Nova Launcher just got another update despite being ‘dead’

Nova Launcher is receiving yet another update, despite its founder, Kevin Barry, announcing in September that he would no longer be involved in its development. At the time, Barry had stated that he was the only one working on the third-party launcher and that with his departure from Branch, the analytics firm that acquired Nova Launcher in 2022, the project would no longer be maintained.

Since then, Nova Launcher has received several back-to-back updates, with the latest 8.1.6 beta addressing a major crash issue. According to users on Reddit, the new beta, released just a few hours ago, fixes the bug that broke app drawer search. In version 8.1.5, performing a search in the app drawer would instantly crash the launcher unless users limited apps to a single row. The 8.1.6 beta resolves this problem, so searches now work properly without that workaround.

Who is working on Nova Launcher?

The question puzzling users now is: who’s actually making all these changes and releasing new updates to Nova Launcher? Since Barry’s exit from Branch, the company that owns Nova, no one was expected to maintain, let alone update, the launcher.

Former Nova developer Rob Wainwright previously mentioned that most of these updates were completed by the original Nova team over a year ago, suggesting that active development may have stalled, and these are simply leftover features being pushed to production now.

Some users also speculate that Branch might be responding to the recent negative publicity surrounding the launcher’s demise by rolling out bug fixes and updates that were already ready to go.