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

submitted 4 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] 13 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

The Play Store link (Lawnchair v2) has not been updated in years. There is a ground-up rewrite (Lawnchair v14) which is being worked on slowly but is currently only able to be sideloaded from their site, and is apparently still missing most of the features from v2.

From what I gather, though, development is happening at a snails pace with "when I feel like it" updates.