Lawnchair 2.0-2130 adds desktop lock and choosing icons from the gallery, tests app categorization and adaptive brightness theming

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Lawnchair is a relatively new and up-and-coming custom launcher from a number of developers within the community. The launcher shares a number of similarities with Pixel Launcher and had version 1 of the app released last year in June. Version 2 was a big update for the group so we went hands-on with the application to show off some of the latest changes. A new version of the popular custom launcher has been made available to the public with a slew of new features including the ability to lock the desktop, choosing icons from the gallery, and more.

We’ve been following the progress of Lawnchair for a while now and have been proud to share the new features it has received over the years. Version 2.0-2130 of the application is now available to download (here’s the APK Mirror link) and with it comes a number of new features.

Experiments with brightness sensor and our theme system (by Till Kottmann)

Add picking icons from gallery (by paphonb)

Add a button to reset custom icons (by paphonb)

Add the dark theme variant of Pixel blue (by paphonb)

Add option to lock desktop (by paphonb)

Prevent MIUI crash when recents model is null (by paphonb)

Scrap dark notification badges for now (by Till Kottmann)

Initial flowerpot (categorization) specifications, parser and rulesets. (by Till Kottmann)

jeff (by Till Kottmann)

Add icon popup shortcut customizations (by paphonb)

Fix ARGB color formatting (by paphonb)

As we’ve been watching the progress of the custom launcher, we learned about some upcoming features that are currently being developed. For example, Jane Manchun Wong recently discovered that Lawnchair will soon add a feature to automatically categorize apps in the App Drawer based on app metadata.

Lawnchair (@lawnchairapp) is publicly testing categorizing apps in the App Drawer tabs automatically by reading each app's metadata pic.twitter.com/Woz3LPTocI — Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) June 17, 2019

The developers of Lawnchair have also confirmed that this feature is currently in the works. Anyone who is interested can check out this page to see the format Lawnchair will use to categorize applications. This feature is possible, in part, thanks to the app categories feature which was introduced in Android 8.0 Oreo. We’re told that the application is also scraping the Play Store for package names and using some heuristics based on intents.

The last thing we wanted to highlight today is another upcoming feature that dynamically fades into a light or dark theme depending on your surrounding environment. This new feature was also discovered by Jane (and you can see it in action via the video below), but we aren’t sure when (or if) it will make it into a public release of the application at this time. We would like to be more definitive about this type of stuff, but you never know if in-development features will work flawlessly and without a negative impact on things like performance, battery life, etc.