I bought and paid for Nova Launcher like 15 years ago and it’s been my go-to for that time; however, over the last year or so it’s been abandoned and is a buggy mess.
What ship should I jump onto? (stock google launcher is giving me the ick)
Square home 2.
TREK: Total Interface
It’s Total Launcher with an LCARS theme.
I’ve been using it for 4 or 5 years now across two different phones.
I absolutely despise the entire smartphone menu paradigm so this is as close as I can get to departing from it and sticking with something static that doesn’t move about or spontaneously change behaviors every third update.
That’s a static menu system sorted, now if I could just get my pixel 8 pro to stick to 30 minutes screen timeout after I set it once, that’d be great. It flips back to 30 seconds nearly every time I put it down and sometimes while I’m holding it.
Why isn’t there a developer option for “never let the phone change settings on its own”?
I use Niagara. I needed something that was linear to help stave off the urge to browse.
Lawnchair
I also used Nova until recently. In a similar post I saw that someone mentioned Octopi Launcher, and I liked it so far. Some features that I liked in Nova are missing, but apart from that, I find it to be a good replacement for now.
TLDR: Octopi Launcher
A search-focused, free and open source launcher for Android
Another Kvae user I see.
…Microsoft Launcher.
It does what I want, has no ads and basically is so smooth I forget I even have a custom launcher installed.
Microsoft was the only launcher I found that has the feature to swipe up on an app icon to launch a shortcut. Nova had swipe up or down that I used to launch different apps.
Smart Launcher will allow you to swipe up, down, left, and right to launch shortcuts.
The paid version will also allow you to use icons to open widgets in a pop-up.
Not sure about the latter part, but Total is another launcher allowing 4-way swiping for shortcuts. Absolute godsend.
Lawnchair
Though it is a bit buggy for me.
What ever comes pre-installed on the device. I stopped caring around the time when they stopped making cool new smarphones. It has became just a tool since.
What is an android launcher?
Like a catapult for robots.
Been using the Fossify suite for a while. The Fossify Launcher works well enough.
Smart Launcher gang checking in. I am also a Nova Launcher refugee, and I found that Smart Launcher had similar features and ease of use.
Lawnchair
Heard a lot of praise for it and tried to test it the other day, but noped right back out when just trying to create a folder in the dock was horribly buggy and repeatedly resulted in having a duplicate of one of the app icons in it showing on the home screen, weirdly overlapping the “at a glance” widget, and when I tried to fix it the folder just disappeared. Not sure if I was doing something wrong, but that wasn’t very confidence inspiring. Stock Pixel 7, so it’s not like I’m using a particularly unusual setup either
Sounds like my experience so you’re not alone. Tried it on both a Pixel 8 Pro and P10 Pro XL. Its foundation is good, but it needs a lot of polishing.
Will check it out, thank you!
Lawnchair. An improved Launcher3 that I use in place of Lineage’s built-in launcher.
I don’t really like text-only “simple” launchers as the icons help with quickly figuring out what app does what. Some of the features the AOSP Launcher3 lacks are present in Lawnchair/(mainly more customization over existing features).
I tried Lawnchair the other day and found it severely lacking.
I love KISS.
I change the settings to set swipes for common apps like browser and camera, set others as favorites like email and messaging apps, and then set it to show nothing else except the search bar. Tapping the search bar shows commonly used apps, or you can a search.
Works great for my “workflow”, and leaves the “desktop” almost completely clear. Then I have the wallpaper set to the NASA astronomy picture of the day. Works great!
I use KISS but with the Launchy widget as well and it works great.
Interesting! Do you (or anyone) know of any similar one that’s FOSS and available outside of Google Play?
I love KISS for the minimalism. I even hide the favorite bar, hide icons and make the search bar transparent too, just tap bottom to bring up recent apps + fuzzy search.
Awesome! will check it out, thank you for the suggestion!
A warning, it’s different from a normal launcher. That’s why I love it!
