After Nova, I’m not so keen on investing in a non-free launcher.

What are the best free software Android launchers currently?

Hi,

love your launcher @ock88@lemmy.world

Was a long-time Nova launcher user and made me switch with ease. Even though it does not implement all Nova convenience features it’s already so good at this stage that it made the switch worth it. Most stand-out feature for me are stacked widgets that help preserve so much screen space. Using it on two GrapheneOS devices right now. Already sent some support your way.

A few suggestions / observations:

• It’s understandable if you decide to not open-source it, but would be great to have a central issue tracker for bug reporting / feature requests. Would make your support work easier I guess? Could also involve the community to sort and clean up reports.
• One main observation (bug?) that is affecting my experience regularly: Other launchers allow you to open a folder and re-arrange apps by simply dragging and dropping right then and there. Not sure why the launcher insists on going through the dedicated “Arrange items” option to sort apps within a folder.

Feature wishlist:

• Would be great if the launcher would read the show / hide private space flag and show / hide private space accordingly in the app drawer.
• Add newly installed apps to the home screen automatically.
• Might be a very obscure niche thing that does not affect many users: I’m using the PixBit icon set and Nova somehow renders icons that are not available within the icon set with a pixellated custom outline which results in a very cohesive icon experience… even when icons are not available natively. Not sure how they do that, but that’s really impressive.
• Per-folder setting of “swipe up/down” or “open folder” behavior instead of one global setting

Happy if maybe something gets picked up in the future, but already committed to the launcher as-is anyway. Thank you for your work in any case!

FOSS?

I thought this had something to do with the 3D printing software called Octopi… Was really confused.

The biggest thing that stops me from switching to a new launcher is the support for search engines.

Most launchers artificially limit your options for search engines to the top 4-5 options. Mostly Google, bing, DDG, and some foreign language options.

Does Octopi Launcher allow you to add your own custom search option for people who use other engines like Kagi or SearXNG?

Being able to add a custom search engine is genuinely a killer feature for me and should be included in all launchers but is lacking from almost all of the ones I’ve tried.