Nova Launcher is back with a second unexpected update in as many weeks

Earlier this year, fans of the popular Nova Launcher found themselves waking up to some bad news. Back in September, developer Kevin Barry shared that he had finally left Branch Metrics, the firm which acquired the launcher in 2022. While that looked like the end of the road for Nova Launcher, just last week users started noticing a new 8.1.3 update hitting their devices — and now it’s already being joined by a new release.

When that 8.1.3 update landed, another former Nova developer, Rob Wainwright, posted to share a little insight into what it included. According to him, this largely represented old work that hadn’t yet been pushed out to users:

Please be aware that … nobody in the original Nova Launcher team works at Branch Metrics anymore. While the majority of the changes in this update were built by the original team over a year ago, we can’t make any promises regarding data collection or analytics.

Today, over on Reddit’s Nova Launcher sub, user Dankees98 has spotted a new 8.1.4 update arriving for beta testers. As you’d probably be able to guess from how quickly this is landing on the heels of 8.1.3, it doesn’t look like there are any new features here, and the release is instead focused on stability and bugfixes:

Admittedly, after last week’s back-from-the-dead update, that’s a little underwhelming, but there mere fact that we’re getting another update so soon could still be great news for Nova fans. While the original team isn’t around any longer, somebody at Branch sure seems committed to keeping up with fixes, and that’s absolutely better than seeing a beloved project like Nova Launcher go abandoned.

The bigger question concerns what the app’s situation might look like going forward, and that’s still an open one. Will we keep getting regular bugfix updates like 8.1.4 in the months to come? Is there any hope of seeing more new features arrive? And just who is working on this code now? Despite all those unknowns, it’s still nice to think that Nova’s story isn’t over quite yet.