But of course buddahriffic! Let’s see how I can explain it, it is quite a different approach to other more classical launchers. There’s no option to put icons on the launcher, there’s no paging or anything. In fact when I found it out it couldn’t even have widgets. But the Dev has been hard at work it seems and has been making really nice changes. Now it allows to use widgets, so at least you got that going. But otherwise the screen remains rather empty and clean.

Then the usage goes with gestures, but I’ve found it is less about gestures and just about straight lines of movement with your finger and how long. So when you start it it has nearly nothing set up to be used, you need to make a long click (I think it is like 3 seconds long and you see some UI feedback) to bring up the settings. In the settings you can see one of those screens with multiple rings in the screenshots on FDroid. On those rings you can manually and one by one add icons for apps or actions (and in the last version even more rings nested). You can set as many as you want, in as many rings as you feel like (maybe there’s some limits I don’t know). The customization options are quite nice, including distance to move the finger for each ring and area of no effect (if you want to cancel the action, I keep moving my finger in the screen quickly, browse the options in the rings and cancel it in the center where I started the gesture, it’s kinda satisfying, like a fidget thingy).

So in the home page, you can’t see the rings (maybe there’s an option for that) and wherever you press will set the center of the rings and then with the same gesture always you can reach the same action/app. The result is quite clean and easy interactions, once you learn your own setup. The apps I use less are a bit harder to find if I forget where I put them, but in those cases you can open a list of all apps just like any launcher. And at the beginning I was struggling to get used to it, but now I find it very convenient and fast for my most used apps. Getting the right place for the icons in the rings is also a bit of a learning process of where you want things.

Well, I hope I made it clearer and not more confusing :) maybe with the description and the screenshots in the app store you can get a pretty good idea of how it goes.

Without knowing their stack it sounds like a really simple fix, just storw which is the main screen.

Soooo… if it’s simple… contribute then?

I’ve learned an app’s stack for far more mundane things. If you want others to build something you want, it helps to build things other’s want. Sounds like there would be a lot of interest if you took this on.

I’ve switched, but this really is my one major gripe. Good to see others see it as a priority too, but if it’s been a conversation for 4 years then I’m not optimistic

They recently started on wraparound homescreens (still a little buggy), so that might indicate they could soon add it. Still waiting on a way to remive widget paddings. In general lawnchair has so much more padding than nova, and not enough customizability to remove it.

and have to go through many useless screens to get to the one you want.

Two things.

Clean your shit up and prioritize. Everything I could ever dream of is on one screen.

Second, it’s foss. Contribute.

HHHGHHHGGHHGHHHHMMMMM.

HgMPH.

(Cow noises for you city folk)

It has basic app folders; I just meant some of the controls that you can do in Nova like setting folders to specific tabs, showing apps in folders in main draw, etc.

(I’m on Obtainium Lawnchair Nightly 1/22/26)

I haven’t used the pixel launcher in ages, but last time I did, you could not remove the “search bar”. That alone justifies a different launcher to me.

So what does it actually do?

It replaces the launcher (“desktop”) of your phone with something else. Maybe something faster, or using less resources, or something you can customize to your taste.

I switched to Lawnchair when Google starting messing with the search bar. They added features right where my thumb would press to use the search bar, so I was constantly opening an AI search that I did not want. Lawnchair let me stick with a launcher I liked and was used to, but gave me the customizability to get rid of bullshit like that.

And I generally don’t like change, and I certainly don’t want to have to do any work to facilitate a change that I don’t like in the first place, but Lawnchair was incredibly easy to set up and go. Runs basically like an app, you change your default launcher to Lawnchair (and I assume this step is similar for any launcher you’d use), and bam, runs on top of everything and that’s that. Simplicity is key for a simple guy like me.

The main thing for me, it gets google out of the picture. No AI, no google search bar, etc.

It also allows me to manage apps in the app drawer. I can hide any stock apps, and put less commonly uses apps in to folders (I miss tabs on Nova). Instead of scrolling through pages of home screen, I swipe up and can see all my common apps at once, no scrolling. The home screen now has free space for widgets.

By default it does look similar. However it has customization options comparable to Nova, or at least I was able to easily replicate how I’d configured it.