Bummer news for Nova Launcher fans

[Hadron]

Hmm, sounds worrying. I do back up my layouts occasionally, and haven't had this happen to me, but it's something I'll watch for.

A couple of years back I had a really strange one where trying out some fashionable new launcher (can't remember which) it messed something up so that my Nova setup didn't work properly afterwards (small things rather than totally broken, but enough to be an irritant). App sandboxing should mean that one app can't mess up another's configuration, so perhaps they actually managed to mess up some system thing that affected both, but that would also be weird. Wish I could remember the details. But unless you've been playing with different launchers this won't be relevant (and I think I was very unlucky with this anyway).

 

[PitCarver]

I haven't tried another launcher in a long time now, Hadron.
I've never found it necessary after Nova.

 

[Hadron]

Sadly it's now being reported that not only has the team been laid-off but Kevin has left, and also been instructed to stop working on open-sourcing Nova (it was apparently part of the original purchase deal that it would be open-sourced if he left, but it sounds like that agreement was worthless in practice).

So right now it's working fine, and I have no immediate plans to switch. But presumably it's only a matter of time until some Android update will break features and eventually the whole app. Of course that may be many years from now: I have apps that haven't been updated for 10-15 years that still work, but they are much simpler and will have many fewer dependencies than Nova, so I'm not expecting it will last that long.