Uninstalled within seconds. I’m trialling Hyperion launcher now, which seems pretty crisp.
do you have dns adblock btw?
I suggest Lawnchair to y’all
An ad for an ad blocker. Ironic.
nova was good many years ago. iirc they got bought by an advertising company, and that was the day i deleted it.
And that license is now in the pile of licenses that used to be worth something, but are now junk.
Little sad trumpet player eulogizing this mess.
WTF is going on? I’ve never seen an ad in my Nova Launcher. I’ll switch immediately if I ever see one. Did they add them to widgets? Does this only apply to the free version?
I would recommend switching already. Even if you don’t get ads, Nova Launcher is tracking you and sharing your information with Facebook and other sketchy companies.
!
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’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.
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.
This is exactly why the first thing I did was disable updates for Nova, just in case.
I have been using Lawnchair Nightly as my default home screen though; there are a couple of things that aren’t carried over from Nova (mainly folder and tabs in app drawer) but for the most part it’s pretty comparable.
What version of lawnchair are you using? I have app folders (although its a bit clunky to manage in the UI, they do exist). Still missing tabs though.
It has basic app folders; I just meant some of the controls that you can do in Nova like setting folders to specific tabs, showing apps in folders in main draw, etc.
(I’m on Obtainium Lawnchair Nightly 1/22/26)
They asked for ad permissions so I uninstalled and now giving Niagara a go. Have a try, it’s different.
Worst part is I paid for it years ago. Now I have to pay again? Nope. Great while it lasted, but it’s buggy garbage now.
They’re not honouring previous purchases?
I paid 99 cents for nova launcher prime back in December 2016 so I feel like I got my money’s worth but still unfortunate to see the app go downhill.
I’ve been scrolling through these trying to figure out if this applies to the paid version or just the free one. Have you tried it to see if the paid version actually pops up ads?
I haven’t noticed any changes to the paid version. Which seems to match what the company said in their recent blog update: https://novalauncher.com/nova-is-here-to-stay
I bought the paid version several years ago, but I’m still switching to Lawnchair
Will things still be okay if I disabled updates for it?
I would recommend switching to anther launcher already. Even if you don’t get ads, Nova Launcher is tracking you and sharing your information with Facebook and other sketchy companies.
Enshittification
