Fossify Launcher

★★★☆☆

Same basics as the built-in Android launcher: a home screen for app icons, optional additional screens, grouping multiple apps in a folder – and it doesn’t push a “news” screen or force a Google search bar on you!

I’ve tried it several times, at the 1.0, 1.5 and 1.10 releases, but I still can’t really recommend it.

• It still doesn’t rotate. Always running in portrait mode is fine for my phone, but I often use my tablet in landscape mode.
• Widget support still needs more work. It’s improved drastically. At 1.0, widgets barely worked at all, and at 1.5, some would still disappear the moment I added them. Now in 1.10 I can add widgets to the home screen, but something breaks after about a week. One time both widgets turned invisible. Another time the weather widget stopped updating. More than once it’s left a ghost copy of the widget in the background, shifted slightly. In all cases I’ve had to restart the phone twice to get them back.
• Icon groups sometimes stop displaying. They still function, you just can’t see them when you open them, and you have to gauge where the app icon you wanted has expanded to. Even when they do work, the animation is jerky.
• There’s no function to pause an app’s notifications for the rest of the day, like there is on the stock Android launcher. Let me tell you, that’s very useful.

I used it for about a month and a half on my Fairphone 4, because it’s more functional than /e/OS’s Bliss Launcher. I can arrange my icons how I want, and I can put widgets on the home screen. Since then I’ve found Murine Launcher is much more stable, faster, and does more of what I want.