Nova Launcher sold to Analytics company. Android ecosystem is getting worse by the day 😕 https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/w2q6al/_/

Depends on how this acq-hire goes, at least Branch isn't a big evil megacorp (or else we'd have known by now), look at SwiftKey for instance, which got acquired by MS years ago, and I still use it as primary keyboard app and I haven't noticed any deterioration or ads anywhere in it.

Speaking of Android: https://blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/an-update-on-google-play-billing-in-the-eea/

They're basically buying a 'mine'.

Nova Launcher - Hearing this name brings back some good old memories of KitKat android!

They'll have access to data about every open you open, how frequently you open them etc.

^ correct. There's a lot of debate regarding ethics of this. Other companies also do this in other ways. But the data is usually anonymised, so it's legit data sourcing

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I'm happy with my native launcher in pixel. Stopped using Nova a long time ago. After hearing this I won't even try it again in future

FYI Lawnchair has like 95% of features that Nova has. And it is Open Source.