Niagara Launcher for Android

One of the popular features on Android phones over the years is the ability to change to a different launcher. The “launcher” is essentially the software that controls your home screen and app layout — the main grid of icons that you swipe through.

Years ago I used to experiment with different launchers quite a lot, but lately I’ve been content to stick with the default Android launcher. However, two things recently happened that caused me to give a different launcher a try.

First, I’m trying to de-Google things as much as I can. While I’m not going crazy on that, and I’ll likely purchase the new Google phone later this year, moving to things like the Brave browser and ProtonMail have been good moves.

One thing that I was unable to solve on Android was changing the Google-powered search box at the bottom area of the phone. While you can change many of the default search actions on Android, you literally can’t change or remove that box without a large amount of work. The easier solution is just to use a different launcher, which is as easy as just loading an app from the app store.

I came across one called Niagara Launcher and had to give it a shot. Most launchers are fairly similar to one another, with the familiar grid of icons. Niagara, on the other hand, changes things up quite a lot. At it’s core, it lets you choose up to eight icons on the home screen, along with a few small optional widgets (calendar and weather), and then you can scroll down the home page to find all of the…