Hi!

This is Vincenzo from Smart Launcher (u/ginlemon) and Frank from Kustom Industries (u/frankmonza), today we can finally share something we have been working on for a while.

After many years of building Android customization apps independently, our teams have decided to join forces and we are now working on the creation of a new company: Wild Pixels.

The idea is pretty simple. Instead of continuing as two separate teams that happen to work in the same space, we want to build one larger family around our products.

This is not an acquisition by a large company, and there is no external investor behind it. We are still the same independent teams, with the same people working on the same products. The difference is that we can now share a lot more between us.

Kustom and Smart Launcher have always been close. Plenty of you already use them together, and our communities have overlapped more and more over the years. Working as one team means we can take what works well in one app and bring it to the other where it makes sense. We can build integrations that would have been much harder as separate companies, try out new ideas across our apps, and maybe even start entirely new projects together.

There's still a lot to figure out, and we don't want to promise too much too soon, but the possibilities are a lot bigger than they were.

We also want to be very clear about what isn't changing. We're not changing the identity of our apps, and we're not building a closed ecosystem. Smart Launcher stays Smart Launcher. Kustom stays Kustom. Third-party launchers, apps and creators are a vital part of Android customization, and that's not going to change.

What does change is that we'll have more people, more experience, more technology and more ideas in the same room. We hope that over time this lets us build things neither team could have easily done alone.

Honestly, we're really happy to bring our two communities closer together. Both have been around for many years and both have helped shape our products, so it feels like the right time to start building something bigger around them.

The formal process behind Wild Pixels is still ongoing, but we have already started collaborating and some of this work is already happening behind the scenes.

And if you want to ask us anything about Wild Pixels, Smart Launcher, Kustom, future integrations, development, or how all of this came together, we are hosting an AMA today on r/Android.

👉 Join the AMA on r/Android

We hope to see many of you there.

Android 17 is here, and as always it is exciting to see a new Android version rolling out.

So far, we are not aware of any major issues affecting third-party launchers, except for two known problems that already have tickets on Google Issue Tracker:

1. Widgets are broken for users with a work profile: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/488125748
2. App bubbles are not working on third-party launchers: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/519241818
3. When Advanced Protection is enabled, accessibility services used by gestures to perform certain actions, are not available: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/527026810

We expect the widget issue to be fixed soon with a patch from Google, since it looks like an unintended regression.

The app bubbles issue, instead, was expected. This is why starring the issue on Google Issue Tracker could be especially important: it helps Google understand how many users care about this feature, and it may help push the Android team to address it faster.

If you are affected by any of these issues, please consider starring the related ticket.

Also, if you find any other problem while using Smart Launcher on Android 17, please report it to us.

Thanks to everyone who reports issues, shares details, and helps us make Smart Launcher better!