Almost the entire team at Nova Launcher, one of the biggest names in Android home screen replacements, has been laid off. The team now has just one full-time developer left: Kevin Barry, the founder of the launcher.
Barry said development will continue and he will remain responsible for the project. But fired team members say work on Nova will have to slow down, and Barry has said he needs to “narrow down” the scope of Nova’s next major release compared to his original plan.
“With fewer people working on the app, development will undoubtedly slow down, but the current plan is to continue with updates in some form,” Rob Wainwright, one of the fired developers, wrote on the project’s Discord.
Nova has been a stalwart of the Android Launcher community for years, offering highly customizable changes to the platform’s standard home screen options. The app was acquired by mobile analytics company Branch in July 2022. Wainwright said there were “about a dozen people” working on Nova previously.
The launcher will continue to work for anyone who is already using it. Although the launcher has been developed by a team for many years, it was initially the work of developers only. “For years, the original Nova team was just me,” Barry wrote in a post today, reflecting on the layoffs.
