New essential Android apps thread

T1Cybernetic said:
On Xiaomi phones, there are some crazy tough battery, process and /or app throttling settings that prevent Firefox from keeping tabs in memory if I remember rightly. I had a similar problem when I last had one of their phones. I can't remember how I fixed the problem, but I'm sure I found the solution with a bit of Google searching.
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Annoying as I opted for a phone with 12GB of RAM to stop things like that happening!
 
Macky said:
Annoying as I opted for a phone with 12GB of RAM to stop things like that happening!
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I'm certain it's as simple as disabling battery optimisation for certain apps that you want left alone. Still, I honestly can't remember if that fixed the problem or even how to do it, as I don't have a Xiaomi phone nearby to test.

A quick Google suggests that's all there is to it, so I'm hoping I'm on to something :D
 
Macky said:
Been messing around with a few browsers following chrome disabling ublock. Firefox seems to have some weird incompatibility with my Xiaomi phone where tabs aren't staying in memory and the general performance of the app is pretty poor. Shame, because the desktop browser is pretty solid. Now trying out Brave on desktop and Android. Doesn't seem quite as polished as chrome or firefox and there are quite a few things it's trying to sell me but performance seems pretty good.. Do people have any strong views on android browsers?
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I'm going to throw in Vivaldi as a suggestion since you can add your own filter lists (although only compatible with ABP style lists and not uBo), it's my backup Chromium based browser.

As for apps not staying in memory... That's the one thing that bugs me with Xiaomi's HyperOS and a lot of other alternate Android skins, they made the RAM/battery management more aggressive than the stock AOSP behaviour. You can mitigate it by following the guides on this site, but some skins you can't completely disable it. Even Pixels aren't a complete exemption, they're on the better end but sometimes adaptive battery decides to manage some apps a little too much as well.
 
mrk said:
Nova Launcher development ia now dead :/

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Looks like I will check out Octopi and see how that goes, shame as I've been on nova since around 2014 with essentially the same homescreen layout and app drawer folder organisation. Everything is set up as gestures on the homescreen!
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Ah, same... That's a shame. I thought they'd gone a bit quiet? I actually had to uninstall Nova the other day on my Mum's Honor tab because it was killing her battery :(

@mrk, would you say Octopi is the next best thing at this stage?
 
mrk said:
Nova Launcher development ia now dead :/

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Looks like I will check out Octopi and see how that goes, shame as I've been on nova since around 2014 with essentially the same homescreen layout and app drawer folder organisation. Everything is set up as gestures on the homescreen!
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You khaaaaaaaaaaaan't be serious!

Why the heck would they not just sell it off? It's been the best launcher for over 10 years and continues to be.

I will be holding on until it's dying day
 
mrk said:
Nova Launcher development ia now dead :/

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Looks like I will check out Octopi and see how that goes, shame as I've been on nova since around 2014 with essentially the same homescreen layout and app drawer folder organisation. Everything is set up as gestures on the homescreen!
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Came here to post the same thing. I'm gutted, I've used Nova Prime for as long as I can remember, probably around the same sort of time. This is going to take some getting used to!

Seems Octopi is getting recommended a lot along with Smart and Kvaesito.
 
V_R said:
Came here to post the same thing. I'm gutted, I've used Nova Prime for as long as I can remember, probably around the same sort of time. This is going to take some getting used to!

Seems Octopi is getting recommended a lot along with Smart and Kvaesito.
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Same as you I've used Nova for the best part of a decade on a device that has become central to most of our lives.

I will still continue using it for as long as feasible but I don't look forward to finding an alternative and then getting that to behave the same with all the customisations I currently have.
 
MartinPrince said:
Same as you I've used Nova for the best part of a decade on a device that has become central to most of our lives.

I will still continue using it for as long as feasible but I don't look forward to finding an alternative and then getting that to behave the same with all the customisations I currently have.
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Same issue.

It's the customisation and the exact ones that I have that I will find hard to change.

I just don't understand how the most recommended launcher I've ever seen, so assume it's the most recommended in the world, is stopping.
 
So the current install of Nova will continue to work until it's no longer supported by Android I guess, but yeah Octopi so far seems to be a feature rich alternative, I have only briefly looked at it but my Nova is so tightly set up that I just CBA right now to mash through all the layouts and gestures etc to replicate across to see if everything I did on Nova works on Octopi just yet :p

I will hold off a little longer whilst slowly loading up Ocotpi every so often and merging something else over I think.

There was obviously some political shift behind the scenes of the exec team at Branch and between the original owner/dev and as such he was told to step down or something and Branch decided it was better to just can it off, though we don't know what its future holds as the original plan was to open source it and they have opted not to right now.
 
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I've been using Octopi for a while now since it's one of the very few that properly supports foldables, but it does still lack a few features that Nova had. Luckily the developer is very active and open to feedback on the subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/OctopiLauncher/

Here's the current roadmap, last updated late July: https://www.reddit.com/r/OctopiLauncher/comments/1j0ykmx/octopi_launcher_roadmap/

But it still feels like it's missing some of the polish Nova had.

Reading the final message, I guess Nova won't become open source in the end? Big shame, I'm sure there's plenty out there who would love to fork and continue on with it.
 
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V_R said:
Came here to post the same thing. I'm gutted, I've used Nova Prime for as long as I can remember, probably around the same sort of time. This is going to take some getting used to!

Seems Octopi is getting recommended a lot along with Smart and Kvaesito.
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Smart launcher. Read their privacy policy before you decide to use it
 
It's something i've always used on Android and there's been times when I've dabbled with another and always end up coming back.

I genuinely thought this day would never come.

Going to take a proper look at OneUI along with Homeup, and see how far off it is. Default launcher should mean gestures and everything else works correctly too
 
superleeds27 said:
It's something i've always used on Android and there's been times when I've dabbled with another and always end up coming back.

I genuinely thought this day would never come.

Going to take a proper look at OneUI along with Homeup, and see how far off it is. Default launcher should mean gestures and everything else works correctly too
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Yeah I can't do it. Haha.

OneUi isn't too bad now but it just misses simple things.

I've also tried pear launcher, that's not too bad but a little glitchy, reached out to the developer!

Really do hope nova gets open sourced!
 
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