Nova Launcher

Nova Launcher

About this app

Nova Launcher is a powerful, customizable, and versatile home screen replacement. Nova brings advanced features to enhance your home screens, but still remains a great, user-friendly choice for everyone. Whether you want to completely overhaul your home screens or are looking for a cleaner, faster home launcher, Nova is the answer.

✨ The newest features
Nova brings the latest Android launcher features to all other phones.

🖼️ Custom icons
Nova supports thousands of icon themes available in the Play Store. Plus, reshape all icons to a shape of your choice for a uniform and consistent look.

🎨 An extensive color system
Use Material You colors from your system, or choose your own colors for a personalised feel that's unique to you.

🌓 Custom light and dark themes
Sync dark mode with your system, the sunrise and sunset, or keep it on permanently. The choice is yours.

🔍 A powerful search system
Nova allows you to search for content in your apps, your contacts, and other services with integrations for your favorite platforms. Additionally, get instant Micro Results for calculations, unit conversions, package tracking, and more.

📁Customizable home screen, app drawer, and folders
Icon size, label colors, vertical or horizontal scroll and search bar positioning just scratch the surface of customization for your home screen setup. The app drawer also adds innovative customizable cards to give you the information you need, right when you need it.

📏 Subgrid positioning
With the ability to snap icons and widgets in between grid cells, it’s easy to get a precise feel and layout with Nova in a way that’s impossible with most other launchers.

📲 Backup and restore
Moving from phone to phone or trying new home screen setups is a snap thanks to Nova’s backup and restore feature. Backups can be stored locally or saved to the cloud for easy transfers.

❤️ Helpful support
Quickly get in touch with support through a convenient option in the app, or join our active Discord community at https://discord.gg/novalauncher

🎁 Do even more with Nova Launcher Prime
Unlock Nova Launcher’s full potential with Nova Launcher Prime.
• Gestures: Swipe, pinch, double tap, and more on the home screen to execute custom commands.
• App drawer groups: Create custom tabs or folders in the app drawer for an ultra-organized feel.
• Hide apps: Hide apps from the app drawer without uninstalling them.
• Custom icon swipe gestures: Swipe up or down on your home screen icons to become more productive without taking up more home screen space.
• …and more. More scrolling effects, notification badges, and others.

――――――――――

Icons used in screenshots
• OneYou Icon Pack by PashaPuma Design
• OneYou Themed Icon Pack by PashaPuma Design
Icon packs used with permission from the respective creators.

――――――――――

This app uses the AccessibilityService permission for optional support of making certain system functions more accessible, such as with desktop gestures. For example screen off or opening the Recent Apps screen. Nova will automatically prompt you to enable this if it is necessary for your configuration, for many cases it is not! No data is collected from the AccessibilityService, it is merely used to invoke system actions.

This app uses the Device Administrator permission for optional screen off/lock functionality.

This app uses a Notification Listener for optional badges on icons and media playback controls.

Ratings and reviews

Nova launcher is the best I've tried. It is compact and easy to understand. It works so smoothly, it is easy to forget you even have it installed. UPDATE: After eight years this app is becoming undependable: I cannot add pages, the screen indicator (the three little dots) doesn't show onscreen, an entire page of icons disappeared, one time screens switched places.

I really like the launcher and customizability but I hate that it doesn't handle instability well. The app drawer will occasionally fail to render (making tapping anywhere on the screen launch apps, when all you see is a home screen). The bug is not a problem in and of itself, but the fact that the launcher doesn't realize something is wrong and restart itself is an extremely annoying problem.

Extremely buggy for the last few weeks or so on my pixel 8 Pro. Whenever I go and switch from an app and swipe to access my home screen, it blanks everything on my home screen and redraws the icons and widgets. It's like my phone is out of memory, but I checked the settings and it still has plenty of memory available. I'm using Nova for probably close to 10 years, but I may be looking for a new launcher at some point soon.

What's new

Add a toggle to show a single row of app search results (Nova Settings > Search > Limit apps to one row)
Prevent Bixby from taking over Google Assistant/Gemini
Dock placement improvements on large screens
Restore the vertical dock background
Restore the ability to open search from the swipe indicator
Nova Settings visual improvements
Various bug and crash fixes
Update translations