Some Apps Do Not Launch

Niagara Launcher is currently having issues launching some apps. At this time, we are unsure about the underlying cause and are working hard to uncover more details. UPDATE: See below.

For now, there is a workaround: Long-press on the app, go to App Info and launch the app from there.

UPDATE: It appears that new intent firewall rules rolled out by Google—in response to a recently discovered Unity game engine vulnerability—are affecting us, along with several other launchers.

These firewall rules filter which apps can launch intents for other apps. Intents are one of Android’s mechanisms for apps to start other apps or specific components in an app (even its own app) and pass data to them, and Niagara Launcher starts an intent to launch an app.

It appears that Google blocks all apps from sending Intents for known Unity apps, except for explicitly allowed apps, and as of now we seem to be missing from the list of allowed apps: https://www.gstatic.com/android/config_update/10222025-ifw.xml

For that reason, we expect the situation to resolve itself within the next few days.

Here's what we know so far:

• The affected apps are games. For now, we've only seen games using the Unity engine affected
• It only affects a relatively small set of devices.
• Downgrading or upgrading Niagara Launcher does not change the situation
• Not all 3rd-party launchers are affected, but we are not alone: Kvaesitso is also affected, for example.

If you want to help, please comment details about your case (Phone model, Android version, affected app(s), ...) on our Featurebase board: https://niagaralauncher.featurebase.app/p/cannot-open-some-app

You can also follow the issue on the board to get notified when we have found a solution to the problem.

For developers

Android does not respond with an error but instead silently aborts launching the target activity. When looking at logcat, the reported error code is 102 , which seems to indicate START_ABORTED  : a new activity start was aborted.

If you are a developer and your launcher is affected as well, please reach out to [email protected]. Hopefully we can work together to resolve this issue.