Comment by herrherrmann
17 hours ago
Ugh, quite annoying. My next phone might be an Android (instead of the current iPhone), and I was looking forward to returning to Nova Launcher, after having used it many years ago as my favorite launcher. This feels like a big no-go now.
What are other good customizable launchers on Android nowadays?
Much less popular but I switched to Kvaesitso from Nova about a month ago and it's been amazing and it's open source. Much more opinionated than Nova but it matched how I used Nova so I really enjoy it.
[1] https://kvaesitso.mm20.de/
I used Nova for years and went through this research before, having tested many alternatives. Octopi is what you're looking for. It can do pretty much everything Nova did for me and more besides. They also update often with improvements and fixes!
I've been using lawnchair as a launcher that is open source (apache) since the first news broke months when the previous dev/owner warned people what was coming, and it works just fine. Not quite as versatile as Nova Launcher, but with 100% less adware now that the new adware company is running up in people with a bait and switch.
Enshittification is real!
Early on, Lawnchair implemented a blacklist to hide apps they deemed “bad”. They only removed it after lots of protest from users. That has “burned” this launcher for me.
For those curious, see this gem of a closed PR:
https://github.com/LawnchairLauncher/lawnchair/pull/905
3 replies →
I know this is weird, but.......
I'm really happy with Microsoft Launcher.
Same! And I feel weird about it. The only issue I have is sometimes the task switcher hangs or fails and I can't easily switch tasks, but aside from that it ticks a lot of boxes.
I paid for "Square Home" a couple years ago and I'm very happy with it. It's highly customizable. The Windows Phone style layout probably isn't for everyone but it works well for me.
Depends what you want, I guess. The nice thing about Android is we still have many options.
I recently moved to AIO Launcher and I've been really enjoying it. I'm sure it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea though.
Lawnchair newest beta, though they still didnt fix years old bug with dark/black font on dark/black background in folders/drawer
also resizing/padding widgets ain't as good as Nova, but for sure much better than Octopi which is completely weird, tried yesterday, chaotic settings, can't even disable background picture for dock
switched yesterday to Lawnchair from Nova after 10+ years, seems OK besides those few quirks, but still keeping Nova as backup, will see after 2 weeks testing how is the stability, if I can remove even nova backup