{"id":273845,"date":"2025-11-05T22:06:06","date_gmt":"2025-11-05T22:06:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/273845\/"},"modified":"2025-11-05T22:06:06","modified_gmt":"2025-11-05T22:06:06","slug":"nova-launcher-gets-its-second-update-in-as-many-weeks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/273845\/","title":{"rendered":"Nova Launcher gets its second update in as many weeks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier this year, fans of the popular Nova Launcher found themselves waking up to some bad news. Back in September, developer Kevin Barry shared that he had finally left Branch Metrics, the firm which acquired the launcher in 2022. While that looked like <a href=\"https:\/\/www.androidauthority.com\/nova-launcher-shutdown-3595611\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">the end of the road for Nova Launcher<\/a>, just last week users started noticing a new <a href=\"https:\/\/www.androidauthority.com\/nova-launcher-update-3611853\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">8.1.3 update<\/a> hitting their devices \u2014 and now it\u2019s already being joined by a new release.<\/p>\n<p>When that 8.1.3 update landed, another former Nova developer, Rob Wainwright, posted to share a little insight into what it included. According to him, this largely represented old work that hadn\u2019t yet been pushed out to users:<\/p>\n<p>Please be aware that \u2026 nobody in the original Nova Launcher team works at Branch Metrics anymore. While the majority of the changes in this update were built by the original team over a year ago, we can\u2019t make any promises regarding data collection or analytics.<\/p>\n<p>Today, over on Reddit\u2019s Nova Launcher sub, user <a href=\"https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/NovaLauncher\/comments\/1op30lm\/version_814_released_in_google_play_store_beta\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Dankees98<\/a> has spotted a new 8.1.4 update arriving for beta testers. As you\u2019d probably be able to guess from how quickly this is landing on the heels of 8.1.3, it doesn\u2019t look like there are any new features here, and the release is instead focused on stability and bugfixes:<\/p>\n<p>Admittedly, after last week\u2019s back-from-the-dead update, that\u2019s a little underwhelming, but there mere fact that we\u2019re getting another update so soon could still be great news for Nova fans. While the original team isn\u2019t around any longer, somebody at Branch sure seems committed to keeping up with fixes, and that\u2019s absolutely better than seeing a beloved project like Nova Launcher go abandoned.<\/p>\n<p>The bigger question concerns what the app\u2019s situation might look like going forward, and that\u2019s still an open one. Will we keep getting regular bugfix updates like 8.1.4 in the months to come? Is there any hope of seeing more new features arrive? And just who is working on this code now? Despite all those unknowns, it\u2019s still nice to think that Nova\u2019s story isn\u2019t over quite yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Earlier this year, fans of the popular Nova Launcher found themselves waking up to some bad news. Back&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":273846,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[1163,165,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-273845","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mobile","8":"tag-android-launchers","9":"tag-mobile","10":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=273845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273845\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/273846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=273845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=273845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=273845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}