Uninstalled within seconds. I’m trialling Hyperion launcher now, which seems pretty crisp.
I’m on one of the last versions from before the acquisition (8.1.1) and intend to use it for as long as I can while searching for alternatives. Thankfully my Prime key still works (email one, not Play Store), maybe the checks are hardcoded in some way.
What I’m thinking now is to get the APK and self-sign it as a way to prevent Play Store from auto updating it. I’m with a non-rooted device, this seems to be about the only way I have. I have already unchecked the auto update for it, but it still appears in the update list, and if I tap “Update all”, it would update. Does anyone have experience with this?
On the subject of android launchers, I gotta advertise: https://github.com/RoBoT095/win95_launcher
Made it in two days, released yesterday, still needs work but I want to know what people think of it.
EDIT: here is an image of it
When I first saw this I thought it was one of the “intentional bad design” images that are common on Lemmy. I am disappointed.
This is amazing. What is it from?
Ready Player One (2018)
Plug for open source launchers like Lawnchair
I have to imagine that anybody savvy enough to make the decision to install a third-party launcher is also savvy enough to immediately uninstall that shit.
It pops up just like a gravestone. Bye bye Nova launcher. I guess apps don’t die, they rot from enshitification.
nova was good many years ago. iirc they got bought by an advertising company, and that was the day i deleted it.
The irony of an ad for an adblocker…
My vote still for total launcher.
This post has just reminded me to change from Microsoft keyboard to FUTO. I wasn’t worried about the data harvesting, but it started redirecting my searches to Bing by hijacking the search button on the keyboard.
I’m 30% slower with FUTO though at this stage. Not sure if it’s my swype style being slightly out of calibration or my device is not fast enough to keep up. (Moto g84).
Will see how I get on.
I’ve been using FUTO for a few months now and the Swype and autocorrect are fucking horrible. Still using it because fuck Google I guess, but man I wish it were better.
You can change some of the autocorrect settings. But yea its not the best for sure
I agree it isn’t great. But I don’t want to be in the abusive relationship with Microsoft. Yes I could probably just turn off the deep search option but they’ll just do something else.
Maybe there’s a better option than FUTO, it’s just the first thing I saw as a recommended alternative.
It seems if I swype carefully it’s reasonably accurate but I have to be patient.
Same. I used a different android device the other day that still had gboard on it and the swype felt so much better. Still won’t go back.
Total is truly amazing, especially for a foldable, no match. Few small long standing bugs though, maybe I should take the initiative to report those
Total Launcher is where I landed.
Also, Heliboard is a pretty decent keyboard.
i switched from gboard to ThumbKey. Took some time to get used to, but now the usual qwerty/swipe keyboards seem inferrior to me. Like, swipe is cool and all, but only as long as the keyboard knows the word you’re looking for. As soon as you need to type out anything manually, it always turns into hell
I switched over to Lawnchair leaving Nova Launcher just last week. All the Lemmy articles about the new owners forced my hand. Perfect timing!
Moved in the last couple of days to Lawnchair. Very happy with it. You can set the icon size very small to fit everything on the HomeScreen.
!
I used Nova for as long as it’s been a thing. Paid for pro. Abandoned it immediately after they released the news a few weeks ago about the tracking and ads.
I switched to Octopi Launcher. It’s really good, and in active development. Author listens to his users and is always adding fun new features.
+1 for Octopi launcher. Very nice.
For anyone looking for more customization, Octopi Launcher has been the closest replacement for me. I’ve tried Lawnchair, Niagara, et al.
I really like Niagara tho, it’s real smooth to use and can look great. But it’s something you have to adapt to, it’s a completely different workflow.
I went from the stock launcher to Niagara and I didn’t feel the learning curve was steep. I did watch a couple of their YouTube videos first before switching.
Yeah, it’s not that it’s hard to learn, but it’s simply a completely different concept. The tutorial videos were a great help!
Octopi launcher so far looks to be the closest to what can replace Nova for me, but an absolute deal breaker for me is the inability to separate business-apps within the app-drawer to a separate page.
It’s possible with tags, but requires an extra step to hide. I ended up having all the same tabs as I did with Nova.
- You tag those apps “Business”. It creates a separate tab, but those apps now show up in both tabs.
- Long press on the “Business” tag tab and uncheck “Show apps in all apps list”
Functionally ends up just like Nova tabs, altho I miss being able to color code and infinite scroll thru them.
Octopi is great but I’ve definitely found settings hidden all over the place. The dev is fond of hiding them inside long presses of various things… XD
New feature I didn’t know I needed is Stacked Widgets. So instead of multiple home pages I can just make one and flip thru my widgets like a book. Handy for me to hide more sensitive stuff like bank widgets behind a weather widget.
Yep, 100%
I was watching a youtube video of an engineer student showing off his project. He had a stopwatch app up to show how quickly something was done, and there was a banner ad at the bottom of it. Like, it’s a damn stopwatch, who thought “I worked hard on this, and deserve to make some money!”. Also, how normalized to ads was that person that they didn’t think twice about letting that ad roll in their video.
I switched to Niagara a few years ago and can never go back. The alphabetized list of apps and slick scroll are super addictive.
Here’s what it looks like: (ignore the use of Papyrus, I just use it because it drives my friends nuts)
Just remember me posting this is your fault
Thanks for the new artist to follow! On topic: Never could like Niagara, it’s just not for me. I’ve just been using a now ancient version of Nova Launcher Prime v7 from before it got sold.
I actually switched to lawnchair a couple weeks ago because magic earth sold out and I realized all profit-motivated, non-foss apps will sell out eventually.
Ricky no!
Think of the children!
You wouldn’t want to subject them to getting into Digimon as a hobby.
(It’s too late for me, I play these shitty video games and enjoy it somehow)They’re still better than what Pokémon has been making the oast few years :3
same and I love it! Hope it stay the same forever as it’s not open source(if I’m not mistaken)
Same to all of that
I love it too!
🥶🥶🥶🥶🥶
PAPYRUS!!!
Yeah, it’s really pleasing
I thought I was a “customize everything” Nova launcher kind of guy, but when I heard the original developer had quit the company that bought it I switched to Niagara. I thought I’d just try it out for a few days, immediately got hooked. Just a few things to set up then your done and getting to everything is so much faster and easier, one handed.
