ignatius Are there any notable security drawbacks to utilizing alternative home screen launchers? What sort of privileges do apps like this have that other apps potentially may not have?
raccoondad ignatius I dislike them usually because they have certain functionalities missing. I really wish there was a good, open slice browser, with little functionality changes. I use the AOSP one ATM, and like it. I use widgets to make it fancy
brandy078 ignatius here is another threat about 3rd party launches. https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/2850-are-there-any-security-risks-by-using-an-alternative-launcher
Stewart It seems to me that launchers have a lot of rights, in terms of privacy as everything it is very important in used good and check permissions well, Niagara Launcher has a good privacy policy and is open source too it seems to me and there is also Lauwchair which is open source and also has a good privacy policy it seems to me.
ignatius Stewart Yes I'm sure that if you use a trusted launcher there won't be any privacy invasive features, but I was more so asking about the security drawbacks.
brandy078 Stewart the developer of Niagara says it's not open source and there are no plans for making it open source. https://github.com/NiagaraLauncher/Niagara-Issues/issues/180 But that was 7 years ago... Do you have other informations? Might also be interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39327561
ignatius raccoondad The AOSP one is great I agree. I just wish that the AOSP launcher supported changing icon shapes, icon artwork, and maybe having more configured behaviors for the app drawer.
Stewart Ah, so it's not, I thought it was, but in any case Niagara seems to have a good privacy policy.
ignatius brandy078 Lots of good stuff here. I assumed it would be the case that launchers are no more privileged than the rest of the system. I guess the key takeaways here are to trust the app developer and trust the exploit mitigations GrapheneOS has for all apps on the system!
DeletedUser203 "Implications of alternative launchers" who needs them! GrapheneOS comes with one. It works perfectly well.
DeletedUser288 DeletedUser203 It works perfectly well. Don't always judge others by your own standards.
DeletedUser203 DeletedUser288 Don't always judge others by your own standards. who is judging whom!...
other8026 DeletedUser203 Maybe best to let them discuss other launchers without bringing up the default one they don't want to use. Many are satisfied with the default one, but wanting to use another one is fine too.