The proposal is horribly flawed!
There is a fundamental weakness in the author's design approach, which is he doesn't state what problem he's trying to solve. Instead, he just starts by sketching a "home-less" UI which he thinks will look cool....i.e he's starting with an imagined solution rather than trying to solve a problem.
By failing to properly consider user workflows for the UX, he is unlikely to come up with good UX design.
What's a typical workflow?
There are too many to enumerate here, but some of the more common/modal flows are:
- User picks up the device to call someone
- User picks up the device to open an app (email, music, facebook, etc)
- User picks up the device to check email/notifications
- User picks up the device to continue using the last app she was using (e.g. continue a game)
- User picks up the device to answer a call
Why the home screen?
In summary
There may be some merit to consolidating the app screen, recent apps and notifications. But the way to do this is NOT to start with a solution in mind ("I want a home-less UX") but rather to consider actual user workflows and have design flow from those key tasks and flows.
This is not an easy design problem....cellphones are a $200 billion industry so there are some huge R&D dollars at work here with mobile operating system UX. I know some of the OS designers and they are phenomenally talented individuals and teams. I'm sorry to be harsh but the design proposed here is not properly conceived and flawed from the very outset because it doesn't provide a streamlined way to address some very fundamental user flows for mobile phones.