Rootless Pixel Launcher 3.2 - The Launcher. Reimagined.

This is an incremental update to my last Rootless Pixel Launcher release. Make sure you have read the previous thread for the 3.0 release, and check if your question or bug report is not in the FAQ before commenting.

3.0 release: https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/7sxe7a/rootless_pixel_launcher_30_based_on_aosp_81/

Additional FAQ entries: https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/7sxe7a/rootless_pixel_launcher_30_based_on_aosp_81/dt9tztc/

It has been a month since I released the new Pixel 2 version of my Rootless Pixel Launcher project, which started all the way back in May of 2017. Thanks to this project I managed to get my name out, and I love all the positive reception the launcher has gotten from those that want a “close to stock” experience. After the 3.1 release some interesting feature requests kept popping up so I thought I could give them a shot, as well as fixing some often reported bugs. I worked together with the alpha testers on Telegram for a month on making this new release the absolute best launcher I could create.

Major Features

Small-scale app customization

This took by far the most time. I completely rewrote the icon pack implementation and incorporated app hiding. The two are tied together, and when you use the system default icons this system is disabled and hidden. Switching to the system default icons will also reset the app hiding. In this way you can choose between the real Pixel experience without any settings, or more customization with an icon pack.

To access these settings, apply an icon pack and then long press an app icon. You will see that an edit icon has appeared, and in there you can enable/disable the icon pack for that icon, and hide the icon in the app drawer. To get it back, you can search for it using the search bar in the app drawer and then use the edit menu again. Icon packs are hidden by default, so your launcher menu isn’t cluttered with icon packs if you love to switch between icon packs often. You can unhide them in the same way you can unhide other apps.

Another improvement is that the icon pack is automatically re-applied when updated, so you don’t get mismatched icons from time to time.

If you are coming from version 3.1 you should go back to the default icons and then reapply the icon pack, after updating. This is because of some internal changes related to hidden app search.

Backported static app shortcuts

Android 6 & 7 can now get a taste of app long-press shortcuts. This works with static shortcuts like YouTube’s Search and Keep’s New Note. Due to permission limitations it’s not possible to backport more than the ones that are currently working.

Optimization

The complaints about performance issues were not ungrounded. I was compiling debug versions in Android Studio and releasing those as the final APKs. This time I did my research and enabled custom flags for the build. It is now built with minify and proguard for much better performance. I think you will feel it, everyone so far has noticed the significant boost in fluidity compared to 3.1.

Dynamic Clock

Paphonb, whose name you should be familiar with by now from Lawnchair and his own Modded Pixel 2 Launcher, came to me with the idea of making a new standard for moving clocks in icon packs. So we sat down, took a look at the Google Clock, and came up with a standard for icon pack creators to implement in their packs. My launcher is the first one to support this standard, and the template for it can be found in my Google Icons icon pack. This means that icon packs from here on can create their own dynamic clock. Look here for how to do it: https://github.com/amirzaidi/GoogleIcons/commit/77b06f31725e6a317fef2750afc4401cbcf80dd2#diff-de839a85aeada7f2028e4a590ef6e7fcL21.

Google Icons

Additionally, I extracted a lot of icons from all the real Google Apps and made an icon pack from it. Even the adaptive icons are included. Then I gathered a list of OEM apps and applied the icons to them. The download link for this icon pack will be at the bottom.

Minor features

The At A Glance setting has been replaced with an enable/disable toggle. You can still access the customization settings by long pressing on the widget.
The regular Google Search animation plays for users without Google App now.
Device profiles have been tweaked with new 6x6, 5x4 and 4x4 grids, depending on your phone’s screen size and DPI settings.
Icon packs load in the background instead of restarting the entire launcher.
The dark widgets view now works on Android 5, 6 and 7
The Pixel 1 Launcher’s navigation bar background has been added to the light widgets view for Android 5, 6 and 7.
A rounded square icon shape option has been added to the icon shape selection for Android 8.
Custom ROMs based on Android 8.1 can now directly build from sources.

Bug fixes

Added an ellipsis (...) to At A Glance date when the text goes out of bounds.
Prevented a possible crash on Lollipop/Marshmallow’s app drawer search.
The full app drawer is always shown when the app search box is empty.
Google Feed settings entry is hidden when the Google App is not available.
App info parsing for icon packs has been changed according to the Nova Launcher standard.
The app drawer search animation for Pixel users is completely rewritten, to remove the buggy layout positioning.
Persistent notification dots and popups do not show up anymore for Android 5, 6 and 7.
Non-working live Google Clock adaptive icon code has been disabled for Android 5, 6 and 7.
Google Chrome’s white background should not show up anymore on Android 8. If you still get this bug, make sure Substratum and other device themes are disabled.

FAQ

Navigation bar is not transparent.

Custom ROM users have to disable the "RR dynamic navbar" feature. Samsung and LG users might have to enable the fullscreen mode for this app in their device's settings.

Navigation buttons are grey on Galaxy S8/9

Unfortunately this is a Samsung specific problem and would require a lot of hacking around to fix. If you are desperate to make them white, consider using a substratum theme.

Feed does not allow swiping

Google changed this and disabled swiping.

Feed has weird sizes that go out of the screen

Seems to be a Google App problem, every launcher with the new feed is suffering from it, including the real Pixel Launcher. Make sure you are not using a Google App Beta.

Forked versions

This launcher is light on customization because I prefer rock solid stability and smoothness over having many options. But because it is completely open source, other developers picked up where I left off and continued porting more customizability to their own versions. I do not provide official support for these versions, but I do find it great to see that my work isn’t being wasted. These are some edited versions of my 3.1 launcher release floating around the internet that offer more settings:

ABC Launcher

Available in ABC, Dirty Unicorns, and other custom ROMs.

Lawnchair 2

This is coming later this year (get hyped!), and it will incorporate many of the additions I made to Rootless Pixel Launcher.

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