Ice Cream Sandwich tweak: disable the home screen search bar

The new launcher for Ice Cream Sandwich is definitely one of its finer UI points, but at least one feature has minimalism fans seeing red. The Google Search bar gets its own reserved spot at the top of the launcher, now that physical buttons are optional and the Search button isn’t included by default. This is the sort of stuff that the XDA-Developers boys live and breathe, so naturally they found a way to get rid of it for a clean and more customizable home screen. The hack is a simple one for any root user – just use the app disable feature we mentioned earlier to turn off the Google Search app. That’s Settings > Apps > All > Google Search, and tap “Disable”. The downside is that the Google Search app ceases to function,...

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