Privacy
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
What is going on with Nova?
Oof, purchased by an analytics company probably means they only want it for your/my information.
it now it’s under new management. Branch, a company that provides analytical data and metrics among other things, has acquired Nova Launcher.
Haha they don't even have to try because normies doesn't even care.
I have been liking Niagara!
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Fossify forked all the Simple Mobile Tools apps and are working on open source, free and ad-free apps with that as the foundation. They have published a few already, Launcher is in the pipeline: https://github.com/FossifyOrg/Launcher
There is lawnchair launcher
But it's been abandoned for a long time now
It was a damn fine launcher
It's still usable, might be worth giving a try
I have used Lawnchair for years and I'll never switch as long as it's usable. It's the best one around IMO, very functional and pretty.
GrapheneOS uses an updated version of AOSP Launcher. I suppose that is usable by everyone?
Lawnchair hasn't had a release since 2018. I find it to be a bit buggy and sometimes won't redraw the home screens. This makes me need to force close the launcher from the settings. I usually clear the cache too, just to be safe.
Just tempering expectations for anyone else looking at it. If anyone knows of a fork that is more recent let me know. Maybe someone else is maintaining somewhere.
They actually kept developing it, with the last release in August 2022, and, even though those releases were tagged as Alpha, I've only had some (not more than a couple times a year) freezes with crash of the launcher since. Tested on two different phones with two different ROMs
I don't know if there's still someone developing it, but until something else just as good (for me) pops up, I'm sticking to Lawnchair
They are develeoping it, but it's slow because there are not as many people contributing as they would need to i think.
Anyways, if you want a more recent version, they are preparing an App store launch. One of the developers publishes more recent builds on his fork, see this comment.
Oh sweet! Thanks for the heads up! I was hoping to find a version 14 without having to figure out how to build it myself.
I took a peek into their telegram feed and it seems they're working on version 14.
Very nice, thanks for the good news! I'll wait patiently for it to release
I'm trying one of the Dev releases that was linked below. So far it's pretty stable. Not sure your tolerance for any issues that may arise.
That's reassuring, for the stable release I mean!
At the moment I don't really feel the need to update it, I'll just wait for a bit longer. Thanks though!
I haven't found one that I like as much. My biggest hangup, and this is probably dumb, is the ability to edit the icons for PWAs so they don't show the stupid browser icon that screams "I'm a web shortcut!!!". I tried Hermit as a PWA/lite app replacement and Android just slaps the hermit badge on it instead. For whatever reason that annoys me enough to stick with Nova.
Could shove it in a folder and then make the tap action open the first item in the folder, then set the folder icon to whatever your want. Disadvantage is that if it's already in a folder you can't do that because it would require nested folders
Not a bad idea. I get picky about aesthetics though. Dumb, I know. But I'll give it a try. Just seems silly to me that default launchers can't manage editing the dang app shortcuts
edit: Samsungs OneUI launcher does not put the badge on a PWA. But I'm not sure I trust them any more than Nova at this point....
I used trebuchet for my launcher, it's a lineageos app but iirc there's a downloader for it. It's not super customizable but I like it
Ruthless Launcher is pretty nice. Unfortunately it's not open source, but Exodus doesn't show any trackers and if you use GrapheneOS you can simply revoke Network permissions
Once Nova got bought i tried Neo Launcher and it has been more than close enough for me, a year and a half later and i'm still using it
I never found one I liked as much tbh
I really enjoy one called Discrete Launcher from fdroid. It's meant to be pretty minimalistic and does not support widgets from what I can tell, but you swipe up from the bottom with one finger for AppDrower and swipe down with one finger for a favorite spar at the top. But neither are shown normally, just your wallpaper. You can also program swipe left to open an app swipe right to open an app and several other gesture actions to open things or do things
Yeah I've been looking for an alternative to Nova myself. I've tried many but I just keep coming back for one reason or another. .I have graphene os but the default launcher is a little too plain for me. The search continues I guess. I'll check some listed here that I haven't tried. Maybe lawnchair will be worth it when they put out a new release.
I spent a few hours trying any alternatives I could find on FDroid, even Aurora and just blocking network access.
Lawnchair has a giant empty space on the dock when you hide the search bar, wasting screen space.
Ended up back on Nova.
We need more options. We don't need any more "minimalist" text launchers though.
It's not popular at all, but I love LukeLauncher on fdroid.