt when you press the Home button to go back to the Home Screen.

The prompt asks you if you want to continue using the launcher you have been, or if you want to switch to the second launcher that was just installed.

As long as you haven’t actively set a default launcher within Android then you will get that prompt each time you press the Home button. This isn’t the case on the Xiaomi Redmi Note 5, Redmi Note 5 Pro, or the Redmi Note 5 Plus as the company has gone ahead and set the system launcher as its default. At first, this leads me to believe we couldn’t change launchers but thankfully that isn’t the case.

I’m happy to report that we can change the default launcher by following the steps outlined below.

Redmi Note 5 Default Launcher Tutorial

1. Install the launcher you want to switch to
2. Open up the Settings application
3. Scroll down to the App Settings section
4. Tap on the Installed Apps option
5. Tap the 3-dot menu icon at the top right of the screen
6. Choose the Default Apps option
7. Tap Launcher
8. Then choose the default launcher you want to use

Explanation

I’m not really sure why Xiaomi has set up MIUI in this way. One would think that they’re doing this as a way to prevent the user from being annoyed by an alert dialog, but this happens constantly in MIUI in the first place. Yea, adding another trigger for one doesn’t make things any better but it will improve the user experience if someone is wanting to switch to a new launcher. I’ve just been so used to Xiaomi changing how things usually work with regular Android that I instinctively thought they had disabled such a feature.

After we download and install the launcher we want to use we need to bring up the Settings application and then scroll all the way down to the bottom. Here, you will find a section labeled App Settings and in there is an option called Installed Apps. Tap this option and you’ll be taken to a list of all the applications you have installed on the device. We can ignore these for now though as we want to tap the 3-dot menu icon at the top right of the screen. This will bring up a drop-down menu of sorts and it’s here that we can choose the Default Apps option.

This page is where we get to choose all of the default applications for the various services offered by the device. A lot of these are typical, like the launcher, virtual assistant, dialer, and messenger, but there are some unique ones here like the video player, setting the default camera, and others. So let’s just go ahead and tap on the launcher option and it’s here that you should find the 3rd-party launcher that we downloaded from the Play Store (or any other sources you download applications from).

Tap it to select this as the new Redmi Note 5 Pro default launcher and then tap the Home button to go back to the Home Screen. You should instantly see your Home Screen has changed from the stock MIUI launcher to the new one that we just set it to. From here we can configure the launcher to look and function how we want it to be. I generally like Nova Launcher as it lets me configure so many options but it can be annoying to set all of that up on each device. There is a backup and restore/apply option within Nova, but you may opt to go for something that is simpler.