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Android launchers
What sort of non stock andriod launchers are people using at the moment? Just moved from iPhone to Android and want to use something better than oneui. Currently using niagara but curious what people are actually using?
I've used Nova for about 6 years or so. I honestly don't even remember what the basic launcher looks like anymore.
You should know: Branch fires team behind Android launcher Nova, only the founder remains
Yeah. It's good for now but I'm seeking alternatives. Hyperion seems promising and it's only 2 dollars.
Personally, I have lost faith in cheap paid options or paid options in general for applications like launchers. For single use applications it is not as critical but a launcher has access to so much of what I do with my phone that I want to be relatively sure there is no shady data collection going on or anything else.
So when I started looking for alternatives, I looked for open source ones that are available through F-droid. Which personally has landed me on kvaesitso as it offers most of the things I used Nova for although with a different UI and UX. But there are a few more options out there depending on what you want.
How painful was the switch?
Are there custom gestures?
That's probably what I use the most in Nova. A lot of the other options I looked at had poor gesture support or didn't allow me to set up my home screens the way I like to.
Once I invested a little bit of time to explore various concepts in Kvaesitso it was pretty painless. What trips me up most, still, is muscle memory as everything works by scrolling vertically (up and down).
There are gestures for swiping down, double tap, long press, swiping left/right and home button. You can attach actions like opening the notification drawer, quick settings, turning off the screen, open recents, show power menu, open search or launching a specific app.
This will be different from Nova. It doesn't have multiple home screens you can configure. Instead, you scroll down and basically can add widgets there from either Kvaesitso or other applications.
I had one screen setup with often used apps. You have a favorites widget available in Kvaesitso, which also lets you switch between various tags you have applied to applications.
Overall though, it is open source and free. So you can easily try it out for yourself ;)
I used to use Nova like the other two people that have left a reply before me. However, Nova was bought by a different company about a year ago and last month the original team was pretty much fired. Tildes thread about the thing.
I have since then switched over to kvaesitso. Which I like quite a lot, however there is a downside, certainly if you are new to android. You need to sideload it through F-droid which is an alternative app store for open source apps.
+1 on Kvaesitso here, a lot of customization and definitely a "power user" sort of launcher wrapped in a sleek minimalist look.
I've been playing around with it for a little bit now. Maybe I'm missing something, but is it possible to have dozens of app icons on the home screen itself like most launchers do? All I can find is a widget for 'favorite' apps. A sorted home screen with app folders will always be nicer than a complete search.
You can add tags onto each app, and then you can select which tags you want to see in your favorites bar. They work like folders, but one app can be in multiple tags.
Oh cool. This will take some getting used to, but now that I've played with it more I get the appeal.
Oh yeah, I should have mentioned that because it does things differently it also does require you to experiment a bit and figure out what is possible. Initially it did turn me away as I just wanted a Nova replacement.
The biggest thing that still trips me is that everything is vertical, so I often find myself swiping to the left or right, as that is still my muscle memory.
Why do people like these search based launchers? I just put my most common apps on the homescreen, and then have left and right screens with folders/widgets for slightly less commonly used apps.
Everything is either 1 tap, 1 swipe + 1 tap, or 1 swipe + 2 taps away. Anything else I can swipe down anywhere, tap on a folder or app, and then if in a folder tap on the app.
I am genuinely curious how tapping on a searchbox, and then tapping out 2-3 letters (or more) feels more convenient?
Or is it a minimalism thing for people who don't like having icons on their screen?
I can't answer it from the perspective of someone who purely wants a search based approach. Although I suspect that for some of them the reasoning is pretty much the same.
With Nova I did have one screen with commonly used apps. Which I also recreated in Kvaesitso a specific tag in my favorites.
However, if I start adding more screens for other apps I start running in the same issue as with the app drawer itself. I simply can't remember where all these apps are located exactly, so I will spend a lot of time hovering over the screen or scrolling down the app list. Basically too many icons becomes clutter to me. Not in the "I don't like the busy vibes" way, but really that my chaotic brain can't cope.
Having a well working search function for me is therefore a much quicker process. Even more so the way I have set it up, I double tap the home button, search comes up, I type the first letter and more often than not the app already comes up.
Ah, ok thanks. That makes sense. I usually spend 1-2 days on a new android phone setting up the icons exactly the way I had them on the old phone (even using the old phone next to me as reference). So I can see how this would appeal to people who don't want to do that. Although with Samsung to Samsung switches I don't have to spend as much time as it syncs over app and folder locations automatically.
It isn't even setting it up exactly like I want, I am just not that organized that I can remember more than one screen ;) I wish I was that organized, but I am not and then having a search function comes in really handy ;)
Eh, it's not so much organization as just using the exact same icon/folder layout for... well...6+ years or something absurd? 😅 After that it's just occasionally moving stuff around for new apps/widgets, or getting rid of old unused ones.
I used Nova until it was bought (and it was by a mile the best android user experience I've ever had). I switched back to the default Samsung launcher which despite a bit of bloat, it really is an alright experience.
There was an optional add-on app that gave it really powerful full phone search functionality that I miss the most out of anything. Do you know if Kvaesitso has that? Or does it just search through apps? I do greatly miss being able to search apps, emails, files, and messages all from one search bar.
Oh yeah, that is one of the selling points of Kvaesitso to the point that I actually turned down what it can search as it was too much for me. It can even search through remote drives like nextcloud.
I honestly don't know if it will cover all your search use cases, but it will cover quite a few. So worth checking it out imho.
It sounds like it searches substantially more than OneUI so that's a plus. I'll have to play around with it. Thanks!
I'd recommend checking out a Niagara trial - I paid full price for it and have no regrets.
It's extremely minimal and doesn't have that many options.
I'll add that one of the best parts about Niagara launcher is that you can actually just buy it. No dumb subs. You can sub if you want, but you should just buy it.
It's the best in my opinion and the launcher I keep going back to. It's just too convenient.
It seems pretty good -- 30 USD/EUR is pretty steep though. It's like I'd be stuck with it (as I'm cheap) and I don't know the devs enough to trust them to continue support for let's say five years.
Hmm, they must have raised that price at some point. It is a pretty feature complete launcher at this point, so at least you know what you're getting into if you decide to buy it. I wouldn't expect major additions but I think the developers are pretty responsive if you really want to dig into that.
I used to use a heavy custom Nova but then I swapped to Niagara.
It just works, it looks nice and I can just forget about anything. I bought it, no sub or anything, no hassle.
I also use Niagara and am quite happy. It's very opinionated, but it suits my usecase well.
One thing I ran into--I purchased Niagara through the Play Store and I like it so much that I put it on my phone, my tablet, my G-Cloud, and my car's Android head unit. Consistently the least-most-recent device I turned on would be showing a nag message on the home screen that said something like "registration failed, tap to confirm purchase" and tapping would take a few seconds to make some network call before removing the message. I contacted the Niagara devs about it and found out there's a limit of 3 devices at a time per license (and since there's no way to purchase multiple licenses through the Play Store it means a 3 device limit per Google account). Thankfully they bumped the limit up for my specific account so I don't get the message anymore, but just something to keep in mind.
+1 for Niagara
It also comes with its own icon themes which look great.
I'll second the Nova recommendation, but there was also a recent post here that might be of interest: https://tildes.net/~tech/1h67/minimalist_android_launcher_recommendations
You should know: Branch fires team behind Android launcher Nova, only the founder remains
When I had an Android phone I used the KISS launcher. It's a lot like the Rofi or Alfred of Android launchers. Very fast and convenient to use for apps, contacts, searches, etc. Free and open-source, of course.
I second KISS, search based, super quick & FOSS.
I love how it has reduced the frequency of checking my phone and just browsing my apps when I'm bored. Now I need to search for exactly what I want, screentime has gone down.
Tags also make folders obsolete so don't feel you lose any functionality to normal launcher other than widgets (while they do support it doesn't work as well for this launcher type imo).
One gripe is very occasionally it bugs out on my pixel 7, can't search & need to hard reset the launcher. It's rare but not great in a pinch/emergency etc.
I need to do a better job at documenting and submitting the bug but it's so rare so I have not managed to yet.
I started using it around 2017 or 2018 and have never looked back.
It's optimised for most-commonly used apps and search (app, contact searches, activities). I prefer it to the usual "search the icon" workflow that the common launchers have.
The only loss some people might feel is the lack of widgets, but I consider these a gimmick since launching any application is so fast anyway.
You can use widgets. I use two of them, one is a clock widget and second is a weather widget. Only those two plus three favorite apps (notes, calendar and tasks) and that's all. So minimal and useful, opening various apps using recently opened or search bar is super slick.
I have been using Lawnchair for years with no complaints. I am on version 2, the play store stable version. It seems like there is some upheaval with a rewrite. The FAQ doesn't fill me with confidence that now is the time to switch to it.
Notwithstanding the above, Lawnchair has been consistently reliable and useful. My main use cases are: folders for apps on the home screen, widget support for quick access to frequently used text/email/whatever, multi page home screen.
I basically have my main home screen 2/3 full of calendar agenda widget and a photo slideshow with picture of my kid, plus the ten most used app/widget shortcuts. I have a second screen with everything else broken down into folders (work comms, cloud apps, games, audio, video, food, travel, etc) and have the locations locked into muscle memory.
One of my favorite features is the ability to lock the desktop in the settings so I don't accidentally long press while falling asleep and mess up the layout.
I'm using a more recent version and very happy with it. Looks great, very customisable, no annoying Google search bar stuck on your screen in perpetuity. Their icon pack, lawnicons, is also great.
Another Lawnchair user here formerly Nova. I've looked at most of the other launchers mentioned in the comments but there's a heck of a lot of inertia with my home screens and folder circles just can't get used to anything else.
Plus, any launcher for me has to be on F Droid.
Another Lawnchair user here formerly Nova. I've looked at most of the other launchers mentioned in the comments but there's a heck of a lot of inertia with my home screens and folder circles just can't get used to anything else.
Plus, any launcher for me has to be on F Droid.
I use Smart Launcher because of its app categorizing functionality, i know i can get something similar using folders in other launchers, but having everything in different tabs is nice.
I use Olauncher, it's a free, open source laincher that presents everything as text over a background, but I kust have white text on black.
Olauncher looks great but why don't they offer a search function?
I like having a minimal home screen, but I should be able to swipe (up, down, left, right, however you really want me to) to get to some sort of a search function and then that search function should give me the proper result back. If I start searching for "J o n a" for example, it should display Jonathan Adams as the top result. Or if I start searching for "V i s i b," the top result should be the Visible app, the app I use once every nine months but still need on my phone. And if I start searching for "hurricane debbie," it should give me the option to search the web for hurricane debbie.
It acutally launches by typing the name out. It is also intended solely as an app launcher.
I use lawnchair beta from izzysoft repo(F-Droid released recently).
Used to use Kiss launcher, it has a unique workflow.
I tried Niagara a while ago, back when it just launched. It was nice, but not cool enough to justify paying for the full version.
A couple of months ago I decided to give it another try, and was very pleasantly surprised. The experience feels super polished, and it's very comfortable to use. Definitely recommend.
Nothing matches Nova Launcher in customisability and options. I've tried most launchers, but I just can't get anything else close to how I want it.
I used Final Interface for years, but I recently felt the need to change things up a bit and am currently trying out Square Home. It takes a bit of fiddling to get the start screen just the way I like it, but it brings back fond memories of Windows Phone. And I like having just a single (scrollable) home screen. When I was using Final Interface, I also had just a single home screen, and relied heavily on the favourites app drawer.
Man the windows phone tiles were so good. I miss them. Still have the last Lumia that came out, the 950XL. It's not much use now though.
Aero Launcher is what I use, but it's mostly because I haven't been looking. I like it, and made a thread looking for something new, but it meets my needs and is easy to navigate, even if it hasn't been updated in a year.
I've really enjoyed Evie launcher on my Huawei. Lots of customizations available but simple to use and set up. The only thing is the play store version has been replaced by a scammer and instead you need to dowload it from here as it's from the original author.
There's a reddit thread about it but that's blocked by reddit's 'download our app or you can't read this!'
Does anyone have a recommendation for something besides Nova that features arbitrarily nested folders?
I really like Unlauncher. It's extremely minimal.