Nova Launcher could soon introduce Nova AI, a built-in AI assistant complete with a chatbot, and a new Nova Plus subscription tier
Yeah it’s time. Nova was great but now it’s fully enshitified. I went with Niagara. There’s a short learning period, less than a week for me to feel comfortable, but I love it. Very simple and clean.
Lawnchair runs fine on GrapheneOS.
I give up. I’m moving to iphone. I’ve been using Android for 16 years and I’m finally tired Boss. There is just too much bad android news stories to count. See you later space cowboys.
Graphene
And the solution is iOS…?
What does any of this do? What problem or need is it addressing? I’m honestly so confused by 99% of technology these days, it seems to be nothing more than an electronic pacifier for an entire generation of ADHD addicts.
Oh great: one more AI to disable.
Lawnchair is a pretty good FOSS launcher.
Do you know if Lawnchair can do a splitscreen with two apps? I got a new phone with lawnchair and I couldn’t figure out how to do it the other day. I know it used to be a part of Android. I don’t know if it’s part of the OS, the launcher, or Google just decided to remove the feature.
damn i remember the good old days with Nova where everything was so smooth. Evie launcher too. And even we have many problems with them, Microsoft launcher was good in the beginning.
There were many good options. Now it’s just Niagara Launcher that doesn’t suck.
Edit: I see Octopi getting mentioned a lot. Might have to check that one out.
The hell happened? First it was ads, now this bs. It was such a good launcher too.
Got bought up Branch, and the original dev left when they refused to open source it as promised.
The end began 4 years ago. Now they’re set up to grift anyone using the app.
A third party launcher for Android(homescreen). It was very beloved for being clean and lightweight while also having a bunch of customization.
It was bought up by an adware company not long ago.
What I don’t get is: why exactly is such software so popular ? Does one really need it instead of just swiping twice or thrice to find the app one is looking for?
Some of us also enjoy customizing and designing our own home screen. I have mine set up to just show my wallpaper and a grid of 9 icons. You can also change icons, icon shape, etc. I have simple icons for my folders rather than an ugly icon with 4 little icons inside it that seems to be the default for “folder” on all phones.
I enjoy the aesthetics of it. I think it’s ironic that iPhones are so freaking ugly and messy when their whole brand was built on clean design.
i think my Samsung had this shitty search feature or something that wanted to put a bunch of shit on one of my pages. Can’t quite remember. But I know Google recently did the same thing with the Pixel. There’s this fucking search bar that takes up the whole bottom of the screen on every single page. And they won’t let you remove it. That alone was enough for me to switch.
It’s putting whatever you want and what you don’t want on the home screen, including for example launching into search.
My phone stock launcher search dialog that once would have been to type the app name became a ‘multi-search’ that would do internet search and AI search and app search was sluggish and third set of results. So I go for a launcher that keeps the app search field just a quick name based search of applications.
It does also do things like let me opt into fitting more icons on the screen at a time, since the default launcher has some ludicrous small number of icons on screen at a time.
Also, the scrolling lets me scroll letters to rapidly get to apps starting with ‘m’ for example without typing, though I never use that.
It also presents a different ‘folder’ design where a tap on it launches a default app from the group, and a quick slide opens it up to select a less popular, alternate app quickly.
Also, two finger swipe from top takes me straight to typing app name to launch.
Someone else I knew swapped launchers just to have a different wallpaper behavior that their stock launcher wouldn’t do.
Currently using Octopi.
You just solved one of my long-standing problems! I’ve been looking for a launcher that could replace Nova for me, but I hadn’t been able to find anything that really did the job. Octopi for the win!
I am in the process of moving over my highly-customized setup now. And I made the larger of the two donations, in support of the app.
Thanks for suggesting it and thanks to the developer who built it!
If I didn’t find Octopi launcher a couple months back, and jumped ship from my overly customized Nova setup, this would definitely have made me switch now.
I had it since at least 2018. At least from then were the 5 stars reviews I had left, now replaced with 1 star ones…
+1 for Octopi, it’s the only one that really does almost everything Nova does
If anyone wants to switch to a more customisable launcher, look up total launcher. You can build the launcher in your own style from a blank template. The only thing that comes close is klwp.
You know some people beat this drum that more people should pay for good software and that it guarantees it’s longevity and independence, and so I did buy the pro version of Nova years ago and now we are here, I think when it comes to software unless it’s open source and you can have full control over it then it’s not worth anything, as it’s only matter of time before it either gets deleted or enshitified, that’s why I started shifting to open source alternatives for most things
What have they done to my boy
You either die a hero or you live long enough to become the villain.
It’s true even for apps.
Total enshittification. Practically conned then kicked out the original team so that they make their own intrusive changes.
Hell, any data they harvest will and can be sold to other parties. God knows how much fucking lunatic Peter could be offering them.
If anyone is stubborn enough and until someone makes a near 1:1 version – and Lawnchair is functionally close to what Nova does – do backup the existing settings, uninstall the app, roll back to the pre-2022 7.0.57b version, sideload install, then from GPlay disable auto-updating for the app. Yeah, and put restrictions on the app from trying to do telemetry.
I still got my Nova7 Pre-Branch .apk saved on my NAS. I really should try to find a replacement but so far it works as expected.
This is what I ended up doing. Keeps it in the older untarnished state, things still work fine. Telemetry hadn’t been added yet
