Nova Launcher, the savior of junk-filled Android phones, is on life support

In July 2022, when Branch, a mobile app measurement company, acquired the popular and well-regarded Nova Launcher for Android, the app’s website published one of those self-directed FAQ posts about it. Under the question titled “What does Branch want with Nova?”, Nova founder and creator Kevin Barry began his answer with “Don’t worry, don’t worry!”

Branch (formerly/sometimes Branch Metrics) is a company that helps businesses track links to their apps, whether they come from SMS, email, marketing, or other apps. Nova, with its Sesame Search tool that helps users find and navigate to deeper links (e.g., jumping straight to hailing a car instead of just opening a rideshare app), seemed like a reasonable solution.

Barry wrote that he had received numerous acquisition offers over the years, but he didn’t want to be swallowed up by a giant corporation, an OEM, or a volatile startup. “Branch is different,” he wrote then, because they wanted to add staff to Nova, keep it available to the public, and leave it largely alone.

Two years later, Branch has left Nova Launcher a little too alone. As Nova’s official X (formerly Twitter) account and Discord transcripts show, by Thursday, Nova had “gone from a team of about a dozen people” to Barry, the founder, working alone. The Nova layoffs were part of a “massive layoff” of more than 100 people across Branch, according to former Nova employees.

Barry wrote that he would continue working on Nova, “but I have fewer resources.” He would have to “narrow the scope” of a future Nova release, he wrote. Other employees noted that customer support, marketing, and even correspondence would likely be strained or disappear.

Ars has reached out to Branch for comment and will update this post with a response.

Custom and Clean Android Home Screens

It’s hard to say whether Nova would have been better off without ever being in Branch, or whether it might have inevitably run into the thorny issue of how to keep people paying for an Android utility. But for Nova to be in jeopardy, or at least severely limited, is a sad state of affairs for a very useful tool.

Installing a launcher on Android allows you to skip your phone’s home screen, app tray, and search bars and design your own. Nova Launcher allowed users to change the number of icons displayed on their screen and their size. It allowed you to hide default apps that couldn’t be uninstalled. It was, and still is, one of the best ways to save your phone from bad skins, shoddy OEM software, and things you never asked for.

In more than a dozen Ars reviews of Android devices touting organizational concepts people might not like, including Google’s Pixels, Nova Launcher has come in highly recommended (minus one odd Razer/Nextbit phone that included it by default). In his Pixel 7 Pro review, Ron Amadeo describes one way Nova saved the day:

The worst part of the Pixel software is the home screen launcher, the phone’s main interface, which isn’t configurable enough. All I’m asking for is two things. First, I’d love more icon grid size adjustments — the default 4×4 grid was fine when we were using 3.2-inch, 480p displays, but I’m now using a 7×5 grid in the Nova launcher, and the Pixel launcher looks ridiculous. Second, I want to remove Google’s useless “At a Glance” widget, which takes up an incredible four icon slots to display the date and current outside temperature.

For over a decade of using (and sometimes benchmarking) Android phones, I kept an exported Nova config file that I transferred from phone to phone. I could experiment with themes, icon packs, and custom widgets (with deep links to app actions), but what that export really did was make me feel comfortable tinkering and playing with layout ideas. I could always go back to my rock-solid, no-frills app layout, spaced just the way I liked it.

While Nova isn’t dead (despite my and others’ praise), it’s certainly not in a position to launch bold new features or chart new futures. Let’s hope Barry can give Nova Launcher a try for as long as he can.