Niagara Launcher’s 2021 Retrospective
Hey there 👋
Just as last year, we wanted to recap what happened around Niagara Launcher over the previous 365 days and give some hints about what to expect next year.
But first, let’s start with your little retrospective of 2021:
Usage stats for 2021
Continuing our small tradition from the last years, Niagara Launcher will present you the number of apps you’ve opened through it.
You can also see the top five apps you’ve used, and in addition to last year’s summary, there’s also an estimate on how much time you have spent using these apps. Maybe this will lead to some new year’s resolutions…
📝 On the latest Niagara Launcher version (v1.5) you can access your usage stats in Niagara’s settings > Recap of 2021. It might take up to 48 hours for this option to appear. If you don’t have the option yet, you can alternatively enter the secret command /newyear.
Highlights of 2021
From our side also a lot has happened this year. So here’s a short recap of the highlights of 2021
Leaving Beta
The 2nd of February 2021 marks an important milestone for Niagara Launcher.
If you’ve been an early user of Niagara Launcher, you might still remember the Play Store telling you that the app is still in development and that it might be unstable. Well, this February, we made this a thing of the past.
After more than four years of development and, more importantly, after almost two and a half years of beta testing, the launcher finally contained all the most essential features in a polished state.
This milestone wouldn’t have been possible to reach without the feedback and input from all of you fantastic beta testers.
Thank you very much for helping to make Niagara Launcher what it is today.
If you want to read up on the journey of Niagara Launcher from Peter’s perspective, you can check out the article he wrote accompanying the stable release.
Digital Wellbeing Initiative
You might still remember the Digital Wellbeing Initiative, which was released to the public in July as part of Peter’s bachelor thesis.
A new feature introduced as part of the initiative is the notification summary. It tries to reduce interruptions caused by non-urgent notifications by delivering these in batches instead of them distracting you from whatever you’re currently focussing on.
If you haven’t set it up yet, we’ve also created a handy guide based on the Eisenhower-Matrix to help decide which apps you should include in the summary:
While this feature hopefully helps you a lot, we’ve also introduced something that helped Peter out a lot:
Another part of the initiative have been the surveys and the anonymous usage data that users could choose to share with us. An astonishing number of 20 thousand people have signed up and helped to create a very insightful dataset about phone usage. Peter’s Bachelor thesis made heavy use of this data and wouldn’t have been possible without all the voluntary participants of the initiative.
So big Thank You to all of you! ❤️
While the survey feature is not active anymore, the anonymous usage data is still in place. Improvement of digital wellbeing and minimizing distractions are continuing to be a central part of Niagara Launcher’s goals, and the usage data enables us to make valuable data-driven design decisions for future features related to these goals.
Also, we haven’t forgotten about the promised publication of the survey results. We are working on it — Stay tuned!
Foldable Update
An exciting release of this year were the new folding phones Galaxy Z Fold 3 and Galaxy Z Flip by Samsung, which have brought folding phones closer to the mainstream than ever before.
To improve the Niagara Launcher experience on this new form factor, we’ve introduced a two-column layout for the big inner screen of these devices. (As a side effect, this also improves Niagara Launcher for tablets.)
We’ve also added official support for using the launcher in landscape mode, enabling you to use this two-column layout on your phone.
Material You
Our last update of this year introduced support for the new Material You styling of Android 12. As a small bonus, we’ve also backported this to Android 5–11, so you can also experience the wallpaper-based color theme even if no phone with Android 12 made its way under your Christmas tree.
Thanks to your feedback, we’ve tweaked the theme a bit from our initial version and made the colors more intense than before.
Awards
We’re also proud to have received some honorable mentions this year 🎉
Along with other great apps, we have been titled one of the best apps of 2021 by the well-known AndroidPolice blog.
AndroidAuthority also made us part of their top 15 apps released in 2021
Additionally, the Tom’s Guide Awards 2021 nominated us as the best Android app of 2021
So if you’re looking for more apps to launch using Niagara Launcher, maybe the other awarded apps have something interesting in stock for you.
Our plans for the next year
What a year for Niagara Launcher — but what can you expect from us in the next year?
As mentioned in the last article, the team working on the app has grown a bit. While Peter and Max are still leading development, Tamino has joined them as a working student and is currently finding his way into launcher development. I’m also now part of the team and helping out on an irregular basis with development and posts like the one you’re currently reading.
Moreover, we all have finished our bachelor’s degrees in computer science this year and started our master’s degrees in October. We’re excited to further sharpen our skills as software engineers and hope that our additional education will positively impact our work on Niagara Launcher.
Bringing more people into the team meant that more defined internal workflows and processes had to be introduced, but I think it’s safe to say that it’s all beginning to run smoothly.
We have some ambitious plans for Niagara Launcher in 2022 already, but I can’t tell you all the details yet. However, we’re looking forward to using the results of the Digital Wellbeing Initiative, and we’re excited to make Niagara Launcher with all of its features more accessible to people from all countries all over the globe.
We wish you a great start into 2022,
Stay safe and have a happy New Year’s Eve! 🚀 ✨ 🎆
