#novalauncher wurde wieder verkauft! 
Erst an branch jetzt an eine Schwedische konzern, die wieder einmal noch mehr #tracker und #ads implementiert haben!

R.I.P NovaLauncher!

#android #app #apps #werbung #datenschutz #datensicherheit #launcher #androidlauncher #smartphone #Personalisierung #anpassung #opensource #ClosedSource #teslacoil #NoBIGTech #google

TLDR: If you're looking for an alternative for Nova Launcher on Android, Pear Launcher could be worth a shot.

So after hitting the update button before the morning coffee had struck home this morning, Nova Launcher greeted me with a GDPR cookie popup, asking me to accept hundreds (literally) of tracking cookies. Of course with no "reject all" option. I'd seen the news about Nova getting sold so the writing was on the wall, but getting such a central piece of software wrecked all of a sudden is some unpleasant shit nevertheless.

I just want to be able to decide what I put on the home screen of my goddamn own mobile phone and where. I want it on three adjacent "workspaces" to loosely group the most used apps by function. Calendar event list on the center one. This doesn't seem like asking for pink ponies - it all used to be trivially possible in stock Android over ten years ago. But then it started getting worse, and eventually Google made their search bar mandatory in the home screen.

I've been through 3-4 launchers since then, each time eventually enshittified and forcing me to start the agonizing and time-consuming search from scratch. There are MANY launchers on Google Play, and there are lots of them on F-Droid. And few of them let me organize the home just the way I want.

One of the first things I tried, Fossify Launcher beta, looked promising but the current versions have a bug that causes widgets to disappear into a black hole and there didn't seem to be any workarounds. I only need that one calendar widget, but it is essential - so no luck there. Need to revisit that in the future.

Since then, I've gone again through something like twenty different launchers today, each of them failing to do what I want. Some of it was subtle, but most of it was not. I even went back to trying SailfishOs for a bit, but you get much less control on the home view there. Was getting more than a little desperate, but fucking finally found something that lets me set it up the way I want and doesn't offend you with cookies and whatnot.

So in case there are other Nova launcher refugees looking for a new home: you might want to give Pear Launcher (from Google Play / Aurora store). It's not F/OSS so I'll be revisiting Fossify Launcher eventually, but Pear doesn't appear to be evil, collect data, it doesn't have network permissions, etc. I'll take my chances for now.

Edit: To clarify, this is not to say the multitude of alternative F/OSS launchers on F-Droid are bad. There are some pretty interesting and innovative looking things in there if you're shopping for that kind of thing, or a minimalist launcher. Me, I just wanted to preserve my old usage patterns - this is such mundane stuff, I don't want to spend energy learning new interesting ways to launch my apps. And yes, it's also very much a first world problem 😅

#AndroidLauncher #firstworldproblem

nova launcher is dead! so sad. my wife uses this...now what am i going to get her to use?

https://teslacoilapps.com/nova/solong.html

#androidlauncher

Nova Launcher: il fondatore si ritira, stop allo sviluppo
#Android #AndroidLauncher #App #KevinBarry #Launcher #NovaLauncher #Novità #Personalizzazione #TechNews #Tecnologia

https://www.ceotech.it/nova-launcher-il-fondatore-si-ritira-stop-allo-sviluppo/

I tried this, and ended up sticking with it. I didn't miss my many pages of home screens as much as I thought I would. Plenty of options and the search works well.

KISS Launcher | Blazingly fast launcher for Android

https://kisslauncher.com/

#android #androidlauncher #foss