I just switched to Octopi. For me, it's an almost perfect replacement. Plus it's a local developer.
this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2026
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Is this open source?
(I couldn't find it)
If you want FOSS, check KISS launcher. Its feature rich, light on resources, and available through F-droid.
Can confirm, only one that had feature parity for most of my nova setup
I showed my wife the before and after of my home pages. She said, "They're the same."
Happy.
Awesome app, replaced Lawnchair. Development simply moved too slowly on LC
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i like lawnchair launcher :3
Wow, I got scared, I thought that was the one I'm using but I switched to Niagara Launcher long ago
I first found out about Niagara on a thread like this a couple of years ago. It's great!!!!!!
I switched to Niagara a few months ago and bought it. It's been working great for me. No regrats.
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Seems like all of our concerns have come true. I'm glad I switched earlier when the main dev bounced.
Been using Smart Launcher and haven't looked back.
I also liked Niagara too.
I dropped them back then too. I have been using lawn chair and I really like it. Could have a few more options but still quite nice
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Upvote for Smart Launcher
Smart Launcher
Is it OSS? If not I wont bother anymore
I ditched them years ago after they got bought out the first time.
I'm not familiar with Nova launcher, it seems to have some USPs to it.
But these days I always recommend Lawnchair. It's built on top of the Pixel launcher, which in itself is a very good launcher IMHO, and refines it to be more customizable.
I switched to SmartLauncher about 4 months ago and have not looked back. It's fine for what I need. I was a nova launcher user for a decade.
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Does a launcher need network access at all?
I have disabled network for this app now. Let's see what happens.
It doesn't. I've also disabled network access to Nova years ago (GrapheneOS FTW). I'm gonna go ahead and disable updates for Nova and try to fully commit to switching to Lawnchair.
Dumped Nova as soon as the sellout was announced. Replaced it with Octopi, which I found to be better anyways.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.otp.octopilauncher&hl=en_US&pli=1
Thanks for this post, I quickly turned off auto-updates 👀
I only started using it half a year ago, but it was still the best from all the launchers I've tried 😔
That's capitalism we all know consumers demand adds overloading everything. /s
I'm glad that the original developers have made some money.
I'm more glad that the new owners will lose all that good will, trust and activity.
At the risk of sounding too much like Picard,....... "make it so"
Bought it so many years ago. Moved to action launcher and since that was abandoned, I'm now using lynx launcher which works perfectly for me.
I stopped auto-updates when the last death happened. Now I'm exploring Lawnchair.