calamitycastle

1000% agree. Pixel 3a / 4a era was the greatest

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.

There are two YouTubes. One is the "creator" YouTube, algorithms, numbers blah blah

The other is the actual content creator YouTube. These are the channels that people actually follow. If captain disillusion set up his own RSS feed for videos, and I had the method to subscribe to it, I'd no longer need YouTube

The argument that YouTube has the algorithm and recommendations etc is moot, that's the same job that every network does, you could absolutely replace this

The video content would have to be self hosted probably. How it used to be. So we need all these tools to eat YouTube's lunch

Yes, why to do this?

Quite a big change for a small feature

I'm using action launcher and I really like the search. It searches apps but then has quick links too, so you can send the search query to a search engine, Google play or others

Switched back to action launcher when this happened

Main feature I love, which to my knowledge action did first anyway, is to have a folder of app icons where one is the most frequent. You tap on it to open the frequent option or swipe it to open the folder.

Basically means you almost never need the app deserter l drawer

Same + AFAIK Nova nicked all the good stuff from action anyway

It's great! Specifically, the feature I'm thinking of was the swipe on an icon functionality (not sure if that's what OP means). I have my most used apps set to the tap, and then the lesser used ones in the swipe action, and I love it

It carried on working for years and years without updates but finally died recently. I miss gestural copy and paste for sure

I tried it with open board and had the same issue I'm never going back to non swiping but I miss swype everyday

My 6a is fully a downgrade from my 3a which broke and I lament its passing every time I use the in screen fingerprint reader

It's bigger, heavier, the battery is worse :(

Kid A was class when it came out