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Nova Launcher, savior of cruft-filled Android phones, is on life support (arstechnica.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

78 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Back in July 2022, when mobile app metrics firm Branch acquired the popular and well-regarded Nova Launcher for Android, the app's site put up one of those self-directed FAQ posts about it. Under the question heading "What does Branch want with Nova?," Nova founder and creator Kevin Barry started his response with, "Not to mess it up, don't worry!"

Branch (formerly/sometimes Branch Metrics) is a firm concerned with helping businesses track the links that lead into their apps, whether from SMS, email, marketing, or inside other apps. Nova, with its Sesame Search tool that helped users find and access deeper links—like heading straight to calling a car, rather than just opening a rideshare app—seemed like a reasonable fit.

Barry wrote that he had received a number of acquisition offers over the years, but he didn't want to be swallowed by a giant corporation, an OEM, or a volatile startup. "Branch is different," he wrote then, because they wanted to add staff to Nova, keep it available to the public, and mostly leave it alone.

Two years later, Branch has left Nova Launcher a bit too alone. As documented on Nova's official X (formerly Twitter) account, and transcripts from its Discord, as of Thursday Nova had "gone from a team of around a dozen people" to just Barry, the founder, working alone. The Nova cuts were part of "a massive layoff" of purportedly more than 100 people across all of Branch, according to now-former Nova workers.

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 3 months ago (20 children)

Used to be my favorite launcher and I, too, abandoned it. Sad, really.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 months ago (17 children)

I still use it. Where did you move to?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

I went back to action launcher which I really like.

I basically have one home screen with links to my most used stuff.

It has covers which I believe originated here but was later possible on Nova. Basically you make folders of apps that you can tap to open, but you can set that to swipe instead so that the tap just opens the first app in the folder

So for example I listen to podcasts way more often than music from my phone, so I have a folder for audio where I can tap to open podcasts or swipe to open the folder and get to music.

I then have a slide in drawer that has the weather and my calendar and that's basically it. Very rarely need to go to the main app list once this is set up. I will likely never change this as I don't really use that many apps regularly.

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