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  • Vanadium "Home Screen" apps missing after update

Hi all,

First time poster and relatively new GrapheneOS user. I'm very happy with GrapheneOS and you guys do a wonderful job of everything. Kudos to you!

This morning after waking up, my phone had rebooted after what I assume was an OS update. First question is how can I tell if this was due to an OS update or because of an unrelated reboot? I had a look for logs and notifications but nothing seems to point me in the right direction.

My second and main question is related to my Vanadium browser "Add to Home Screen" apps missing. I had a folder with a number of blogs and commonly used sites that I'd used the "Add to Home screen" function to add. After this morning's reboot, this folder and all my icons within it were missing. Does anyone know why this would have happened, and is there a way I can restore them? If I remember correctly this happened before, but I was relatively new to GrapheneOS and just put it down to human error. Today though, I definitely didn't mess up. My phone just rebooted overnight (no notifications of updates, but very possible I'm missing something) and the only noticable difference was those Vanadium "Add to Home Screen" icons missing.

Any suggestions on how I can get them back or prevent this happening again? Has it happened to anyone else?

Thanks in advance :)

It likely did reboot to do System update. You can check which release you are on from Settings > About phone > Build number. The latest release is 2023031500 and is now in stable channel.

You can control whether your device auto-reboots for System update from Settings > System > System update.

My phone also installed the latest release while I was sleeping. But all all my Vanadium shortcuts on the launcher home screen have been preserved. I'm not sure why yours would have been deleted.

    treequell

    treequell It likely did reboot to do System update. You can check which release you are on from Settings > About phone > Build number. The latest release is 2023031500 and is now in stable channel.

    Nice, I'm on the latest release too. Must have updated overnight just lke yours, and I assume many others. Good to know!

    treequell My phone also installed the latest release while I was sleeping. But all all my Vanadium shortcuts on the launcher home screen have been preserved. I'm not sure why yours would have been deleted.

    Hmm, good to know (kinda!) in a way, in that I've an example to compare against - and it's not expected / normal behaviour. Narrows it down to something in my setup or that I'm doing that could cause this. Strange, I don't recall doing anything unusual. As far as I know, I'm just using the bog standard stock Vanadium that comes with the install. The version of Vanadium I'm running is 111.0.5563.58.

    treequell You can control whether your device auto-reboots for System update from Settings > System > System update.

    Yep, I remember setting that up and was aware it'd cause the auto reboots. I'm fine with that, it's a good option and makes sense for me. Maybe I'll turn it off for now so when the next update comes along, I can catch this happening and confirm it's the update. Although almost certainly is. I had my icons last night, and after my phone had rebooted this morning, my icons were missing. Come to think of it, my folder was too - which would suggest maybe more of an OS issue? Could Vanadium delete an actual desktop folder containing its own App icons? I can see it deleting its icons, but a folder? Hmm..

    The latest release includes the second quarterly release (QPR2) from AOSP, so it was a fairly major release.

    Have a look at the changelogs here:
    https://grapheneos.org/releases#2023031500
    https://grapheneos.org/releases#2023031300

    The 0315 is now in stable. The 0313 was the initial release including QPR2 but it did not make it out of a beta due to a few issues which were fixed in 0315.

    In my uneducated opinion, your disappearing shortcuts/folder sounds like a launcher bug. I am pretty sure QPR2 includes changes to the AOSP Launcher. The GrapheneOS Launcher is very closely tied to that. I know there are a number of bugs in the AOSP Launcher, most of which we have to wait for Google to fix.

    14 days later

    Lots to digest there, thanks.

    My phone's updated / rebooted overnight once or twice since this first happened, and my folders persisted. Strange, just one of those things.

    a year later

    I'm having exactly the same issue still - have you found a solution? Thanks

      stereo052 check your settings to see if it was due to an update like Treequell already said. The setting can be found while logged in to the Owner profile here: Settings > System > System update.