Nova Launcher

» see novalauncher.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

nova launcher had one developer for fourteen years. kevin barry shipped it alone out of a one-man shop called teslacoil software, named after his cat. the cat was named after the engineer. you could read the whole lineage off the loading screen if you knew where to look.

it launched in november 2011, ice cream sandwich era, when android was still figuring out the visual grammar a phone was supposed to use. nova let you change the grid spacing or override the icon pack. for the part of the android user base that read tech blogs and rooted their phones, this was the first thing you installed after a factory reset. fifty million play store installs sat on top of one person.

i ran android through this whole stretch as an engineer on a daily-driver phone. nova was the launcher friends pointed at when stock got too google for them. i never set it as my default for long enough to count. that did not stop me from knowing exactly what nova was for.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

branch metrics, a mobile attribution-link company, acquired teslacoil on 19 july 2022. branch's pitch read as "let us handle the business side, you keep building". the codebase stayed proprietary while barry stayed the only developer. updates kept shipping. for a stretch this looked like one of the rare acqui-deals where nothing visible broke.

then alex austin, the branch co-ceo who closed the deal, left in 2023. the contract barry pointed at said if he ever left branch too, the code would be open-sourced and handed to the community. by 2025 he was preparing that release, cleaning up the codebase and stripping out proprietary bits.

~ the actual end ~

on 8 september 2025 barry posted that he had been told to stop. stop the open source work, stop working on nova at all. branch leadership had changed and the new direction was to let the launcher quietly become a maintenance shell. barry's response was to leave the company.

the official novalauncher.com went 404 within days. the play store listing stayed up and the app still ran. in october 2025 a swedish company called instabridge bought the brand from branch with a vague commitment to keep it stable and add ads. nobody at instabridge had ever written a line of nova's code.

~ the long tail ~

the open source release barry had been preparing never shipped. it may still happen, or someone may fork the last public apk and rebuild around it. neither has the original. the part of android nova represented was one developer being trusted by fifty million users with the launcher they saw a hundred times a day. that arrangement still exists on smaller platforms. at this scale it does not.

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