I’ve tried looking for launchers that have this feature, but have yet to see it mentioned anywhere.
I despise how the focus of development for at least the past decade has been form over function. I like information-dense displays, and Google has gotten everybody to waste so much screen real estate on looks (never mind other crappy UI decisions). My home screen widget layout is the one big thing keeping me on Nova.
I don’t know if it’s exacly what you’re looking for, and it’s early so still has some bugs, but try Octopi Launcher. It allows you to stack widgets into cards and gives you pretty granular grid flexibility.
I’ve been using Octopi for a few months now. It works for me, but I do miss a few features. I really want the ability to store folders in folders. And I wish the landscape layout was derived from the portrait layout, instead of being separate. At least the first of those issues seems to be on the list of planned features, so I am hopeful.
I think one of the main selling features that made Octopi stand out from the others was the multiple home screen layouts. I agree with you and would prefer only one, but supposedly it’s a killer feature for people who have folding phones with multiple screens so they can have different layouts for each mode the phone is used in. Hopefully a toggle will be made for us normies somewhere down the road to just have one. Or, maybe I’m being closed minded and there’s another way I could be using s landscape homescreen that I haven’t thought of yet.
That’s where I ended up too. It seems to be the closest to what Nova used to be.
I was hoping for something open source so I wouldn’t have to deal with it becoming crapified at some point down the line. While Octopi currently doesn’t contain trackers, it IS dependent upon Google Play Services which is a bit of a turn off.
However, I gave it a try & was having the most bizarre behavior trying to place widgets exactly. While they’d start out where I dropped them, upon resizing & trying to fine-tune placement I repeatedly wound up with the widget partially off the right edge of the screen & unable to move it back - each additional attempt would move it further off the edge.
Maybe I’ll try again once I’ve got Graphine installed & running, but no go for now. Thanks for the suggestion nonetheless.
Yes, it has some rough edges. I remember a few months back icons would be different sizes depending on how you added them to the home screen, but that’s been fixed.
I agree that I’d rather it be open source, but I haven’t found one that can handle folders within app icons like Nova, and this is the closest one. The price is reasonable and the updates are regular, so I’ll stay here for a while. It definitely has promise.
I switched to Octopi when I started to get ads on the homescreen with Nova