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Bummer news for Nova Launcher fans

Buddy The Elf No GIF
 
Lots of things happen behind the scene. Some other company might be paying them to get rid of it

Remember when Netscape was the #1 browser everyone was using? Then AOL bought them out of the blue to get rid of it. I wonder who was behind that to get their browser more attention?
 
KISS seems to be the ultimate launcher.

i loathe looking at/using stock launchers, or any that use a screen full of icons

my ollady bitched up a storm a few years back when i put KISS on her phone, and the other day her phone crashed and the stock launcher was activated.

i was amused that she hated it and wanted KISS back by all means

it is so different at first that it seems impossible, but using it for a day or two makes a believer out of many if not most
 
I refuse any other launcher, but action and smart launcher has basically the same edit the app's name as well, as plenty of functioning though, but they are like the rest "pay us money to keep us around."
 
Didn't something similar happen to Cyanogen Mod?

Kevin is a great dude. Hung out with him several times at Google IO. This has got to be heartbreaking. Maybe they'll let him buy Nova back for $1 like Dave Portnoy did with Barstool ha.

Hope this ends on a good note but doesn't look promising...
 
As I recall the story of CM was a little different in that the original lead developer set up a company to commercialise it (with VC funding), rather than accepting an offer from an existing company. And their business was selling to manufacturers rather than the public.

The problem with apps as a business is that a "single purchase for life" model leaves you with no income stream unless you can keep recruiting new customers. And what people are prepared to pay for apps is generally pretty low: I was struck when I started up with Android that the prices for comparable apps were a fraction of what they'd been for Palm software 10 years earlier, which was itself much cheaper than PC software had been 10 years before that. And was then struck again by how many people thought that paying for software at all was unreasonable! So yeah, if you have the resources to develop it you can occasionally release a "major" update and charge for that, which will provide another burst of income from those who take it. Otherwise it's ads (which nobody likes) or subscriptions (which is hard to sell when so many people won't even make a small one-off purchase). It strikes me as a tricky business to make a living from, so I can understand people who sell their apps to a bigger publisher.

Over in iOS land app prices seem a little higher, and there are more subscription apps from my observation, but even there I think really only certain brands can pull off a subscription model. And I know my own threshold for taking a subscription is much higher than for a one-off app purchase (I have one subscription app on Android, which is the Ordnance Survey app, i.e. walking maps from Britain's national mapping service, which I use quite a lot). Though if I was given a choice of "subscribe to Nova or use Samsung's One UI Home" then Kevin could name his own price. ;)
 
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