Missing Customization Features

One of Niagara Launcher's main goals is to stay simple, and that's why we're not implementing all requested customization features. You can read about Niagara Launcher's design principles here: Niagara's Design Principles.

Customization Features That Are Unlikely to be Added

Customizing Accent Color or Text Color

Niagara Launcher automatically chooses its accent color based on your wallpaper and on the Material You color scheme. You can freely choose the color with a third-party app mentioned in our color system article. In our opinion, that gives you enough freedom to play around with.

Customizing Text Color

Customizing the text color isn't impactful enough in our opinion.

Grid Layout

The list is one of Niagara Launcher's most fundamental design elements. Adding an alternative grid mode for favorites and all apps would add too much complexity to Niagara Launcher. Every feature would have to work for lists and grids, and we couldn't only focus on the list design anymore.

Center or Right-Align List

We're not planning on adding different alignment modes for Niagara Launcher's app list because we think the left alignment is already sufficient for both left and right-handers. Furthermore, new alignment options would mean designing additional layouts for every new feature that changes something on the home screen, which slows down development.

Customizable Niagara Clock Widget

We decided not to make our clock widget to keep things simple and ensure the clock widget looks good in combination with Niagara Launcher's other inbuilt widgets (like the date, weather, and calendar widget) customizable. However, you can replace the clock with a widget of your choice; here's how.

Add Toggle To Move the Media Widget to the Bottom

If we add an option to move Niagara's widget to the bottom, it would still be hard to reach your favorites at the top. Suppose you're having difficulties in reaching anything on Niagara's home screen. In that case, we recommend moving the Niagara widget (and, with it, the whole list) further down (Niagara Settings > Features > Niagara Widget > Move widget). Moreover, for the sake of simplicity, we'd like to add as few toggles as possible.

Supporting Dynamic Calendar / Clock Icons

This is not a customization feature, but we want to mention it here nevertheless. We don't have anything against supporting it, but it's a low priority because this is a redundant feature. Niagara's home widget already shows the date (along with the day of the week and month) and time.

Freely Customizable Gestures

Customizable gestures are a popular feature in many launchers, but at Niagara Launcher, we believe in keeping things simple and easy to manage. Therefore, we have made some choices about the gestures we support to give you the best user experience.

We don't offer two-finger gestures to ensure you can access everything you need with just one hand. We also don't support double-tap gestures on apps because it can cause delays in launching the app. (To detect a double-tap, we also have to delay app launches because we have to wait after a tap to check if the user taps again.)

We do not allow custom horizontal swipe gestures (left and right) since they are already assigned to opening pop-ups and dismissing notifications. Similarly, we do not support custom vertical swipe gestures (up and down) since they are reserved for essential functions like opening the notification drawer and the Niagara search.

However, we have some alternatives that we recommend. You can add the apps you frequently use to your favorites and use Niagara Launcher's pop-ups for other frequently used apps. Additionally, you can customize the tap gesture and the swipe-up gesture of our Niagara button with Niagara Pro.

Sorting Apps by Color

In our opinion, categorizing apps by their primary icon color is flawed because many apps have multicolored icons, e.g., FDroid, Slack, and almost every Google app (Google, Maps, Chrome, Play Store, Drive, News, etc.). Those apps could not be categorized well by colors. Once you know the first letters of your favorite apps, you'll be able to access your apps even faster with our alphabet than with color search.

Notification Badge / Notification Dot Instead of Text Notification Preview

Because notification dots would already be an alteration of an existing feature, we decided not to add them to keep everything simple. Additionally, we experimented with showing numbers next to notifications but couldn't get decent results. Some apps count incoming messages, others count notifications (you get one notification for every person that writes you a message), and so on. Notification summary texts don't have this problem; they're straightforward to understand.

Adding Customizable Padding / Empty Space Below the Niagara Widget

While we don't plan to offer an option for this, you can add an invisible third-party widget to serve as a spacer between the Niagara widget and your favorites. Many apps are offering invisible widgets on Google Play (use at your own risk).