Ready for Android 12?
🎤 For reviewers & press: We bundled all media assets for this update here, feel free to use them.
🔽 As always, this update is first published as a beta release, which you can download via the usual channels before hitting the Play Store in about two weeks.
Hey there 👋
For this changelog, we’re doing something different.
As you might have noticed — this post isn’t written by Peter, like all the previous posts. Writing changelogs like this takes quite some time — time which cannot be spent on development, so we thought we should give offloading that task a try.
Now, who’s the author of this post?
It’s me, timm0e.
You might have heard my name already in our Telegram groups. I’m also the developer of the knowledge base bots, which are there to help you in our Telegram and Discord channels. But that’s enough introduction — you didn’t open this post to learn about me, did you? So let’s get to the latest news regarding Niagara Launcher.
A lot has happened since the last update. Peter has turned in his bachelor thesis about Digital Wellbeing (more details about the results coming soon™️), the dev team gained one additional member — welcome Tamino 👋, and Google released their new line of Pixel phones, which ship with Android 12.
The former circumstances allowed us to prepare for the latter, and we’re proud to announce the latest update of Niagara Launcher — this time with a focus on Android 12. (If your phone has not been updated to Android 12 yet — keep on reading, we’ve got a small surprise for you 😉)
Making the Launcher more about you
A major new feature of Android 12 is the new Material You design. It includes a color palette, which gets extracted from your wallpaper, and is then used throughout the whole system UI and most apps.
Since Niagara Launcher resembles a significant part of your phone’s interface, it should, of course, also make use of this palette.
We’re excited to announce that with this update, Niagara will do exactly that. Until now, only components like the alphabet selector, the search bar, or the Niagara Button have been colored according to your wallpaper, but now this also includes the backgrounds found throughout the app:
As seen in the images, the color change is very subtle, yet it helps the UI to harmonize with the style of your wallpaper.
Additionally, while you’re not on your home screen, Niagara Launcher applies a tinted overlay to your wallpaper, which increases the readability of the foreground items.
At the moment, Material You is only available on Google Pixel phones running Android 12. For everyone not owning such a phone, here is your aforementioned small surprise 🎉:
Niagara Launcher’s Material You theming will be available on Android 5.0, 5.1, 6, 7, 8, 8.1, 9, 10, 11, and 12 on any device (you might have to restart Niagara Launcher after updating on older Android versions).
What about the stylized icons?
In their current state, they create a very inconsistent look, since they are only available for Google apps, and the styling of these few apps is already inconsistent.
Therefore, we have chosen not to support the native stylized icons for now. We might reconsider this decision in the future if the icons become more mature.
In the meantime, we recommend resorting to similar-looking 3rd party icon packs, since these don’t come with the aforementioned issues.
Making the Launcher less about you
… or at least about your Location
Other than giving you more options for coloring the UI according to your taste, Android 12 also gives you more options to protect your private data.
One of the many new privacy features is the option to only grant apps access to your approximate location. Since the weather typically doesn’t change that much in a 2-kilometer (that’s ~1.2 miles) radius, Niagara Launcher only requires access to your approximate location for the weather display.
If you’re on an older version of Android, no worries:
Since the launch of Niagara Launcher’s weather feature, we have always been scrambling your location on the server-side as a first step after receiving it, and will continue to do so in the future.
This hides your exact location from the weather provider and makes sure none of our error logs allow us to see it either.
Widgets
Usually, we don’t cut corners at Niagara Launcher — but this time we sadly had to 😞
No need to panic though, we’re of course just talking about the new rounded widgets. In the new Material You design, widgets have rounded corners, and they also will in Niagara Launcher, even on older versions of Android.
Some widgets also allow you to change some settings after being created (e.g., the Telegram Widget). Now you can access these widgets’ settings in the Niagara Widget Settings on Android 9 or above.
Other than that, on Android 12, Widgets now have a Live Preview in the widget selection — so if you were looking for a more complicated way to check the current time — there you go!
More Goodies
- Media widget title scroll: Now you don’t need to open your music player anymore to check whether you’re really listening to the Live Version of “Our Lawyer Made Us Change the Name of This Song So We Wouldn’t Get Sued”, you just need to wait a bit.
- Community settings: We gave the social media icons of the community tab in Niagara Launcher’s settings a new look
We’ve also squashed some bugs
- Icons are now automatically reloaded after an icon pack has been updated: https://github.com/8bitPit/Niagara-Issues/issues/410
- After uninstalling an icon pack, manually selected icons do no longer stick around: https://github.com/8bitPit/Niagara-Issues/issues/1322
- Changed the weather location selection to better explain the “current location” mode: https://github.com/8bitPit/Niagara-Issues/issues/1537
- Custom font no longer have issues with large font files: https://github.com/8bitPit/Niagara-Issues/issues/1695
- The Niagara Button changes to the corresponding color of the wallpaper when folding/unfolding the phone, and there are different wallpapers for the inner and outer screens.
- Fixed a bug that prevented the weather location to update automatically based on your current location
- Fixed a bug where your location couldn’t be determined
That’s it
A lot of work has gone into this update, and we hope you’ll enjoy it.
As always, this update is first published as a beta release, which you can download via the usual channels before hitting the Play Store in about two weeks.
Thanks for sticking with us 👋
