If you’re an iPhone user then trust me when I say you’ll never get your home screen to look quite as sleek as those of us on Android can with apps like Niagara launcher available to us.
I’ve always bounced back and forward between using the stock launcher on my OnePlus 8 and a variety of custom ones that are available. I’ve used nova launcher, lawnchair V2, Microsoft Launcher, Evie and probably even more, although some not for any huge length of time. Niagara has been the only one that I was surprised that I stuck with.
Take Nova launcher for example. It truly does meet the criteria for custom launcher. The vast array of options available through it’s settings allow for any setup you could possibly want but here’s the thing, it always still feels like a standard launcher. You know how a launcher will always have icons, folders, an app drawer, a dock etc… There’s sometimes the ability to toggle these on and off or mess with how they work but overall the basic formula is always the same.
Niagara takes a very different approach to giving you a place to launch your apps. There’s no dock, no grid of icons, no app drawer (sort of) and no widgets or folders (again sort of). Niagara aims to be clean, minimal, quick and simple. You pick a few of your favourite apps, most likely the ones that would go in your dock or on the first page of a standard launcher and they get placed into a simple list right in the middle of your screen. To access any other apps you can use a swipe up to search or you can drag your way through an alphabetically sorted list of your apps with just one finger. You can even have each app in this list sub-sorted by usage frequency so that the most commonly used apps are at the top of each lettered section. Initially this takes some getting used to but the developer knows this and even puts a quick little notification when you first start using the launcher to explain that for most people it will take a while to get used to Niagara’s way of navigating your apps. Once you get into the swing of it though, even apps that aren’t in your favourites list are quick to get to.
The home screen is not only minimal but practical as well. Above your list of favourite apps is the clock, date, battery and weather. These all lead to their respective apps as well, as determined by your devices default app settings. For instance when I tap on the clock I get taken to Sleep as Android which I use for my alarms. The launcher also adds a nice feature when tapping on the date on your home screen. A nicely designed agenda slides up from the bottom of the screen and displays all of your upcoming events and an hourly weather forecast.
A more recent update to the launcher also brought Niagara’s answer to folders and widgets called “Popups”. Popups appear when you swipe right on an app or tap on a folder. Apps will display their quick actions in their popup but can also be customised to display a widget of your choice. This doesn’t even have to be the widget from the app in question. A folder in Niagara is essentially just a popup that shows more apps instead of quick actions.
Niagara also offers some more optional features such as there “Dots” icon pack. This icon pack applies to every app you have installed and picks a colour from the apps icon to make a nice simple coloured dot. This maintains the association you have with the apps by colour. For instance Spotify is green, YouTube is red. This, although a simple concept, does wonders for improving how quickly you can locate an app without having a proper icon sitting beside it, and as an added bonus these dots look super nice with a minimal wallpaper.
So if you’re looking for a launcher without millions of customisation options that stands out a bit then I’d highly recommend taking a look at Niagara launcher. It’s fast, clean and anyone else who uses your phone will have no idea how to use it properly.
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