Comment by saltcured

It's these discussions where I realize people use phones in such different ways.

I abandoned Nova last year when I read about this looming problem. I found that Fossify Launcher beta (from F-Droid) works well enough for me on my Pixel 8a.

I don't really need much out of a launcher. My main goal was to have one like my older Android and not be forced to have a search bar or assistant triggers on my home screen.

All I need from the home screen is to be able to place basic widgets like clock and calendar and shortcuts for the basic apps I use frequently. A plain app drawer is fine for the rest, because I don't really install that many apps and instead disable/remove many. My app drawer shows 35 apps and has several blank rows remaining on the first page with 5 icons per row.