Today marks 1 year since our announcement that we've joined the Branch and Sesame teams! 🎉
That also means it has been 1 year since we promised your data would be safe and (shocker) we were telling the truth!
Thank you for sticking with Nova Launcher! ❤️
Nitter link provided instead of Twitter post. Screenshot below.
My AOSP launcher has zero permissions, except one that I optionally enabled to see notifications so it can do the little notification dots on my app icons.
I was referencing usual launchers with a rich set of features. As fas as I remember, one can also disable most of the permissions for no a as well, but this will kill all cool features.
I can see it requiring internet for integrating a search bar like it does, but why does their servers need that info instead of directly sending it to the search engine?
My only point was, that nova needs a lot of permissions on my device to make its cool features working AND it has access to the internet. So, technically it can collect and upload a lot of user’s data. If/how it does this, is a matter of trust.
Well sure, but that also means it’s rather limited in what it does. In theory if it had no permissions, it couldn’t even list the installed apps.
So I guess what you want to say is that it has some permissions, but none that leave the direct context of launching apps?
But even then… do you include a search box in that? Should that show recently opened files in apps, too? A rather common feature those contextual per-app run-actions, but they require some way of either the launcher getting this from the app, or in turn the app supplying this action to the launcher. Include a web search in that box? Sync settings? Show notifications? Gestures? All of these require a host of permissions.
A launcher needs a lot of privileges to do its work. I have to trust it that it does not collect/send anything to anywhere.
My AOSP launcher has zero permissions, except one that I optionally enabled to see notifications so it can do the little notification dots on my app icons.
I was referencing usual launchers with a rich set of features. As fas as I remember, one can also disable most of the permissions for no a as well, but this will kill all cool features.
I can see it requiring internet for integrating a search bar like it does, but why does their servers need that info instead of directly sending it to the search engine?
My only point was, that nova needs a lot of permissions on my device to make its cool features working AND it has access to the internet. So, technically it can collect and upload a lot of user’s data. If/how it does this, is a matter of trust.
And many people lost this trust.
Well sure, but that also means it’s rather limited in what it does. In theory if it had no permissions, it couldn’t even list the installed apps.
So I guess what you want to say is that it has some permissions, but none that leave the direct context of launching apps?
But even then… do you include a search box in that? Should that show recently opened files in apps, too? A rather common feature those contextual per-app run-actions, but they require some way of either the launcher getting this from the app, or in turn the app supplying this action to the launcher. Include a web search in that box? Sync settings? Show notifications? Gestures? All of these require a host of permissions.