Lawnchair News Telegram Posts

Happy New Year from Lawnchair!

As we step into 2025, we want to take a moment to reflect on the incredible milestones we achieved in 2024:

Highlights from 2024:
- Released Lawnchair 14 (beta) in April after two years of anticipation! This update brought global search, smartspacer integration, and various improvements.
- Made Lawnchair (in Early Access) and Lawnicons available on Google Play in September! Lawnchair has already surpassed 100K downloads, while Lawnicons has reached 10K downloads.
- For Lawnicons, we created a total of approximately 6000 icons and implemented several UI tweaks, along with improved documentation and icon guidelines to assist contributors.
- Launched our Open Collective account to support development, raising $1200 already! We've also decided to use $50 to accelerate the AOSP merge for Lawnchair 15.
- Refined our documentation and website for a better user experience.

What to Look Forward to in 2025:
- Lawnchair 15 is on the horizon, featuring Private Space, App Archiving, and more! You can follow development in our GitHub page.
- We’ll be putting your donations to good use with bug bounties and initiatives to accelerate releases and feature improvements.
- Expect even more icons for Lawnicons!

Thank you for being part of our journey! Here’s to an exciting 2025 filled with innovation and collaboration!

We have opened the possibility to sponsor us via GitHub! The earnings from this will go to the open collective we launched recently, which helps fund Lawnchair development. You can sponsor us here:
https://github.com/sponsors/LawnchairLauncher
You can also directly fund us via the open collective found here: https://opencollective.com/Lawnchair

We are teaming up with third-party launcher developers (Smart Launcher, Niagara, Nova, etc.) to launch a survey (initially made by the Smart Launcher devs) to identify how widespread OS issues are for third-party launchers.

This critical feedback will help show our concerns to Google. We'll present the findings at a Google event in October, so we're aiming to gather as much data as possible to ensure accurate results.

Take the survey below to help improve the experience for all third-party launcher users:

https://forms.gle/kDQgs2Cd98w4Xydt6

AOSP 15 merge is still WIP and there's some broke stuff but should have less conflicts

Been a while huh...

Today Lawnchair 14 got approved by @GooglePlay!

Enjoy Lawnchair 14 on the Play Store by joining the beta, download Lawnchair here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.lawnchair.play

Alongside that, you are now able to download Lawnicons (based on 2.11.0, ~5000 icons) at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.lawnchair.lawnicons.play

For those oldschool people still enjoying Lawnchair 2, it will stick around for a while, it will now be known as Lawnchair Legacy!

Lawnchair Legacy will probaply not stay forever, as Google keeps increasing the minimum sdk version. Lawnchair Legacy already is already being blocked to download on some devices.

Lawnchair 14 Beta 3 is here! This release works with QuickSwitch from Android 10 to Android 14 QPR3.

This release contains numerous improvements:
* UI improvements
* UI text refresh: all text is now Sentence case to match Material You guidelines
* Proper tablet support: the launcher and settings UI now adjust accordingly to the larger width
* Color scheme improvements: Lawnchair now matches the Android 14 and Pixel Launcher colors
* Added support for predictive back when navigating in Settings
* Added support for Android 14's per-app language feature
* Added new fonts in font picker
* Search improvements
* Improved permission handling for contacts and files search settings
* Improved performance of search results
* Added the ability to switch search algorithms
* Added new web search providers: Google & DuckDuckGo
* Added new dock search bar providers: Yandex
* Added additional dock search bar customizations
* Added an option to use dock search provider actions for app drawer
* Recents screen improvements:
* Added the ability to reorganize the quick actions in Overview
* Added the ability to change transparency of the recents background
* Bug fixes
* Fixed crashes on One UI, ColorOS, and other Android OEMs
* Fixed crash when accessing settings with a wallpaper preview on Android 15
* Fixed Smartspacer left padding not working
* Other repository improvments:
* Improved docs and README of Lawnchair
* Added nightly releases; do note that these are built differently from normal builds, and can be buggy and less optimized.

Alongside that, this release contains the usual performance improvements, miscellaneous bug fixes, and new bugs & translations.

Thanks to our new contributors: @osm0sis, @t895, @berkekbgz, @JovannMC, @Susexe, @HarmfulBreeze, @sandstranger, @hotmule, and @nivlafx

Want to support Lawnchair's development? Visit our Open Collective page, or set your search engine to Startpage. Alongside that, if you're a developer and want to work on Lawnchair, we're investigating how we want to do payouts for development work and bugfixes. If you have any ideas or want to contribute, please get in contact at our discussion forums!

We have also released Lawnicons 2.11.0 with new icons about a week ago; see our GitHub for more info.

🚀 We’re excited to announce that Lawnchair is now accepting donations through Open Collective! Your donations will help us continue supporting the project in a more sustainable way and improve Lawnchair for everyone.

To make a donation or learn more, visit our Open Collective page at https://opencollective.com/lawnchair

Even if you can't donate, we still appreciate other forms of contributions, like spreading the word, contributing code, or providing feedback. Thank you for your continued support!

Common issues and how to fix them

Some people are having issues with using Lawnchair 14 with QuickSwitch, the major reason is QPR2 (for most this is the april security patch), this will require a future Lawnchair update to fix. For now, only Android 14 QPR1 is supported.

Another issue could be the use of QuickSwitch 4, as of now Lawnchair and QS4 have some issues together, if you're experiencing this, use QS3, which can be found here: https://t.me/QuickstepSwitcherSupport/143038

Last of all, some users are experiencing issues with getting lawnfeed to work, a workaround could be to force stop the google app or rebooting your phone, if that does not work, install aidlbridge, available here: https://github.com/amirzaidi/AIDLBridge/releases

As you asked for us to release more updates, here you go, Lawnchair 14 beta 2!
Jokes asides, we are fixing some of the issues with our first Lawnchair 14 beta release:

* Fix Lawnchair crashing on Android 9 and some Lenovo devices on Android 10
* Fix spacing issue within the announcement settings
* Fix "Apps and Shortcuts" being tied to "Files" suggestion in Drawer Search settings
* Add support for force resizing widgets/unlimited resizing options (thanks to @SolidTux for their PR!)

Alongside that, after discussion with the team, we have changed the package name back to app.lawnchair because of the Play Store update conflicts. This means that Beta 1 and Beta 2 are different apps. You may need to delete an older version of Lawnchair to install Beta 2 (make sure to backup first!).

Note: you will have to uninstall Lawnchair 12.1 to install this update, be sure to backup

just to clarify, you have to join @lccommunity to comment on these posts, otherwise your comments get deleted

After about 2 long years, we're delighted to announce that Lawnchair 14 has finally arrived!

Based on Launcher3 from Android 14, this release works with QuickSwitch from Android 10 to Android 14! You won't need to use an older version to integrate with the system.

Some major highlights:
• Search your phone, the web, and more with our new Global Search — no root needed!¹
• View flight info, see surrounding traffic, and keep an eye on your data usage with Smartspacer — all integrated within Lawnchair.²
• Want to further control your icons? Fret not, We now support custom icon packs for themed icons, alongside some new icon options.³
• Themers rejoice — you can now hide the Dock for a cleaner home screen. You can also change even more colors, fonts, and padding.
• Are you tired of Lawnchair crashing because of widgets? We've fixed that issue; you won’t need to do some hacky workaround to add them.⁴

Alongside that, we have a new partnership with Startpage — searching with Startpage (via the dock search bar or App Drawer search) helps support Lawnchair’s development.

We still have more things to share! See the announcement on our website for more information.

¹ Experimental feature, requires opt in Lawnchair Settings.
² Requires Smartspacer and respective plugins.
³ Requires a supported icon pack.
⁴ May still persist depending on the device.