Feature Requests • Pop-ups/Folders
Pop-ups are a more versatile version of folders and help you organize and tidy up your home screen. They can contain apps, shortcuts, notifications, and even widgets.
How we track requests
We track feature requests and bug reports on GitHub. However, we have decided to mention important GitHub issues here briefly.
On this page, you will find common feature requests and our stance on them in a condensed form. On GitHub, we mirror this article without our thoughts: [Collection] Pop-ups/Folders.
Also, we categorize these requests for our and our users' convenience:
- ✅ Added
- 🚧 Currently being worked on
- 📝 Planned
- 💬 In discussion
- ❌ Not planned
Common feature requests
📝 Category / Automatic folders
A common use case for pop-up folders is to group similar apps. Similar apps often belong to the same category, like Fitness or Games. It would be great to allow the creation of folders that automatically update their contents so they contain all apps of a certain category. That way, manually editing the folder becomes redundant, and using it becomes more comfortable.
A major issue we are facing in this is how to categorize apps, since it is a complex issue to solve.
💬 Automatically hide apps contained within a folder (Exclusive folders)
Some users prefer to organize their apps using pop-ups/folders and wish to avoid having their already sorted apps visible in the all-apps list. Another good reason for this is when you want to use a folder to bundle not-often-used apps, like your entire game collection. You might use some of the entries frequently but do not want all of them to clutter the all-apps list.
While we think this is a good idea, we are unsure whether the complexity that comes with it is worth it.
📝 Better creation flow
We are aware that customizing a pop-up folder's appearance and setting it up is cumbersome at the moment. We plan on adding more customization options (color selection for the folder icon) and making it more straightforward to create a folder, give it an icon and name, and define its content.
❌ Sort folders into the alphabetical all-apps list
We believe an option for whether to include folders in the app list or show them in their own section does not warrant the added complexity of an additional toggle.
Please also refer to Niagara's Design Principles.
❌ Nested folders
We think that allowing folders to be nested within folders will introduce a lot of complexity to folders in general.
Some design aspects that trouble us or would make things less intuitive to use are:
- How would smaller folders overlay their parent folder pop-up?
- How do you navigate back to the parent? Do you need to close the entire tree and re-enter it?
- Where should notification previews be shown? Should they all propagate to their parents?
- We need to stop users from creating a looped folder structure, which would lead to nesting a folder sometimes not being allowed, and it would not be clear right away why.
As an alternative for the most common use case, which is using folders to categorize apps, we are thinking about a way to categorize your apps and then search or access these categories.