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You should pay for your Android launcher
Pretty much every Android phone I’ve ever owned has gotten the same first-week surgery: whatever launcher the vendor bolted on top comes off. With a few exceptions (we’ll get to them), the pattern has held for a decade, across manufacturers, across Android versions, across price brackets. Including the price bracket of free, which is where the habit started.
From 2015 to 2020, I didn’t buy phones. Phones arrived. Someone in the family would get fed up with how slow theirs had become, buy a new one, and the old one descended to me. And a phone that descends to you has already lost the war: the eMMC has degraded into quicksand, the CPU is now considered from the stone age, and every app update assumes more RAM, more storage, more cores than the device could physically produce on its best day, which was years ago, in somebody else’s hands. You can debloat, you can disable, you can factory-reset. There is only so much a tech-inclined teenager can do before the honest answer is that the thing belongs in a recycling bin, not in your hand.
But there was one thing I could do. Whatever vendor skin came bolted on top (LG’s Home, Samsung’s TouchWiz, whichever ad-adjacent pile of cruft the previous owner had already given up fighting), I could rip it off. Install Google Now Launcher, or Microsoft Launcher, and the phone felt a year newer. The launcher was the one part of the device I actually controlled.
And the launcher came with me. Next hand-me-down, 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 touched did not. Which means that by the time I could afford my own phones, I had spent half a decade developing extremely specific opinions about grid density, label font sizes, and icon shapes, and exactly zero tolerance for anyone taking those knobs away.
Hold that thought.
Three Motorolas, In Descending Order
In 2020 I got a job, which meant I got to buy a phone for the first time. A cheap Motorola. Its launcher was based on Google’s Launcher3 (basically stock Android with the rough edges sanded off), and Motorola had left most of the customization knobs exposed. Good enough. It stayed, somehow. Five years of reflexively replacing launchers, and the streak ended on the cheapest phone I ever bought new.
Second Motorola: more expensive, meant to last years, same launcher, still fine. What eventually forced a change wasn’t the phone. It was Avanade’s device security requirements. When the corporate security posture is paranoid, your phone either complies or stops being a phone you can work from. Mine didn’t make the cut.
Third Motorola. Yeah, no.
Notification ads, first of all. Actual ads, in the actual notification tray, on a phone I paid for. And then the launcher got a redesign where the knobs I cared about were replaced with themes: pre-baked aesthetic bundles, usually wearing 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.”
That is not the same thing. That is the same answer wearing a different hat.
Six Reais
“Microsoft Launcher was very decent in 2015, what’s the best one now?” I asked Claude. “Nova Launcher,” it said.
Sure enough. Fast, stable, configurable down to the pixel, and the only thing it was trying to sell me was the Prime license, a one-time purchase for a handful of extra features. There was exactly one feature behind that paywall I wanted. Not needed. Wanted. R$ 6, lifetime, and I happened to have Google Play credits sitting around from I-genuinely-don’t-remember-what.
Six reais for the app I touch more than any other. It was less a purchase than a thank-you note to a developer who had done everything right, including the hardest thing, which is making you forget you’re using a third-party launcher at all.
That license outlived the Motorola. It came with me to my current Samsung, where One UI was trying too much to be Apple, and Nova un-tried it. The phone felt like my phone again.
Then Nova Got Acquired
I found out from Reddit, the way you find out about all quiet deaths. The app still worked. The dev team had been acquired, by Branch, an analytics company, which then reportedly sold it to Instabridge, a Swedish telecoms company. Version 8 sat in beta for over a year while 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 exact thing I had paid R$ 6 to avoid, retroactively.
So I went looking again, tested a few, and landed on Smart Launcher. Close enough to Nova that my entire setup survived the move (same grid logic, same knobs, same circle icons), and it had features Nova didn’t, several of which I now wonder how I lived without. Migration was nearly free and the destination was an upgrade. The rare kind of win-win.
Smart Launcher Pro: R$ 26. I paid the same week. Same rule as before. Once I knew it was the one, the developer got paid. February. Still happy.
The TV Is Also A Phone Now
I bought a TCL Google TV, a massive credit card points-powered deal, the kind of impulse purchase that sneaks up on you. Set it up, signed in, things worked.
Then we wanted YouTube, YouTube Music, Jellyfin, and HDMI1 in the same row. Specifically HDMI1, where the Nintendo Switch lives, 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 subscribe to, would you like to subscribe, here are shows on those services you can’t watch unless you subscribe, here are more shows, here are more.
The deeper problem is what Google TV thinks a TV is. It thinks a TV is a content-discovery surface. Endless algorithmic rows with sponsored slots throughout. Our household model of a TV is: it’s a tablet with HDMI inputs. Four tiles. YouTube, YouTube Music, Jellyfin, Switch. No carousels, no “continue watching,” no suggestions. Google TV’s launcher is structurally committed to a model of TV-watching we do not subscribe to.
Pun intended.
Projectivy Launcher. Lifetime Premium, R$ 38. HDMI inputs on the home screen as tiles, alongside apps. Four big tiles, no ads, a TV that thinks the way we think.
Sold. Literally.
Seventy Reais
| Purchase | Price |
|---|---|
| Nova Launcher Prime | R$ 6 |
| Smart Launcher Pro | R$ 26 |
| Projectivy Lifetime Premium | R$ 38 |
| A decade of home screens | R$ 70 |
Seventy reais, total, across ten years, for the software I touch every single day on the two devices I use the most. Less than one bad dinner. The habit of replacing launchers is a decade old; the habit of paying for them is recent, and the only thing I’d change is starting earlier.
Because the launcher is the menu. It’s the thing between you and every other app, the most-touched app on the device by definition, because it’s the one you go through to reach the rest. And we collectively expect it to be free, and somehow also good, and somehow also not selling our attention to whoever’s actually paying.
Free. Good. Not ad-supported. Pick two.
The free, good, ad-supported launcher does not exist: that’s just an ad you launch apps from. The free, good, not-ad-supported launcher exists for exactly as long as the developer’s patience holds out, which Nova has now demonstrated empirically. The paid launcher is the only configuration of the three that is structurally allowed to keep being good.
So pay for your launcher. It’s the gateway. Pay the toll.