You should pay for your Android launcher
For most of the last decade, on most of the Android devices I’ve owned, I have not used the stock launcher. With a few exceptions, the pattern has been pretty consistent: whichever vendor skin was bolted on top of Android, I’d replace it within the first week.
Reasons varied. From 2015 to 2020, the phones I owned were hand-me-downs, and the way I got a phone was: someone else got fed up with how slow theirs had become, and I inherited the corpse. eMMC degraded into quicksand. The CPU was now considered from the stone age. And every app update demanded more RAM, more storage, more cores than the device could physically produce. There is only so much a tech-inclined person can do before the honest answer is that this thing belongs in a recycling bin, not in your hand.
What you can do, in the meantime, is take back the surface. LG’s Home, Samsung’s TouchWiz, whichever vendor skin had been bolted onto whichever device had been passed down — slow, ad-adjacent, full of cruft, occasionally just broken. So you’d reach for Google Now Launcher, or Microsoft Launcher, and suddenly the phone felt a year newer. The launcher was the one part of the device I could actually control.
And — this was the whole point — the launcher came with you. Next phone, different manufacturer, different Android version, different vendor skin to ignore. Same launcher. Same layout. Same circle icons in the same grid. The phone underneath kept changing; the surface I actually touched did not. One less thing to relearn every time the family hand-me-down chain coughed up a new device.
This also meant I started to have opinions about how my home screen should look and work. Specific grid density, font sizes for labels. Circle icons.
The Motorola exception
In 2020, I got a job and finally had the means to buy my own phones. First phone: a cheap Motorola. Moto App Launcher was based on Google’s Launcher3, which meant it was basically stock Android with the rough edges sanded off. Motorola was also kind enough to leave most of the customization knobs exposed to the user. Good enough. Did not bother me. Was left as the launcher, somehow.
Second phone: an expensive Motorola. Meant to last a few years. Same launcher, still good enough. Still left it alone. What made me change was device security requirements from a multinational company I was working for.
Third Motorola — yeah, no. Third time was not the charm. Notification ads, first of all. Actual ads, in the actual notification tray, on a phone I paid for. And then the launcher itself got a redesign where the customization knobs I cared about were replaced with themes. As in: pre-baked aesthetic bundles. Usually bundled with some Material You functionality. You ask for granular control over icon shapes and grid density, and the answer is “we have themes now.” You ask again, and the answer is “you can build your own theme.” Which, no. That is not the same thing. That is the same answer wearing a different hat.
Nova, and the R$ 6 that kept paying off
“Microsoft Launcher was very decent in 2015, what’s the best one now?” I asked Claude. “Nova Launcher,” was the answer.
Sure enough, it was. I could configure it to look and work exactly how I wanted. It was fast, it was stable, and the only thing it was trying to sell me was the Prime license, which was a one-time purchase that unlocked a few extra features.
There was some single feature behind the paywall I wanted at the time. Not something I needed, but something I wanted. R$ 6 for the lifetime Prime license. I had some Google Play credits, I don’t remember what for, and I thought: sure, why not. It’s a small price to pay for an app I touch every day. It was also a thank-you for the developer who had done everything right to make me forget I was using a third-party launcher in the first place.
Said Prime license came with me from that last Motorola to my current Samsung. Samsung’s One UI was trying too much to be Apple. Nova Launcher fixed said ambitions and made the phone feel like my phone again.
Then Nova got acquired
I found out about this when Reddit posts about Nova demise started popping up. The app was still there, it still worked, but the dev team had been acquired.
By Branch, an analytics company. Which then reportedly sold it to Instabridge, a Swedish telecoms company. Version 8 has been in beta for over a year, but the original developer was forced to stop updates.
This is worse than a launcher dying. A launcher dying is sad. A launcher being acquired and quietly hollowed out is the thing you actually paid R$ 6 to avoid, retroactively.
So I went looking again. Tested a few. Landed on Smart Launcher.
Smart Launcher was similar enough to Nova that I could keep my entire setup essentially intact — same grid logic, same kind of customization knobs, same circle icons. Migration was nearly free. And it had features Nova didn’t, several of which turned out to be genuine improvements I now wonder how I lived without. Win-win. The rare kind.
Smart Launcher Pro: R$ 26. I paid for it the same week. Same logic as before — once I’d been using it long enough to know it was the one, I bought the license. February. Still happy.
My new TV apparently needs a launcher too
I bought a TCL Google TV. A massive deal when bought with credit card points. The kind of impulse purchase that sneaks up on you. Set it up, signed in, things worked.
Everything was great until we wanted YouTube, YouTube Music, Jellyfin, and HDMI1 in the same row. Specifically: HDMI1, where the Nintendo Switch is connected, as a tile. Same grid as the apps. First-class citizen.
Google TV said no.
Google TV also said: here are some streaming services you don’t have a subscription for, would you like to subscribe to them, here are some shows on those services you can’t watch unless you subscribe, here are some more shows, here are some more.
The deeper problem with Google TV is what it thinks a TV is. It thinks a TV is a content-discovery surface — endless rows of “things you might want to watch,” algorithmically arranged, sponsored slots throughout. We do not want that. The household model of a TV is: it’s a tablet with HDMI inputs. The interface should be four tiles. YouTube, YouTube Music, Jellyfin, Switch. That’s it. No carousels. No “continue watching.” No suggestions.
Google TV’s launcher is structurally committed to a model of TV-watching that we do not subscribe to. Pun intended.
I tried Projectivy Launcher. Lifetime Premium: R$ 38. It lets you put HDMI inputs on the home screen as tiles, alongside apps. Four big tiles. No carousels. The thing we wanted, finally available.
For an ad-free TV that thinks the way we think. Sure.
The throughline
Add it up. R$ 6 + R$ 26 + R$ 38 = R$ 70. Roughly eighteen months of paid launcher coverage, less than one bad dinner total, for three pieces of software I touch every single day, on the two devices I use the most. The habit of replacing launchers is older than that — about a decade older — but the habit of paying for them is recent. And it should have been earlier.
Here’s the thing about launchers: it’s the menu. It’s the thing between you and every other app. It’s literally the most-touched app on the device, by definition, because it’s the app you go through to get to the others. And we collectively expect it to be free, and somehow also good, and somehow also not selling our attention to whoever’s paying.
Pick two.
The free, good, ad-supported launcher does not exist. The free, good, not-ad-supported launcher exists for exactly as long as the developer’s patience holds out, which Nova Launcher has now demonstrated empirically. The paid launcher is the only one of the three configurations that is structurally allowed to keep being good.
So pay for your launcher. It’s the gateway. Pay the toll.