Android is all about letting the user customize their devices, the way they want. And talk about customizations, Nova Launcher is the go-to third-party launcher app that most of us trust upon.
Though over the course of Nova Launcher’s decade long history, the app has received plenty of updates. However, the latest update for the home launcher which arrives in beta is huge.
Notably, in a somewhat limited beta release, the developers have released the Nova Launcher 7 beta. The update becomes more important because Nova Launcher 7 beta has been rewritten off of Launcher3 from AOSP.
Now, this brings updated visuals and animations. Apparently, just about every part of Nova Launcher’s code has changed. There are some good reasons for Nova devs to rewrite Nova Launcher in AOSP’s Launcher3.
As noted by XDA, until this point, Nova Launcher was built on Launcher2. This made delivering new updates and porting features from AOSP a bit difficult.
Cut to now, since the new Nova Launcher 7 beta has been rewritten on Launcher3, the app will receive new updates and features more quickly.
Well, along with under the surface changes, this new update also brings a bunch of design tweaks and new animations.
Nova Launcher 7 is already live for public beta testing via its Discord channel
At the time of writing this post, the Nova Launcher 7 has already bagged several updates on the beta channel with bug fixes and additional features.
Talking about the features that the first initial beta build received, it got radial folder icon layouts, swipe down actions on icons, searches and tab bar can now be placed at the bottom, more Nova search windows and bar options, and much more.
Horizontal app drawer style and card backgrounds are some of the noticeable cuts that you will notice with this new Nova Launcher 7 beta update.
We are already past the era of having a horizontal scrolling app drawer. Only Samsung users that still stick to the One UI are scrolling sideways to access their apps on the app drawer.
The first beta builds rolled out with version 7.0.2 and the latest one is 7.0.7. In between these beta updates, devs have fixed bugs including force closes issue, shortcuts and gestures improvements, icon shape detection, etc.
Note that this new beta update is not available via the Google Play Store. You can grab the latest Nova Launcher 7 beta update from their official Discord channel.
