Nova Launcher 7 Hits Beta and It’s a Huge Update

The developers behind Nova Launcher had a last minute surprise up their sleeves just prior to 2020 ending. In a somewhat limited beta release, Nova Launcher 7 is here and it’s a pretty major update.

First posted a couple of days ago and updated several times since, Nova Launcher 7 beta has been rebuilt off of Launcher3 from AOSP, so you’ll get “updated visuals and animations and just about every part of Nova’s code has changed.” See, this is big.

While the focus may be on a move to a new base, there are new items as well as “nearly all” of Nova’s customization options having made the journey over. In the first beta, we got the following new goodies:

– Radial folder icon layouts
– Vertical paginated folder scrolling
– Swipe Down action on icons (Prime)
– Search bar and Tab Bar in drawer can be placed at the bottom
– More Nova search window and bar options
– Save APK popup menu action
– More

There were a few cuts, most notably in card backgrounds and horizontal app drawer styles. No one is out here missing horizontal app drawers, are we? Only weird Samsung freaks have convinced themselves that scrolling sideways in an app drawer is OK.

The first beta build rolled out as 7.0.2 and we are already on 7.0.7. Through updates, bug fix after bug fix has been deployed, force closes have been addressed, shortcuts and gestures have been improved, icon shape detection and theme handling has gotten better, and scroll effects from Nova 6 were restored. It’s been a non-stop fixing session, which you absolutely love to see.

Since this new beta build is such a massive upgrade, you won’t find it on Google Play just yet. Instead, you have to grab it through the Nova Discord server. Join that here and get to playing.