How time flies! I can’t believe it’s already a year ago, when I released the first beta of Niagara Launcher.

Developing the launcher has become a wonderful journey. I want to thank everyone who submits feedback and reports, shares his setups icon packs and wallpapers, posts feature suggestions, translates the app, helps out others and/or moderates on Telegram and Reddit, and who is part of Niagara’s community (maybe even since 2018), but also thanks to all who just simply gave this unconventional Launcher a try. Thank you.

To celebrate the app’s anniversary, I want to share an update that makes Niagara ready for Android 10 a few days before its official release. But don’t worry if your phone manufacturer is slow when it comes to keeping phones up to date; not all of the new stuff requires Android 10.

What’s new:

Dark Theme

Niagara Launcher comes with three themes: light, dark and pitch black (the third one is an optimized dark theme for OLED displays). With the new update, the dark themes have been refined and will turn on automatically on Android Pie and on Android 10 when you change the device theme in system settings.

Notifications

smart replies & contextual actions

It has become a tradition that every major Android version adds tweaks to notifications.

This year, Android 10 brings smart replies to all messaging apps. They’ll also appear in Niagara Launcher.

Unfortunately, floating notification bubbles didn’t make it into Android 10 (they’re only enabled for developers). But Niagara already provides something similar with expandable homescreen notifications and inspired by bubbles they got an upgrade in design and functionality. For example, a reply box will appear when receiving a message, to respond quickly.

On top of that you might see contextual actions directly in your notifications, for example a button to open YouTube when someone sends you a link to a video. With Niagara Launcher, contextual actions are not only available to Android 10 users, but for everyone starting today.

Apart from that, I put a lot work into optimizing the notification system and improving its performance.

Media Player

Lastly, I want to mention a feature that is still not included in Niagara Launcher:

Media notifications now display a progress bar on Android 10. This shows how long a song, podcast or video is as well as your current spot in the track.

This feature could be backported to Android Lollipop, but I tried out several styles and couldn’t find one that is compelling. The progress bar takes away the minimalistic feel from the media player. Feel free to comment here if you have an idea on how to integrate the progress bar in a functional but still minimal way.

Nevertheless, iterating through different designs was by no means waste of time. While doing so, I came up with a more modern design with animated outlined buttons, you can also try the result for yourself.