Uninstalled within seconds. I’m trialling Hyperion launcher now, which seems pretty crisp.
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.
I switched to lawnchair. It’s ok but feels a bit “We have Nova Launcher at home”.
I also made that switch. Lawnchair works great but some of their settings are clunky. Managing app folders is kind of bothersome. You can’t do it right in the app drawer, you have to dive into Lawnchair’s settings.
And when you have moved everything into folders you can’t sort the folders. Also can’t get rid of the stupid horizontal padding on widgets.
If they ever get around to adding drawer tabs, I’ll happily make the swap. Until then Kvaesisto is a decent alternative (unless you’re the sort who likes having lots of icons on home screen; nothing wrong with that, of course, but Kvaesisto doesn’t really have a way to do it).
If you’d like to try something different, i use Lynx launcher:
I’m enjoying a lot using Dragon Launcher, it’s a bit more complex with a bit of a learning curve but really nice once you get used to it. It’s less known so I’m trying to increase its visibility because it deserve all the love it can get.
Can you elaborate a bit on what makes it hard to learn and what is so nice about it once you do? I didn’t see much for details on the linked page.
But of course buddahriffic! Let’s see how I can explain it, it is quite a different approach to other more classical launchers. There’s no option to put icons on the launcher, there’s no paging or anything. In fact when I found it out it couldn’t even have widgets. But the Dev has been hard at work it seems and has been making really nice changes. Now it allows to use widgets, so at least you got that going. But otherwise the screen remains rather empty and clean.
Then the usage goes with gestures, but I’ve found it is less about gestures and just about straight lines of movement with your finger and how long. So when you start it it has nearly nothing set up to be used, you need to make a long click (I think it is like 3 seconds long and you see some UI feedback) to bring up the settings. In the settings you can see one of those screens with multiple rings in the screenshots on FDroid. On those rings you can manually and one by one add icons for apps or actions (and in the last version even more rings nested). You can set as many as you want, in as many rings as you feel like (maybe there’s some limits I don’t know). The customization options are quite nice, including distance to move the finger for each ring and area of no effect (if you want to cancel the action, I keep moving my finger in the screen quickly, browse the options in the rings and cancel it in the center where I started the gesture, it’s kinda satisfying, like a fidget thingy).
So in the home page, you can’t see the rings (maybe there’s an option for that) and wherever you press will set the center of the rings and then with the same gesture always you can reach the same action/app. The result is quite clean and easy interactions, once you learn your own setup. The apps I use less are a bit harder to find if I forget where I put them, but in those cases you can open a list of all apps just like any launcher. And at the beginning I was struggling to get used to it, but now I find it very convenient and fast for my most used apps. Getting the right place for the icons in the rings is also a bit of a learning process of where you want things.
Well, I hope I made it clearer and not more confusing :) maybe with the description and the screenshots in the app store you can get a pretty good idea of how it goes.
Thanks for taking the time to write that out, yyprum!
It sounds interesting. I switched to O launcher when Nova was sold and the writing was on the wall, but it was overly simplistic and I didn’t continue using it when I got a pixel and moved to graphene, but I’m neutral on the default launcher it has. I’ll check this one out when I have some time, it sounds compelling.
I hear ya, I used Nova for so many years, always trying other things but going back to it. And like you, I dropped it as soon as it got sold. But I struggled to find a good alternative. The most similar in usage and capabilities was lawnchair and I settled with it for a long while. Nearly all other options were too simple or lacked something I really wanted in a launcher (some quick gestures, proper folder handling…)
For the first time I have found a different approach to a launcher that I find genuinely useful aside of the Nova style.
