Thoughts on niagara launcher

It seems to me that the ubiquitous multiple-pages-of-icons school of phone user interface design is not the best design available. It’s main advantage is muscle memory, in that it is quite easy for us to remember the position of an icon, provided we access it frequently enough. But a lot of apps do not get accessed frequently enough, and so finding them is a wild hunt.

For a long time, launchers which act as a simple list of apps to scroll through have been available. The simplest of these really are just a list of apps in alphabetical order. This style is good, because as long as the number of apps doesn’t change, scrolling to the right place to open a commonly used app becomes a learned gesture, and for those apps that aren’t commonly used, scrolling to approximately the right place in the alphabet is also quite simple, in the same way that we can approximate where we must open a dictionary in order to search for a word.

Some of this style of launcher will bubble up commonly used apps to the top. This can be good, because it means that it is easier to access frequent apps, but if there is not some kind of a check to stop order adjustments above the fold, it becomes a game of whack-a-mole because the apps are never in the same position.

A further group allow us to select a few of our most commonly used apps and pin them to the top, and then use the alphabetical list to access everything else. This is a good middle ground, and in some ways is better than the automatic sorting, as it lets us select what apps we want to be most visible, even if they are not the most frequently used.

These apps are often described as minimalist launchers. The design could certainly be called minimalist, but often the implementation is too, and that is what has historically caused problems for me when i try to adopt one of them. For example, most of these apps don’t know how to properly sort non-alphabetically named apps: chinese apps will be sorted in unicode order at the end of the alphabet, when it makes more sense to group them by their pinyin initial along with the rest of the alphabet. Apps starting with a latin letter with a diacritic will also often be relegated to the end, rather than their appropriate position within the alphabet, which can depend on the locale.

Furthermore, one of the reasons i keep returning to the default launcher is because i make extensive use of application shortcuts that can be accessed by long pressing on an app icon, and also individually placed on the homescreen. I have one to open my student id qr code, my wechat pay qr code, and the wechat mini program qr code scanner. All of these i use many times per day, and all of them are hidden in submenus within their respective apps, which is more frustrating than i appreciate for such a common function. But many of these alternative launchers have no support for application shortcuts.

Finally, i like to have a calendar widget on my home screen, so that i can see the things that i have planned for the day. Many of these apps don’t support this, or have built their own calendar functionality that makes use of android’s built-in calendar system. I use orgzly to access my org-mode calendar, so this is also not useful to me.

Luckily, i came across niagara launcher, which has none of these grievances. My chinese apps are sorted according to their pinyin. I can easily access shortcuts to qr codes. And i can put my own widget at the top of the screen to access my calendar the way i want to.

Niagara has a free version and a paid version, so it’s easy to try it out and get a feel for whether it’s suitable for your needs without paying any money. Furthermore, the paid version doesn’t require a reliance on google play services, and an apk is also provided so it can be downloaded easily even without access to the play store. This is really nice and i wish more apps did this.

Unlike the many other alternative launchers that i’ve used, i’ve stuck with this one for a long time now. During that time, i’ve mostly been content, but there are still a few things that i find frustrating, and they all relate to muscle memory.

The main thing is that instead of a scrolling apps list, it uses an alphabetic scrubber. You can slide along the right or left edge of the screen to jump to the appropriate place in the alphabet. This would be a fine design, except that the slider also moves with your thumb; that is, when you get to z, you can keep sliding down and the whole scrubber moves with you, and when you get to a, you can keep sliding up and the whole scrubber moves with you. I find that in practice this is quite frustrating, as it limits my ability to develop muscle memory to access a particular app. If i want to access an app near the end of the alphabet, its easy to pull my thumb right down to the bottom of the screen; but if i want to access an app beginning with a, i have to pull more gently so as not to shoot past it or end up further down the alphabet.

Another two things are some of the launcher’s more advanced features. First, it allows me to mark some apps as music apps so that when i connect headphones, they move to the top of the home page. Moving my apps around means that if i have headphones connected and want to quickly open the dictionary, i frequently click on the wrong app because it has moved down a step in the list. Luckily, this feature is easy to disable. The second thing is niagara’s notification functionality, where notification content is shown inline below an app’s name. This is nice, but if the notification is long, the item expands in length to show more of its content, again moving the other apps in the list around. Neither of these things cause too much headache too frequently, but together they result in my opening the wrong app perhaps twenty percent of the time.

Even with these annoyances, however, this launcher is very comfortable to use. There are lots of thoughtful touches that most launchers of this kind don’t have. In particular, i like the way that icon themes work, where apps without a dedicated icon are given a generic icon that fits the style, so that they don’t look out of place. I like that i can add swipe actions to any app listing, and that the swipe can access any app, any shortcut, or any widget. In general i like the notification system, and i like that it is available as a one-time purchase as well as a subscription. I like that on their website, there is not only a list of features they are planning to add, but also a list of features they are not going to add, with justification as to why not. While ideologically i would prefer that it was free and open source, it is clear that the price is going towards building and improving a high quality product with a clear vision in mind.