Hello folks. Four minutes ago, I got a notification that Nova now has ads, despite Me disabling updates. Three minutes ago, I uninstalled Nova. Any recommendations for a new launcher?
My ideal launcher would be completely free, have plenty of customisation options, and the only updates would be bugfixes and op-in features that I am not notified about. I first installed Nova years ago, to make My new phone’s home screen look like the last one’s. And I’m not about to change My ways now, so hopefully the new launcher lets Me recreate the look and feel of the very first smartphone I ever owned over a decade ago.
All the best,
A cranky old wizard
I’m in a similar boat. I’ve searched the available FOSS launchers, and none seem to allow overloading app icons/folders with swipe actions. App folders and swipe actions are the only launcher features I really care about. (Well, a functional app drawer/list of some kind, too.)
I want 1 home screen with all my frequently used apps accessible in a single action, less frequently used apps sorted into logical (custom) folders, and rarely used apps visible in a drawer/list.
idgaf about widgets or search bars; I don’t want to type anything in my home screen, and I only use my home screen to open other apps, so widgets are pretty useless to me.
Do people just, like, keep their home screen open? Why?
Here’s what I’ve got so far, but I’ve only been playing for a week. Everything below the calendar widget and above the podcast widget is an app “drawer”. It scrolls vertically if I have more apps than for on the visible part, and I get to set the number of displayed rows and columns, labels, icon shape, etc as you’d expect.
You can put stuff in folders of course, and in the paid version, SUB folders, and there’s also that odd search and tag button group on the right. You can tag apps with one (or more?) labels like “work” and filter the visible app drawer by that. I don’t use that so far.
I get to choose how many apps are pinned at the bottom (Or get rid of the bar altogether!). I have swipe actions on some of them. Every single element of the screen can be resized, overlap (there’s a button to move an item forward/backward through the layers), be moved, or gotten rid of. At minimum, you could have an absolutely blank screen top to bottom, and a swipe from (any) edge action to open one of the app drawer variants. The whole screen could just be the app drawer.
It’s not QUITE perfect for me, because I’m annoying and picky, but it’s working well enough. I’m feeling like I’ll be fiddling with this forever. There’s even a Star Trek LCARS theme that I want to try. ($5 I think)
I think this is common to all launchers, but you can try this one or and NOT set it as your default launcher. You’ll only see your Total Launcher home screen when you click on the Total Launcher app from the stock launcher, then, until you are happy with it.
Thanks for taking the time to write that up! That looks like it might work really well for me.
You betcha. For people who care to use something other than the stock launcher, the way we set up our home pages is a bunch of personal preferences that you may not even be able to fully list.