Spring-Clean Your Home Screen

🎤 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 it hits the Play Store in about two weeks.

We at Niagara Launcher have been starting off our year by spending some time on details of the launcher and focussing on what you could call spring-cleaning: We dusted off some existing features and polished them further to improve the launcher experience. This means that instead of focusing on one specific topic, this update consists of multiple tweaks and features throughout the app.

But now, what did we change then? Well, let’s take a look together, shall we?

Spring-cleaning your phone with Niagara Launcher

In line with our spring-cleaning theme for this update, some of the new features can be useful for spring-cleaning your phone. We’ve prepared three small tips for you to guide you through the process:

1.First, getting rid of some of your rarely used favorites can greatly clean up your home screen.

When entering the edit screen, Niagara Launcher now informs you about favorites you rarely use, which can be a starting point for your decluttering. Moreover, can now quickly sort your apps by usage.

2. Next up, we recommend reviewing your app list and removing distracting “time wasters” or apps you don’t use at all. Up to 70% (!) of apps are only used the day they are installed [Source], so getting rid of these is another important step on your cleanup journey.

Niagara Launcher now features a new dialog that lists your most recently installed apps. This is very useful if you haven’t yet remembered the name of that one cool new app that you just installed two days ago, but it can also help you with discovering apps that you no longer require.

Also, you might want to check Niagara Launcher’s hidden app list (see Niagara Settings > Features > Hidden apps). Maybe there are some apps on there that you don’t need anymore. Uninstalling them is quick and easy: Just tap on the trash can button.

3. Lastly, your home screen is not the only place worth cleaning: Getting rid of unnecessary interruptions from unimportant notifications frees up your mind and notification area.

Using Android’s Digital Wellbeing Features, you can identify the apps that send you the most notifications. (The availability of this feature and its UI vary between different Android Skins)

However, completely disabling all notifications of an app you’re generally interested in might not always be the best idea: Without notifications from the app, you’d need to open it regularly to stay on top of what’s happening.

Niagara Launcher’s notification summary can help you reduce interruptions without missing out on updates. For a guide on setting up your notification summary and guidelines for deciding if you should summarize or disable specific notifications, take a look at our corresponding knowledge-base article.

Later this year, we will introduce further digital wellbeing features in Niagara Launcher, so definitely stay tuned!

More Haptic feedback

While scrolling through your decluttered app list, you might have already seen — or should I say felt — our maybe most striking change of this update:

Lately, we have been experimenting with newer Android APIs and the improved vibration capabilities of recent Android devices. In the past, vibration effects have just been too rough to indicate minor details, and we’ve mostly stayed away from them because of that. However, newer technology opened up much finer vibration motor control to apps. This finally allowed us to introduce more haptic feedback in a way that fits our design.

With these new tools in our toolbox, we’ve revamped the most iconic part of Niagara Launcher: The alphabet scrollbar.

The circle now snaps to each letter more prominently, which you can now feel for the first time. Many people have asked for this in the past, and with the advanced vibration effects, we finally found a fitting way to implement it. We’ve also added more haptic feedback to various other places throughout the app and hope that this new feature brings you even more joy while scrolling through your app list.

If your device’s vibration motor ruins the experience for you, or you’re just not- a fan of vibration effects, you can disable haptic feedback in our launcher’s settings.

📝 Not all devices support light vibrations. If your device does not support them, some haptic effects will not be available. If you do not notice light vibrations while scrolling through Niagara’s alphabet, you either disabled vibration on your phone or your phone does not support light vibrations. We prepared a guide for enabling alphabet haptics to check that.

Bug fixes and other changes

While these were some of the more significant changes of the update, there are, especially in this update, many more small changes and also some bug fixes:

• Smart Font Rescaling: Custom fonts are now getting automatically scaled up or down. Therefore, you can now use many of the fonts that previously resulted in uncomfortable sizing.
• A12 Splash Screens: On Android 12+, apps show a splash screen with their icon when loading.
• New Bootup Animation: Starting up Niagara Launcher looks a lot cleaner now!
• Widget Freezing Bugfix: We could finally fix the complex widget freezing bug that plagued the launcher for years. It’s not reproducible with every widget and only happens rarely. When it happened, it froze your widgets.
• Xiaomi Dark Mode Bugfix: We prevent MIUI from tampering with Niagara Launcher’s dark mode color palette.
• Auto-Refreshing Material You Icon Packs: Niagara Launcher can now automatically update icon packs when the wallpaper color palette changes. The only icon pack known to us that depends on these colors is Pix Material You Icons, but if you’re an icon pack developer and have some kind of dynamic icon pack, please let us know.
• Changelog Dialog: We now offer a quick summary of past updates. You can access the changelog from Niagara’s advanced settings.
• Toggle for Notification Summary: Disabling Niagara Launcher’s notification summary is now straightforward. You don’t need to deselect all apps first.
• A12 Media Apps Bugfix: We added a new explanation for the music apps feature to the home screen and now request the ‘nearby permission’ on Android 12+ to detect Bluetooth headphones and speakers.
• More Calendar Events Supported: We fixed some calendar events not being shown in the launcher. This especially happened with privately shared events or events with a blank title.
• Improved Back Gesture Behavior: When multiple dialogs are open, the back button now behaves as you would expect, and brings you back to the previous dialog.
• Niagara Button Position Bugfix: When using a language with a right-to-left script, such as Arabic or Hebrew, the Niagara Button was occasionally placed on the wrong side after rotating the device. We fixed this, so now the button is always on the correct side.
• Dismissable Media Widget: You can now always dismiss the media widget. If you watch closely while dismissing the player or a notification, you’ll also notice that we tweaked the dismiss animation.
• New wallpaper: You can find our latest wallpaper themed around spring in our wallpaper collection in Niagara’s look settings.

Thanks for sticking with us and happy spring cleaning 👋