Wow, I’ve been using Nova Launcher. I paid for it and everything. Guess I’ll uninstall. The ads wouldn’t affect me, sure, but enshittification knows no bounds.
They got a new owner years ago. No one should still be using it. Lawnchair has been great for me.
Holy shit the screenshots on Play store are depressing
You want to use one of the much more recent nightly or beta builds.
Can you remove the search bar at the bottom of the home screen?
Yeah, that’s what I do. It’s fully customizable.
Hm maybe I’ll try it out.
I used to use lawnchair. Good reason to switch back.
I ducked off the Nova train with their fishy new owners a few months ago. My one complaint about Lawnchair is that the search function is slower and less effective, otherwise it’s great!
If anyone is looking to try something new - I really enjoyed
WaterfallNiagra after dropping Nova.+1 for Niagra. It takes a few days to get used to but it’s the launcher every power user didn’t know they wanted. Lifetime purchase options and a very responsive/passionate dev
Seconded. Looks good and I’ve found browsing by letter is way faster than the traditional folders (although you can still use folders with premium). I bought the upgrade after a few months.
I picked up Lawnchair when I de-googled my phone a bit more than a year ago. There were a couple launchers I considered, but honestly the name is what sold me. And I haven’t missed Nova since.
Made the switch last year. Have had no issues,especially now that you can do folders.
I recommend dragon launcher or lawnchair
dragon is now my favorite, the ring design is awesome and the dev is active, but lawnchair is the most like nova but open source.
Where do I find this dragon launcher? I searched for it in the Play store and didn’t see it.
Its on Github.
Onec again the “Everything that’s not FOSS will turn to shit at one point or another” theorem proves true.
And if a FOSS project turns into shit a fork will come up.
One perfect example was simple apps acquisition. New owners turned it a ad ridden mess, fossify apps fork came to the rescue.
nextcloud! mariadb! libreoffice!
Mariadb got bought by a private equity strip miner company late 2024, so it will probably be mined for every enshittification possible before thrown on the garbage heap like every company private equity has acquired before it.
(It always takes a few years of inefficient planning before private equity starts rolling out enshittification)
Fuck MariaDB, all my homies use Postgres.
Yeah but foss has its own problems. Mainly financing. People are expected to work for free on most open source projects, and some do because they enjoy it. I do that myself too. Its fun.
But foss doesnt create products that require a lot of funding to get off the ground.
There is something to be said about continuous community effort. Projects tend to continue even with original developers absent, sometimes for a very long time.
One of my favourite games is STALKER, and boy does it hold a story and history behind the community. The eurojank game that was modded into an AAA looking survival game that was even published to GOG (STALKER GAMMA). Such project could’ve probably costed millions for a studio. Coincidentally, watched this video today, which briefly tells the history too: https://youtu.be/5C80TWlTC1o
Don’t forget to leave a bad review before uninstalling it.
Maybe after the big changes with the Linux desktop in the last year we might start to see renewed focus on a truly open source phone OS
There already is one.
Not much focus yet 😭
I’m getting really tired of companies pissing all over my name!
time to go super…
Shouldn’t have tried to disassemble Johnny 5.
No disassemble!
No disassemble!
Yep. I recently bought a used Pixel 8 and wanted to install a new launcher - my googling turned up Nova launcher, but the app said it had ads, so I looked a bit further and installed Lawnchair instead. Does the job!
It already had a new owner which is why I stopped using it years ago.
Up until today I was happy with turning off updates (as a precaution) and restricting Nova’s internet access (all phone network access is proxied through Rethink+), but this made me switch to Lawnchair and leave a 1-star review for both the free version and the paid upgrade token.
I didn’t know about Rethink, looks like a cool project
It’s excellent, you can filter network access per app, or per IP, or isolate an app and allow it to access only certain addresses / ranges and the interface is really intuitive and user-friendly.
Thats why you want open source software, its the only software you can trust, its the only software that won’t fuck you over
Until these mfs relicense their sht and we have to fork
at least forking is an option you can choose, and someone else with decent reputation in the foss community will probably also do it before you, instead of just accepting being fucked up the ass with no lube for the third time this week
Except when it goes from open source to closed lol
At which point it simply gets forked from the last release/commit. Unless the project nukes all of the history and no one comes forward with a backup.
And, they would typically need the consent of every contributor to legally change the license, unless they had been forcing contributors to sign over rights to their code before contribution.
This used to be my favorite piece of software I paid for. Then… 💩
Ahh sonofabitch! It’s already updated for me and there is no changelog. Turned off auto update.
Edit: and uninstalled. Lawnchair FTW.
You should really not have automatic updates on. Aside from the fact that you also should have moved away from Nova years ago when Branch first acquired them.
Yeah. Totally correct. That one slipped by.
Annnnd TIME! About 1 hour.
95% interface and widgets swapped over to lawnchair!
Boom!
Just get the older APK form one of the mirror sites.
Dang… I saw this a while ago, but thanks to this post I looked again and it turned out that mine had automatically updated to the new version on Play Store. Went ahead and uninstalled it and then installed the latest Beta from before, and I was lucky that my email license still worked - don’t know for how long though (not sure if the check is hardcoded in some way or if it makes an API call).
It’s had a great run, but it’s just sad that it has to end like this. Would’ve been spectacular if it was open-sourced as promised.
I started looking into alternatives and it seems like no other launcher is quite there yet, but Lawnchair looks promising for my use. The whole situation started looking like the appropriate time to learn some Android development; a while ago I was thinking of forking the AOSP launcher and trying to implement some stuff by myself, but now it seems like contributing to Lawnchair would be a better idea.
I’ve installed Lawnchair and I’m quite happy with it.
I’ve tried it, but it’s missing some things I’m used to - both functionally and visually.
For example?
Off the top of my head:
- complex gestures (tap + swipe, two finger swipe/rotate)
- frequent/recent/new apps in app search
- app drawer tabs
- icon customisation for folders
- creating home screen shortcuts for activities (or if that’s possible, I couldn’t find it).
Of course this shouldn’t sound as a blame - I know Lawnchair is relatively young - those are a bit more advanced features that I grew used to over more than 10 years with Nova. When I manage to get a development environment running and some knowledge about Android, those are some of the first things I’d try to implement in Lawnchair.
I just switched to Octopi. For me, it’s an almost perfect replacement. Plus it’s a local developer.
Is this open source?
(I couldn’t find it)
If you want FOSS, check KISS launcher. Its feature rich, light on resources, and available through F-droid.
Can confirm, only one that had feature parity for most of my nova setup
I showed my wife the before and after of my home pages. She said, “They’re the same.”
Happy.
Awesome app, replaced Lawnchair. Development simply moved too slowly on LC
is it new? cant find it on the launcher comparison table https://grabster.notion.site/6671f3b62d8043c4aaaae22a241e3f05?v=91d9b664887643298f85fe18044d3560
thanks for this table!
Nova is rated as advanced customisability, and in this table Bridge Launcher is the only FLOSS launcher that has advanced customisability and is not discontinued, but based on the app page it’s basically a programming platform, not an actual launcher :c
Nova Launcher was acquired by analytics firm Branch Metrics in 2022 . Barry initially stayed on to continue development, but the situation deteriorated. After being the sole developer for the past year, Barry announced he had left Branch and was no longer involved with Nova Launcher . The Broken Promises: Branch’s then-CEO and founder Alex Austin made public commitments to the community about open-sourcing the code if Barry ever left . However, Barry was ultimately asked to stop working on Nova Launcher and the open sourcing effort he had been preparing . The Irony: Nova Launcher is now owned by Swedish company Instabridge and already contains code for Facebook Ads and Google AdMob trackers, with ads being integrated into the app . This is exactly the kind of enshitification that the community feared when an analytics company acquired it in the first place. In Barry’s actual statement, he was more restrained—just expressing that he was grateful for the community’s support while confirming he’d left. But the community response on Reddit and elsewhere absolutely used the word “enshitification” to describe what happened to their beloved launcher.
Pure fucking bullshit.
