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

Back in July 2022, when mobile app metrics firm Branch acquired the popular and well-regarded Nova Launcher for Android, the app’s site put up one of those self-directed FAQ posts about it. Under the question heading “What does Branch want with Nova?,” Nova founder and creator Kevin Barry started his response with, “Not to mess it up, don’t worry!”

Branch (formerly/sometimes Branch Metrics) is a firm concerned with helping businesses track the links that lead into their apps, whether from SMS, email, marketing, or inside other apps. Nova, with its Sesame Search tool that helped users find and access deeper links—like heading straight to calling a car, rather than just opening a rideshare app—seemed like a reasonable fit.

Barry wrote that he had received a number of acquisition offers over the years, but he didn’t want to be swallowed 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 mostly leave it alone.

Two years later, Branch has left Nova Launcher a bit too alone. As documented on Nova’s official X (formerly Twitter) account, and transcripts from its Discord, as of Thursday Nova had “gone from a team of around a dozen people” to just Barry, the founder, working alone. The Nova cuts were part of “a massive layoff” of purportedly more than 100 people across all of Branch, according to now-former Nova workers.

Barry wrote that he would keep working on Nova, “However I have less resources.” He would need to “cut scope” on an upcoming 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 response.

Custom, clean Android home screens

It’s hard to tell if Nova would have been better off without ever having been inside Branch, or if it might have inevitably run into the vexing question of how to get people to continually pay for an Android utility. But for Nova to be endangered, or at least heavily constrained, is a sad state for a very useful tool.

Installing a launcher on Android allows you to ignore whatever home screen, app tray, and search bars your phone came with and design your own. Nova Launcher allowed people to change how many icons showed up on their screen, and how big. It allowed for hiding default apps that could not be uninstalled. It was, and still is, one of the best ways to save your phone of bad skins, cruddy OEM software, and stuff for which you never asked.

In more than a dozen Ars reviews of Android devices touting organization concepts that people might not like—including Google’s own Pixels—Nova Launcher was recommended (minus one weird Razer/Nextbit phone that came with it by default). In his Pixel 7 Pro review, Ron Amadeo spells out one such way Nova saved the day:

The worst part of the Pixel software package is the home screen launcher, the primary interface of the phone, which is not nearly configurable enough. All I’m asking for is two things. First, I’d like many more icon grid size adjustments—the default 4×4 grid was fine when we were using 3.2-inch, 480p displays, but I now run a 7×5 grid in 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 show the date and current outdoor temperature.

For the more than a decade that I used (and sometimes reviewed) Android phones, I maintained an exported Nova configuration file that I brought from phone to phone. I could experiment with theming, icon packs, and custom widgets (complete with deep links into app actions), but what that export really did was allow me to feel comfortable tinkering and messing with layout ideas. I could always go back to my rock-solid, no-nonsense layout of apps, spaced just how I liked them.

While Nova is not dead (despite mine and others’ eulogistic tones), it’s certainly not positioned to launch bold new features or plot new futures. Here’s hoping Barry can make a go of Nova Launcher for as long as it’s viable for him.