Niagara’s New Years Update
Hey, Happy New Year 🎉First, let’s talk about what’s new:
Full adaptive icon support
Free/Requires Android 8+
Consistency across app icons. All app icons are now guaranteed to share the same shape (non-adaptive icon packs are not affected by this). You can choose between the following shapes: rounded square, circle, and squircle (a mixture between square and circle). We also added a soft shadow below each adaptive icon to improve its contrast against your wallpaper.
Niagara Dots
for Niagara Pro
Niagara Dots is an exclusive, inbuilt, and minimal icon pack that supports every app. Especially for those who don’t want to get distracted by flashy app icons.
To apply it, open Niagara settings > Look > Icon Pack > Niagara Dots.
Usage Stats of 2020
Find out how often you launched apps in 2020 and what were your most-used apps and be surprised like I was. You can find your usage stats in Niagara’s settings > Usage Stats of 2020 but only in January 2021 and only if you used Niagara Launcher for quite some time. In case that’s not the case, you can also open usage stats with the help of the secret command /2020.
Download Links
The update is available right away. Because it’s brand-new, it can be unstable. That’s why you don’t get the update immediately through Google Play but have to download it for yourself. You can download it on our new Discord Server, via Telegram, or GitHub, but you can also wait for ~ one week, and you’ll automatically receive a stable build through Google Play. Download links:
- Discord: https://niagaralauncher.app/discord
- Telegram: https://t.me/niagara_news
- GitHub: https://github.com/8bitPit/Niagara-Issues/releases
Past & Future Development
Well, I’m sure no one in 2019 imagined how 2020 would turn out. 2020 was overshadowed by disaster, but for a moment, I want to focus on the good parts and end this article on a positive note.
First of all, I want to give special thanks (in no particular order) to many incredible people: Thanks…
- … Mug, for setting up our new Discord Server!
- … Ilya, for all the questions you answered on our discussion group
- … Malcolm for your customer support via Mail, Telegram, Reddit & GitHub
- … Ken for so sharing so many fancy home screen setups
- … Tim for building the Niagara Knowledge Bots for Telegram and Discord
- … Max for coding Niagara Launcher with me :)
- … Sangam, Sen & Piet, for all your internal testing and feedback
- … to you for being with us!
Next, Niagara Launcher v1.0: After more than four years of development, two years of Early Access testing, and some delays, I’m so excited for Niagara Launcher’s release this year. To indicate we’re almost there, we named the newest build v0.90.
By the way, the reasons why Niagara Launcher was in beta for so long were not bugs. In 2018 we could squash tons of them and improved Niagara Launcher’s stability tremendously. No, it’s not that; it’s because Niagara Launcher was pretty bare-bones at the beginning and lacked polish. While we worked on the former in 2019 (e.g., by adding shortcut and widget support), in 2020, it was time to take care of the latter. If you’re curious, what else we added in 2020, here are links to our favorite additions: Integrated calendar, Custom font support, Swipe actions, Auto Backup, Our knowledge base with >50 articles, Sesame shortcuts, Tap-2-lock gesture, and a Redesigned interface.
Happy New Year, and thanks again,
🔹 Peter
