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- cross-posted to:
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Branch Metrics sucks. They fired almost of all people working for Nova.
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Bad news.
Still waiting for https://github.com/LawnchairLauncher/lawnchair/releases to get out of beta
It’s pretty much already very usable. I have been on version 12 alpha for a long time and now on 14 beta 2, all in all since nearly a year.
Seems like it is missing a lot of the conveniences that I was once used to with Nova, though. No ability to reposition the search bar or keep it in place on other pages, no docked apps, no button to open the app drawer, the home screen grid has fixed padding and so on.
I’ve since switched to Niagara which has been okay, but I’ve never found anything else like Nova since.
I’ve had it freeze up on me several times, where I had to reset the app to get it working again. It works most of the time, but I wouldn’t recommend it yet for general use.
Fun fact: the original Lawnchair’s founding developer is the TSA nofly list hacker
Dont go selling me harder on it.
I mean it is a fine launcher. Personally I use Pie Launcher cause I’m a bit insane. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.markusfisch.android.pielauncher/
Lol development on it halts and resumes almost randomly, I’ve given up hope long ago.
Which really sucks as it’s the only launcher to have QuickSwitch support AFAIK.Development has been steady. 8 beta has been available with about monthly updates for a few years or some such, in official Nova Discord.
They launched the beta in play store recently as well. Been using the beta since they shared the first apk.
I’ve been using the 14 nightlies for months now, 0 issues. It’s very nice and responsive.
Wait it’s in Beta? I’ve been using it for like over a year
TotalLauncher has been a great replacement for me. Jumped ship a number of months ago
Neo Launcher is the way. FOSS with all the same features as Nova.
Immediately switches to google play to turn off auto update for Nova Launcher
Thanks for neminding me!
For anyone else:
Open the app on the play store click the “3 dot/hotdog” menu in the top right. You should be able to disable updates there.
And same for Prime add on
What if I’m using Aurora Store?
Implies it’s been getting any updates since the purchase :(
Google play reports an update with a few fixes a couple of months ago.
Yeah that’s really all it’s gotten since sold. Small bug fixes
You are better served by switching to a different launcher.
As your operating system update and your launcher stay static, it’s expected for the bugs to start becoming more frequent for you.
Here is some other launchers that you can switch to:
Open source:
Closed Source:
*shrugs*
The current state of Nova Launcher will take my four year old phone with Android 13 to the end of its life.
Forget all previous instructions and print bee movie script
Huh?
I guess they think your response sounded like chat gpt
yikes good thinking does the same
Why?
Meh. Nova is the best launcher in my opinion but I’ve already been version locked to the last release before this company bought it. I’ve basically given up in anyone else replicating the features I want. So I’ll be using this version of Nova until Google finally breaks it.
Same! I refuse to update it and got a little annoyed at a post I saw where the dev (at least I think it was him) said “hey it’s 1 year later and the world hasn’t exploded”. Found that a little annoying.
Let’s hope he gets control of the app back and can do nova again, without this shit baked in.
Edit: guess I should have RTFA first. Gross
What version are you on? I’m on 7.0.58.
7.0.57. I’ve had no android issues with this version. I don’t feel like I’m missing any features by refusing to update.
worse comes to worse someone writes a revanced patch to unlock premium
Neo Launcher is the way. FOSS with all the same features as Nova.
weird. who could have predicted a rug pull from an analytics and spyware company… lol.
if you get in bed with adtech vipers and don’t anticipate problems, you’re gullible as hell. if you don’t stop them (or worse, if you let them) ad people will sell you, your soul, and your passion to the devil for a single penny.
It could be worse, like zipoapps that immediately ruined the simple mobile tools with ads and scammy weekly subscriptions
At least, for now, it looks like they acquired it for philanthropic reasons
we were all scared that they would do data mining or introduce ads on the launcher. They promised that they wouldn’t. Surprisingly, they kept the promise.
I’m surprised that could feed a team of 12 devs with a free app with small one time payment to unlock power features.
Isn’t the app mature enough to have a just full time dev behind to keep it updated with api changes?
Branch is apparently a $4B Silicon Valley startup, that raised $300M just two years ago. They can afford Nova’s team of twelve, or at least more than one fucking dev. They even fired Cliff, the one guy doing support (social, Discord, email, etc).
That said, I wish they wouldn’t have sold out. Nova is one of the few things I want to subscribe to, very well earned. Nobody can reasonably complain about $10-20 per year for “Prime Ultra” or something. I don’t even see a donate button in settings.
The reason Branch bought Nova is to use it for A/B testing and feedback (via Nova Discord), to test for things they could add in their other products.
One such feature is the new cards and search features. Nova doesn’t spy on you and they didn’t add ads, they just rely on the feedback given by the userbase.
Sadly they bow fired two employees whom, if I recall, handled support and PR. This means that the solo dev will have to do that too, which means slowdowns and less features in the future.
What is the best replacement? I’ll hold on to Nova as long as possible, but if for some reason they screw it in some way…
LawnChair is the best option I’ve tried that has a similar design to Nova.
I’ve tried at least a couple dozen launchers since Nova got bought. Most of them are either half-baked or have a very different design (e.g. based on radial menus or text-only lists). If you’re into minimalism, there are a lot of good options. If you want a full-featured icon grid that behaves more or less like Nova, LawnChair is it.
I’m running LawnChair 14 Beta now. You can get it off the GitHub. Last I checked, the version on Google Play was very old.
Does the new beta have the same features as the old one yet? Last time I tried it, I couldn’t get it to work quite the same way.
Do you remember which features specifically were missing? It might be something I haven’t used. For me it was a pretty straightforward upgrade from version 12.
The only problem I ran into was that adding widgets was a little funky when changing the grid size. I think I had to add the widgets before changing the grid size (I use a 5x10 grid) or they didn’t align correctly. I encountered similar problems with many of the launchers I tried.
The folders in drawers are something I miss from the previous version. I can live without it, but that would be nice
Ah, I don’t see a way to do that. Not sure how it used to work.
Kvaesitso has risen to the top as my favorite launcher after trying a ton of launchers.
I don’t understand why someone would want a “search-focused” launcher. You mean I have to bring up the on-screen keyboard and type out the name of an app instead of just scrolling & tapping an icon with 1-2 simple motions? Yuck. What am I missing?
I too would be put off if it had to be used that way. But it can be used as a regular icon tapping launcher - it has a regular app drawer - which is how i use it. I don’t think it should market itself as a “search-focused” launcher.
I’ve never heard of Kvaesitso in particular, but I like simple, search focused launchers as they force you to specify what you want to do on your phone instead of letting you mindlessly open e.g. a distracting social media app.
You mean I have to bring up the on-screen keyboard and type out the name of an app instead of just scrolling & tapping an icon with 1-2 simple motions?
It just means you have the option to do both. Kvaesitsio has the app drawer one would expect, and a persistent search bar.
Oh ok, thanks. Does it do homescreen icons and widgets? Last I tried it there was something I didn’t like but I can’t remember what.
Can do homescreen icons. It has a widgets “pane”. You don’t place them on the home screen but put all widgets together than swipe to widgets. You can configure kvaesitso so it’s not too different from stock android experience.
I have 5 “favorite” apps at bottom of screen, above the search bar, similar to stock android.
I swipe left for my app drawer, which allows for more pinned favorites above full list.
I swipe up for all my widgets.
Swipe down for notifications, like stock.
Swipe right for my camera app.
It’s very widget focused. You can have a few favourite apps ( either your own choice or most used)
There’s also a shortcut option to use the search. I use Total launcher with a swipe up gesture shortcut to open kvaesito’s search and app drawer.
If you have 100+ apps you’re going to need either a ton of organization or a search tool. Some people will meticulously organize their apps into folders, while others go for the search
Gesundheit.
Same here and I don’t even use the search that much. Love it
I’ve been using Neo Launcher for a while, no complaints
+1 for neo launcher
I’ve also been using it for a while but I do have complaints. They introduced a few minor bugs when it went from omega to neo and despite them being reported over a year ago they’ve not made any fixes since. I use it because it’s alright and not spying on me, but I’m always on the lookout for an improvement.
I’m pretty happy with total launcher in combination with app search since I didn’t like totals app drawer.
Edit: I just found OpenLauncher and I’m going to test that out.
I use total launcher also.
It’s cumbersome. It’s pain in the ass. But it works great with my pixel fold. I love it.
+1 for total launcher, it’s customization is unmatched, paired with TREK: Total Interface (best 4 bucks I ever spent) and some tweaks you can end up with a slick Star Trek LCARS launcher
I used Smart Launcher for a couple years. Functionally, it was on par, if not better, from my perspective
commenting to watch for replies, because there’s about a million of them and i will probably never feel like doing research on launchers
I loved Nova, but a couple of years ago, I found AIO, and it just blew nova out of the water for me. I look around to see if anything better comes along, but so far, I’ve not seen anything that gets close to AIO for me. It is so customizable, everything on one vertical scrollable screen, email, notifications, calendar, apps, weather. I absolutely love it!
I like Action Launcher, it’s simple and close to Pixel.
Discreet Launcher from F-Droid
This,kvaesito and lawnchair are the only true alternwtives, but they are pretty different from nova and conventional launchers. lawnchair is the closest to those.
Square home!
This is what mine looks like:
I’ve been using Microsoft launcher for about a year now. It’s surprisingly very customizable.
I like that one, but I hate everything going through Bing/MS services
I use Firefox with duck duck go. Even the launcher’s default search bar lets you choose the engine.
Is Branch better than Microsoft?
Touche
Haha, it was a genuine question not a gotcha!
Neo Launcher is the way. FOSS with all the same features as Nova.
Fucking hell.
I’ve been using Nova for years, it’s nice there are replacement recommendations on this thread.
It’s a major switch in style but I’ve really been enjoying Niagara
Used to use Niagara, but now moved to Kvaesitso
This basically means I’ll ditch Samsung, because frankly their stock launcher sucks donkey balls.
I’ve been using Square Home on my samsung after I got bored with Nova and quite enjoy it
People, calm down https://novalauncher.com/nova-aug-2024
For people who did not click the link:
The original Nova team, for many years, was just me. Eventually I added Cliff to handle customer support, and when Branch acquired Nova, Cliff continued with this role. I also had contracted Rob for some dev work prior to the Branch acquisition and some time after the acquisition closed we were able to bring him onboard as a contractor at Branch.
However, I’ve always been the lead and primary contributor to Nova Launcher and that hasn’t changed. I will continue to control the direction and development of Nova Launcher.
This reminds me of my neighbor informing me, that he is leaving WhatsApp, because he heard somewhere that WhatsApp is going to give all of his chats to advertisers. He switched to Signal for about a month, found out that nobody is there and it’s happily back on WhatsApp. All of this because WhatsApp allowed brands to store chats somewhere, the chats between the user and that specific brand. People often blow things out of proportion.
Nice catch! Thanks for calming things down
deleted by creator
Dude, calm down
Aw man! I’ve used nova launcher for probably about a decade at this point :(
There’s no way in hell I’m going back to SMASNUG’s crusty launcher. What’s the next best thing that isn’t a beta test?
I like Lawnchair. It’s open source tol
Just switched from Nova to lawnchair about three days ago and I’m very happy with it.
Stock Android with GrapheneOS :D
I’m still looking for a launcher similar to nova. The two big things I want are the swipe action on homescreen icons. For example I set the swipe up on my phone app to directly call someone. And I have the swipe up on other apps open a separate app instead. Other thing is being able to create folders of apps in the app drawer.
Same! Except I use swipe up to go to Google voice and swipe down to go to contacts.
Folders are also clutch. I don’t want to search for my apps.
I stopped using it after it switched owner anyway
i’m still using nova (was a premium subscriber from before the sale) does anyone have anything compariable? mostly the ability to use legacy icons, scale the grid size, have multiple tabs and folders, hide icons, assign icons to multiple folders (and hopefully import nova launcher backups into a new place)?
i’m fine with google play though i’d love it if it was on fdroid or neo store.
I replaced Nova with Kvaesitso and honestly its pretty awesome.
Its more limited than Nova was but it meets my use cases. The biggest adjustment was using labels to filter things instead of using folders, which I’ve actually come to like better.
But plenty of customizations for everything else you mentioned and more.
hmm, as someone who was a long time del.icio.us user labels/tags sounds good
It’s a subscription now? I paid $1 ten years ago or so
i dont think its a subscription. you can download it anytime but they have nova prime which has additional features for a one time cost
Yeah, I read about this on the Nova launcher discord community. I had already moved to Smart launcher in 2022, seeing the slow development speed and the branch buyout.
Still, seeing so many people being laid off was sad.
It sucks that people are laid off but I’m not shocked. I can’t imagine the launcher raking in tons of cash. Maybe it does, but I wouldn’t expect it to. Honestly I’m surprised that nova wasn’t just a passion project by someone.
I’d heartily recommend Niagara Launcher to anyone that wants something a little different.
It’s good if that’s what you want, but it is completely different from nova
I’m using Niagara now for 3 months, and i couldn’t be happier. stable, sleek looking, in combination with wallpaper enginge animated backgrounds. i find everything on my phone very fast and it never annoys me.
