Yahoo finally launches Aviate, a location-sensitive, intelligent Android homescreen

After several months spent being acquired by Yahoo and in beta, Aviate, the Android app that allows you to tweak your homescreen for your exact location, is ready for the world.

The app is formally launching today with new features, an all new look, and a new name: Yahoo Aviate.

Yahoo Aviate is called “the intelligent homescreen that simplifies your phone.” With the app, you’ll be able to get information you need at the exact moment that it’s useful. It shows weather and news apps throughout the morning, productivity apps while you’re at work, music apps while you’re driving, and perhaps a Reddit app before bedtime. It has a clean, simple layout, with organized apps that cater to the user, displaying information based on what it knows you’re up to.

The company’s new acquisition allowed Yahoo Aviate to focus less on showing apps and more on your daily habits and on showing content based on these habits.

Now, for example, Yahoo Aviate displays snippets from Yahoo’s News Digest app instead of just the news apps that appeared on Aviate Beta. Instead of just the calendar app, Yahoo Aviate shows actual calendar meeting entries equipped with a conference call phone number. The calendar integration is thanks to Donna, a calendar application that Yahoo acquired this past January.

You’ll get a weather alert if the weather is different today than it was yesterday, and you’ll get an estimate for how much the traffic will cause you to be late for work.

Yahoo Aviate also includes new ways to call or text friends and family. If you swipe up on your home screen, you’ll find icons for people you speak with frequently on the phone or through texting. Aviate founder Paul Montoy-Wilson has learned in the beta period that 40 percent of the app opens were related to communicating with others.

It’s not just an app. Yahoo Aviate, according to the company blog, is a “mobile homebase.”

Yahoo has given Aviate lots of new resources, and the company has been able to grow from seven to 25 people since the acquisition took place. Yahoo’s acquisition has been a large help, but Montoy-Wilson and co-founder Mark Daiss want to make sure they integrate content that is the best for its users and not necessarily just created by Yahoo.

“We knew at Yahoo there would be content we could use from within Yahoo, but Aviate will still put in front of you whatever the best content is for that specific context is. We will remain very agnostic,” Daiss said.

Montoy-Wilson and Daiss said that cards inside each Aviate context will be able to be customized. Right now, Yahoo News Digest remains one of the best ways to read bite-sized chunks of news, so nobody has disputed that yet.

This Aviate update will be for Android 4.0 and higher. The company knows how vital it is for the app to be just as dynamic as the home screen, and users should expect lots more updates and changes coming soon to Yahoo Aviate.

“When you work on a home screen, the engagement is so good. Users touch it 50 times per day, there’s no interface you touch more in your life,” Daiss said.

Download Yahoo Aviate here, and check out some great screenshots below: