2019. What a year. Niagara Launcher received around 50 updates, the most important ones added shortcut and widgets support, the launcher had its first anniversary and Niagara Pro went public.

I can’t stress enough how thankful I am for your support. Regardless of whether you bought Niagara Pro or you just joined our community — thank you. You’re making it possible that Niagara Launcher keeps evolving.

New Year’s resolution

Thinking back, I noticed I used my phone a lot last year. Unfortunately, not only to chat with my friends, take notes and check for important updates, but also because I wasn’t in the mood to get out of bed.

It would be interesting to see how many apps someone opened with Niagara Launcher over the year, I thought. That’s why Niagara Pro members are getting greeted with a dialog after updating Niagara to v0.11.6. (You can get the update from GitHub. It will also be published on Google Play one week later.)

I’m almost at 5000 launches in only three months 😯 (Because I reset Niagara Launcher in October, only a portion of my usage gets displayed.)

It’s just a single number that doesn’t tell that much, but I thought it may give you an incentive to think about your phone usage and becoming (even) more productive.

Would you like to see more digital wellbeing tools integrated into Niagara? I believe launchers offer great potential for improving your phone usage, because they serve as your phone’s main entry point. Please let me know on Telegram, Twitter, Reddit, GitHub or write a comment below this post.

Folders & Categories

Another goal for 2020 are folders. Folders & categories are hot topics in Niagara’s community and there are tons of ideas how they could look:

We’re still unsure which one of them are the best. Moreover, I have to admit, that I don’t use folders on Android Launchers, I don’t have that many apps installed to make use of them. To get a better understanding of use cases for folders I want to ask you which types of apps you’d place in folders (e.g. for Games, Social apps, Financing, etc.).

Of course, many more features will be coming to Niagara Launcher in 2020:

I don’t want to spoil to much, but I’m also working with other developers to integrate their apps into Niagara Launcher.

Spring cleaning

However, releasing a lot of features doesn’t have to be ideal either. It’s tempting to implement all feature requests as fast as possible, but that can mess up an app pretty quickly. You lose control of designing good user experience. Think of a combination tree: If you add ten settings that can be toggled on or off for example, the user can choose between 1024 states, depending on which settings she turns on. Niagara Launcher should feel polished regardless of the user’s settings, every switch makes the overall experience harder to maintain. To counteract this, I came up with four criteria every new feature of Niagara Launcher should meet:

An addition to Niagara Launcher should be…

Simple · Easy to configure and easy to use. As few settings & toggles as possible.

· Easy to configure and easy to use. As few settings & toggles as possible. Impactful · Either appealing for many or necessary for some.

· Either appealing for many or necessary for some. Universal · Has to work everywhere: in every country, on all phones.

· Has to work everywhere: in every country, on all phones. Independent · Doesn’t add complexity if it’s not being used.

Going out of beta

Admittedly, Niagara doesn’t feel very polished yet. In 2020, I want to redesign settings and improve usability for the whole app. There are also a lot of bugs to squash. After all that, I’m looking forward to releasing Niagara Launcher (v1.0) in 2020.

I hope you’re as excited for 2020 as I am, it’s going to be great.

Happy New Year and all the best,

Peter