A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
On a Pixel with GrapheneOS
I use KISS, I wanted an opensource launcher
Its quick actions, history and tags are exactly what I need.
You need to customize it heavily to get it to look good: I use a very minimal amoledBlack&white config with Arcticons and I love it
I use KISS launcher. It is simple and I love it.
Lawnchair. It mimicks the Pixel launcher quite well, which is my favorite stock Android launcher, and is much better than default OneUI. To be honest, I dont care for phone customization as much as I used to, but Lawnchair just works. Not to mention its FOSS and has a great themed icon pack that covers every app I use daily except for the Lemmy app Liftoff.
Holy shit, lawnchair is still around?! I remember that from the droid 2 days!
I have used many over the years. Lots of great ones, but it came down to taste for me. A few faves were Niagara, Nova, Lawnchair and the stock Pixel launcher. But for the last few months, I have gone back to Square Home. I was a huge Windows Phone enthusiast, so I just really wanted to go back to that vibe. It took a decent amount of time to get it set up and exactly how I wanted. Worth a try if you want something different.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ss.squarehome2
I'm on Pixel 5 and my vote is Niagra! It's utterly unique among launchers, most of which are more or less the same but with different customizations. It's difficult to say what makes Niagra better for me, but now that I've gotten used to it (not easy but worth it) all the samey launchers just feel so much worse.
Olauncher is open source minimalist launcher. VERY minimalist. You can get up to 8 apps on the home page and swipe down to search for all other apps.
I like Nova Launcher. Compact. Flexible. Consistent interface regardless of what craziness Samsung tries to impose. Good gesture customization. Don't need to learn anything new.
i use evie but evie doesnt exist anymore the playstore thing is a scam
I use Nova. I recently bought a Samsung phone and was tempted to give One UI's launcher a try, but there was one feature that I instantly missed. Forget about all the personnalisation, there was one deal breaker.
The search bar.
The search bar in Nova, especially in the beta builds of Nova 8, is just so good. I can search for any app, yes, but I can search on the web, on Wikipedia, on YouTube, on Maps, on a ton of things very very easily. It also offers shortcut search, contact search, quick unit conversions and it's connected to DuckDuckGo, my search engine of choice.
I can also place a search widget on the home screen/dock. I couldn't do this on One UI's launcher and I just don't get why. As someone that primarily opens apps by searching for them (whether that's on my phone or on a PC), having a quick and easy to access search bar is just essential.
Currently using Lawnchair 12.1 and their icon set, and I'm quite happy with it!
I've used Action Launcher for something like a decade now. I love it, because it allows you to use folders with a "default" up. If you click on the folder, it launches the default app for the folder, but if you slide up on it, then you can see all of the apps in the folder to access them.
However, it doesn't work well on my zfold, so I've had to retire it. I'm still looking for a good alternative
Pixel 7, Niagara launcher. I find it much easier to find apps by starting letter then any other method, it looks very clean and has everything I need
Since it's not mentioned, I use Before Launcher to help reduce phone usage. It still has some customization, folders, and a notification filter to block out noise.