The Iconic Update

Making icon-theming hassle-free

🎤 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 a few weeks. Update: The iconic is out of beta, we rolled it out to everyone on Google Play.

It’s summer, it’s really warm outside, and it’s finally time for another feature update of your favorite launcher!

As you might have guessed by the title, this update is about icons and icon packs. If you’ve never heard of icon packs before, here’s an example of how these apps can transform your home screen:

Icon Packs are apps you can install that provide redesigned icons of various apps, which a launcher can then display instead of the app’s original icon. This allows you to customize the appearance of your home screen drastically and make it look fancy.

1. By Cliko ‧ Pixbit Icon Pack ‧ Original Reddit post
2. By Simon ‧ Crayon Icon Pack ‧ Original Discord post
3. By El Tigre ‧ Aline Green Icon Pack ‧ Original Telegram post

For more examples of customization using icon packs, you can take a look at our community groups on Discord, Telegram, or Reddit.

Icon Packs Are Like Swiss Cheese

Even the best icon packs, such as Linebit, can’t support every icon

Shout-out to all the icon pack developers who make awesome setups like the previous three possible by redesigning thousands of icons one by one. According to Forbes, more than 8 million apps are available worldwide right now—even the most dedicated designers can’t cover all those apps, especially when it comes to niche or brand-new apps.

Of course, you still want to have a consistent-looking home screen. A workaround that many launchers (including ours) provide is the option to replace an app’s icon with an icon from another app. E.g., if your new favorite mail app has no redesigned icon, you could manually replace it with your icon pack’s version of the Gmail icon.

But choosing replacements like this is very time-consuming, and you’ll have to re-do it for every icon pack. This makes maintaining such beautiful setups as the ones shown above tedious. To address this issue, we’re introducing a set of new and helpful icon-related features into Niagara Launcher.

Filling the Holes With Niagara Pro’s Icon Assistant

The primary feature of this update is the brand new Icon Assistant. It consists of three main functions:

1. Quick-Edit

With the Quick-Edit feature, Icon Assistant presents you suggestions for alternative icons right on the freshly redesigned icon selection screen. (more on that later). These suggestions consist of icons from similar apps or alternative icons for that app if your icon pack supports this.

2. Auto-Replace (Coming Soon)

Icon Assistant learns from you. If you found a better replacement than it did, your choice will be considered when recommending icons to other users in a privacy-preserving manner.

Our goal is to make Icon Assistant become so smart that you don’t even need to choose from suggestions; Icon Assistant will automatically determine the best and select it for you. We’ll let you know once auto-replace is ready to theme your home screen automatically. If you want, however, you can already get a sneak peek at how it will work with the help of a little secret command, more on that here.

3. Auto-Restore

After perfecting your setup and keeping it for a while, you might want to experiment with a different look. But it would be a shame if all of your manually chosen icons were lost, wouldn’t it?

But no worries, with the Auto-Restore functionality, Icon Assistant remembers your chosen icons whenever you switch to a different icon pack. When you return to a previous icon pack, Icon Assistant will restore all your manually selected icons for that pack.

More Iconic Features

Outside of Icon Assistant, we’ve also added another feature to make manually choosing replacement icons for multiple apps faster and easier. All of these features are also available for users of our free version.

Edit Icons Individually

Niagara Launcher Settings > Look > Icon Pack > Edit icons individually

Here you can see all apps not covered by your current icon pack, allowing you to quickly replace them without wasting time long-pressing and navigating through dialogs.

Revamped Icon Selection Screen

The redesigned icon selection screen now groups icons according to categories provided by your icon pack. In combination with the instant search and faster loading times, selecting replacement icons is quicker than ever before.

Dynamic Icons

We’ve rewritten our icon system so that all app icons, including individually applied icons, can react to changes (e.g., change their color if the wallpaper changes if the icon pack supports it). This also ensures app icons are always rendered sharply no matter how large you resize them.

More Tweaks

As usual, we’ve got some tweaks and fixes next to our new features.

• 🎨 Full Material You: The devil is in the details. We reviewed every screen of Niagara Launcher and tinted every element according to your wallpaper’s color palette. Look, for example, at the new Niagara Pro screen or our credits section. We also improved the algorithm to generate our color
• 📁 Directly add apps to folders: Long-press an app and tap Add to category to quickly add it to pop-up folders and other categories.
• 🔍 Search: The keyboard automatically closes when you scroll through the results, and we also added a button to conveniently open it again.
• 🔽 Swipe down for notifications: The gesture is now easier to trigger; you no longer need to swipe fast. You can also swipe down with two fingers to access Android’s quick settings.
• ❓ Secret commands: You can now run secret commands via links, e.g., https://niagaralauncher.app/app-link/secret-command?cmd=toggle-ia-auto-replace. You can replace toggle-ia-auto-replace with the secret command of your choice.
• 🎶 Media widget: We prevent swiped-away media players from showing up again in the launcher
• 🎬 Animations: The home screen reveal animation now plays a tad faster. We also gave the app list more bounciness and subtly scaled up dialogs while animating.
• 🔶Icon Packs: We now support icon packs having multiple fallback icons (aka icon masks) and adaptive icon shapes.
• 🐛 Sesame bugfix: Some Sesame shortcuts did occasionally not open on tap.
• 🐛 Notifications bugfix: We fixed a bug that caused the launcher to crash when closing a pop-up with notifications.

We hope that you’ll enjoy the new update! If you’ve got some feedback, you can share it with us in our Subreddit, Discord Server, or Telegram discussion group. For reporting bugs, please use our issue tracker on GitHub.

While Peter is already done with his exams for this semester, Max and I still have some exhausting weeks ahead of us. We’re eagerly awaiting our semester break so that we can join in on working on the next update with full force.

Have a wonderful summer, and see you in our community chats. 👋

— timm0e