One of the greatest virtues of Android is how customizable it is. This customization can range from simple things such as simply switching launchers to make your home screen your own from there, and even going so far as to change entire aspects of the UI and UX using apps like Substratum and the recently launched Substratum Lite. How far you want to go is actually up to you, but if you want to go for a simple home screen touch-up, there are many alternative launchers you can download, including user-favorite Nova Launcher and Hyperion Launcher, made by the same folks behind Substratum. One of the most solid ones out there is Lawnchair, and it’s getting a couple of new improvements today, at least in its beta version.
One of these improvements is rootless App Actions. App Actions are just one of many new features of Android Pie, but it requires Google’s Action Services app to be integrated into the system in order to work, virtually ending rootless workarounds and limiting how third-party launchers can integrate this feature. Lawnchair’s implementation is different: it does not rely on the AOSP implementation included with Android Pie, but instead tries to mimic its functionality. Lawnchair simply takes the most used app shortcuts out of the last 100 shortcuts used and then displays them as app actions in the drawer.
coming soon to all nougat+ devices near you.
no root required. pic.twitter.com/tXkmZByDRx
— Lawnchair (@lawnchairapp) April 2, 2019
This approach also allows the developers to bring this feature to Android 8.0/8.1 Oreo and Android 7.1 Nougat devices as well since they fully support app shortcuts. This approach, while not exactly app actions in the sense Android Pie implemented them, should work almost identically to Google’s implementation. Among other improvements, we’ve also gained the ability to customize folder icons to our liking, fixing crashes on older versions, general stability improvements, and much, much more. The full changelog includes:
- Fragment#getActivity can be null (by Till Kottmann)
- Fix remaining crashes on Lollipop (by Till Kottmann)
- Setup proper optimization rules for GSON and OWM in specific (by Till Kottmann)
- Fix OWM integration, initial support for location based weather with OWM (by Till Kottmann)
- Don’t treat launching actions as app launches (by Till Kottmann)
- Only use up to 100 events to predict actions (by Till Kottmann)
- Migrate icon shape override to general preferences to allow backing it up (by Till Kottmann)
- Get rid of non-working Telegram chat plugin (by David Sn)
- Reduce unnecessary usage of lazy initialization (by paphonb)
- Create rootless Actions Suggestions implementation (by Till Kottmann)
- Fix opening home settings (by Till Kottmann)
- Add fallback app suggestion algorithm for users without root (by Till Kottmann)
- Fix crash when choosing icon pack after scrolling down (by Till Kottmann)
- Fix remaining improper iconback existence check (by Till Kottmann)
- Lazily init more stuff to try to reduce memory footprint (by Till Kottmann)
- Refactor drawer tabs backend (by paphonb)
- Significantly improve icon pack parsing speed (by Till Kottmann)
- Reduce log spill when Lawnchair isn’t set as default (by Till Kottmann)
- Properly fallback to DefaultPack in #newIcon (by Till Kottmann)
- Remove 2019 April Fools’ Day joke (by paphonb)
- Clean up preference controller delegates (by paphonb)
- Fix crash when spamming delete button in tabs editor (by paphonb)
- Use hardware bitmap for folder icon preview (by paphonb)
- Improvements to tab name editor (by paphonb)
- Improve tab indicator (by paphonb)
- Initial support for custom folder icons (by Till Kottmann)
- Update dependencies for latest AS canary (by Till Kottmann)
You can download the latest beta from APKMirror right now by clicking this link. Alternatively, if you don’t wanna mess around with betas, you can pick up the stable version from the Play Store right now.
Lawnchair Launcher (Free, Google Play) →
The post Lawnchair’s latest beta adds rootless app actions, customizable folder icons, and more appeared first on xda-developers.
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