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Kevin Barry, the founder and original developer of Nova Launcher has stopped working on Nova Launcher and the open sourcing efforts. (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/opensource@lemmy.ml
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After Working on it alone for a year, the founder and original developer of Nova Launcher Kevin Barry has stopped working on Nova Launcher and the open sourcing efforts. More Info: https://teslacoilapps.com/nova/solong.html

However I was ultimately asked to stop working on Nova Launcher and the open sourcing effort. Nova Launcher has been an incredible project and has an incredible community. I'm grateful for the years of support, feedback, and enthusiasm. Kevin Barry September 6, 2025
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[–] 19 points 1 year ago (16 children)

It's not even the 6th yet! ...which tells me he's in Europe and that makes Nova a little cooler.

iPhone guy but of course I have Nova Prime on my backup phone. I wanna say I had a couple other apps he made, too? Tesla Coil sounds familiar. But it's been almost 10 years since an Android phone was my main phone.

So Nova should be usable for a few more years at least... but... what's everyone gonna replace it with? For what I use my S10 for, it should be good enough. I mainly need the launcher to support custom grid sizes, larger icons, and custom icons since my Android phone is a cosplay prop. (It's meant to look and act like the NookPhone from Animal Crossing. It's fully functional — you open Nook Music and it's Apple Music which I'm subscribed to, as long as it has WiFi it will play, and it has a lot of stuff downloaded. And of course the browser is Firefox with uBlock Origin — it's just Redd the fake art purveyor on a globe rather than the red panda we all know and love.)

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  • [–] [S] 22 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Try Kvaesitso its free and open source: https://github.com/MM2-0/Kvaesitso

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Does not have widgets/has some limited plugins. Can't have apps pinned on screen. Looks nifty but it's unusable for me :(

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 1 year ago

    Well, you can add some apps and widgets on home screen. 1.For Apps: Settings > Home screen > Dock. After that add the apps you want on home screen to Favorites. 2. For Widgets: Settings > Home screen > Enable Show Widgets on Home screen. After doing that Swipe up that will show widgets. Go to end to edit widgets and add whatever widget you like.

    Other than that yeah it is different , it is supposed to be different. Like, how Niagara launcher is different. If you want something more like nova launcher then I'd suggest Lawnchair.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Regarding pinning apps, you can add apps to Favorites by holding the app icon and tapping the ★ icon. On the homescreen, the pinned favorites can be shown and either sorted automatically by usage, or sorted manually to lock them in place on the screen. You can also do a mix of auto/manually sorted, so that the apps at the top are static while those below are dynamically changing.

    Another option is adding one or multiple tags to each app (hold the icon, tap the three dots, then Customize). After setting some tags, you can then tap the pen icon in the bottom right corner of the Favorites view, tap the first + to add a new tag to favorites. You can then switch between "folders"/"collections" of the pinned tags inside the favorites view.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    The other Tesla Coil app I used was Widget Locker. Back in the days before Android had flashlight controls on the system tray, I had a lock screen shortcut for the flashlight.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Yes, Widget Locker! I used that too. Now there's KWGT (I think that's how it's spelled) and also KLWP and KLCK. Kustom is the brand and their apps make widgets, live wallpapers, and lock screens, respectively. But Widget Locker came first IIRC.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    Neo Launcher.

    It's great. The only downside is not having a release schedule. It had one or two annoying bugs in the past but nothing serious.

    I didn't read anything about nova for the past years, I even forgot that it was a thing.

    Edit: there has been no fdroid or github release since 2022. There are still commits in the repo but I don't know if the published version on telegram is the one from github. Does this make it closed source now?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

    Do you like your iPhone?

    I just came to iOS from a Razer Phone 2 (S9 generation), but I used jailbroken iPhones forever, until the 6 or so.

    ... And I don't like it. All the gestures, everything is unintuitive, and I can't change hardly anything! My old jailbroken 5 was more feature rich, yet somehow simple and snappy too. Every app nickels and dimes you, and I feel like I'm struggling to restrict thier access to things.

    I made the mistake of getting it for older family thinking it'd be easier, and they can hardly even function.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Well, I have the best one. I have the 16 Pro Max, 512GB. I like the big screen, and I like a lot of things about it. And how well it works with my watch, my AirPods, and my Macs — for example, being able to copy something on one and paste it on the other. "The Ecosystem" isn't as great as some say, but it does have its advantages.

    Some apps cost money. I refuse to do subscriptions. I'll pay for an app if I like it but I won't pay monthly unless it's a service (like say Apple Music). There are free apps on both platforms. There are paid/subscription apps on both platforms. Both platforms take 30% so they're both incentivised to promote subscriptions and paid apps over free ones. The free ones still exist. Only on Android, you also have F-Droid which is all free/open source apps.

    Nothing is more powerful than an iPhone in all conditions. Okay so the Galaxy S25 is faster right now, but when it gets hot, its thermal protections reduce power by like 50-60% to cool it faster. iPhone only loses 20-30%, so under no load, the S25 is gonna be faster, and the iPhone is gonna be faster under load. Talking about playing the top games. So most of the time you're under no load. Also, on paper nothing has faster storage than an iPhone because iPhones use more expensive NVMe SSDs. Your top Android phones use UFS 4.0, or even 3.x, which is slower... on paper. The benchmarks speak for themselves. But power on an iPhone 16 Pro and a Galaxy S25 Ultra and open and close apps, you're not going to see a big enough difference to say "I'm selling the phone in my left hand to buy the phone in my right," whichever way you wanna go. Android has more RAM. Android has better AI. iPhone has never had a good keyboard — Gboard sucks on iOS but it's amazing on Android. Android has Firefox with uBlock Origin. iPhone has better video cameras. Still cameras? iPhone over-sharpens, Samsung over-softens, and Pixel uses AI hallucinations to fill in what it can't see. They can all show you lab-created conditions where their phone comes out on top. MKBHD has shown people time and time again that in blind image contests, most of his viewers/subscribers prefer pictures taken by cheap Android phones, not flagships from anyone.

    So the truth is, there really is no best smartphone platform. For a Mac guy, iPhones have a slight advantage, but their disadvantages are notable, too. And honestly I'd love to have a better Android phone than my 2019 Galaxy S10, but the fact that I like my S10 better than my 16PM for a few things speaks volumes.

    I think what I'm gonna do is, in a few years, buy a Galaxy phone that's a couple generations out that is better than my S10 (it should be — by a lot) and then after a few more years, replace the iPhone... probably with a base model, because honestly I don't play top end games and even the top iPhone can't get something as basic as typing.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Nothing is more powerful than an iPhone in all conditions

    I guess my use case is just totally different.

    I have zero interest in phone gaming, as (even if the App Store wasn't so MTX-ridden) I'd rather do that on PC and just read stuff when on the go. I need performance for two things: web apps (which Android inexplicably seems to win on) and, theoretically local LLM assistants, and iPhones just dont have enough RAM to make the latter worth it.

    As for disk speed, my use case is transferring media on/off. But there's no MicroSD! And even USB transfers are bizzare on Apple.

    ...So all their performance is totally useless to me, I guess.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    That's my point, for most people the performance gains of one 2024 or 2025 flagship over another don't mean much.

    I can transfer stuff over WiFi to my iPhone in seconds. Like 2-3GB movies, 100MB-1GB video clips, etc. Seconds.

    microSD sucks and I think anyone familiar with the tech knows it. The issue is speed. microSD is fine for like 16GB, maybe 32GB. Once you get bigger, you wanna put bigger files up there, more files, but they move. so. slow. It's painful to watch. Then you get a bigger one and it's such a headache to transfer stuff between them. I think a couple companies tried to make faster microSD cards/readers but they never took off. So I talked about NVMe and UFS. Slower than UFS, on garbage Android phones that aren't good enough for UFS, is EMMC, and EMMC is faster than microSD. microSD is good for Jack and shit, and Jack left town. Apple may have blessed the industry by never including it. It's trash and Jobs knew it, and he didn't put trash in his products. Lots of people know microSD is trash and that, not Apple, is why most Android phones don't include them now either. One, because yeah, they wanna sell you the faster internal storage and/or cloud storage. But two, because it's just so slow.

    But yeah, I'd say get a big-ish phone (storage wise, like 256GB or more) and keep stuff on the internal UFS or NVMe. Optionally get a Samsung T7 or T9 portable SSD, 2TB for around $100, on Black Friday (I mean, that's about what I paid for my T7, like $110 tops) and keep stuff on that. Yes, iPhones can read/write from/to flash drives and portable drives. Same as Android, you open the file manager, browse to the drive, copy stuff over. Apple's built in Files does it. On Android I'm old school, I'd only mess with either Solid Explorer (my personal choice) or FX File Explorer (2nd choice). I know Android has a file manager now (Samsung had one longer) but I trust those.

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