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Last year, Nova Launcher founder and sole developer Kevin Barry announced he had left Branch Metrics, Nova’s parent company at the time — which followed an announcement from 2024 that nearly everyone working on the project had been laid off. But the launcher is getting new life: in a blog post on Tuesday, the Swedish company Instabridge, which makes an app that helps people connect to Wi-FI hotspots, announced it has acquired Nova Launcher.
“Nova is not shutting down,” according to Instabridge. “Our immediate focus is simple: keep Nova stable, compatible with modern Android, and actively maintained.” However, Instabridge says it’s “evaluating ad based options” for the free version of the launcher.” But the newest update for Nova Launcher has trackers for Facebook Ads and Google AdMob in its code and users on Reddit have already reported seeing ads, as reported by Android Authority.
If ads are added to the launcher, the paid experience, Nova Launcher Prime, will “remain ad free.”
Instabridge is also “actively evaluating” open sourcing Nova. When announcing his departure in September, Barry said that he had been “asked to stop working on Nova Launcher and the open sourcing effort” even though former Branch CEO Alex Austin said publicly that “If Kevin were to ever leave, it’s contracted that the code will be open sourced and put in the hands of the community.”
“Open sourcing a product responsibly involves licensing, security, build tooling, contribution workflow, and trademark stewardship,” Instabridge says. “We do not have a decision to share yet, but we will be transparent once we do.
Barry tells The Verge he hasn’t yet been contacted by Instabridge about Nova Launcher and potentially open sourcing it. (Regarding the previous commitments from Branch, Barry says that “Contracts are complicated, but the statements and promises made to the community from Alex/Branch are straightforward and haven’t been honored.”) While he says that Instabridge is in a “difficult position,” he thinks that open sourcing Nova “has to be a component” of helping rebuild trust with the community:
It’s complicated to build, maintain and monetize a launcher. I’d love to see them develop Nova completely as a true open source project, but I also understand that might not fit their business. I think the community would be happy to see just a code drop of Nova 8.1 as open source.
I already completed the prep work for this. Cleaning the code, removing some dependencies, stripping API keys, etc. Branch legal approved it, and I’m sure Instabridge legal just reviewed everything for the acquisition. The heavy lifting is done. They just need to make a decision. The time to do it is also now. Nova 8.1 is already a bit dated, so users will be eager to see what they can do with Nova 9. But until they make an open source release of Nova, that is going to dominate the community discussion.
Even if Nova 9 remained closed source, this would show the community that Nova is in the right hands after all this uncertainty. It sounds like they’re confident in their vision for Nova, so open sourcing 8.1 wouldn’t be a threat. And it would go a really long way with the community.
Instabridge and Branch didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
Update, January 20th: Added details from Kevin Barry.
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