try lawnchair
this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2026
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Android
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I've been liking Total Launcher
Seconded. I don't have a tablet, but I use Total on my phone and I'm very happy with it.
It requires a bit of work to get it set up, but the trade off is how massively customisable it is.
Lawnchair and Nova (without network permission) are my personal goto. At this point I'm on Lawnchair for everything, but I acknowledge Nova feels smoother at times.
Octopi launcher is a very good Nova replacement
Heartily seconded. I had a couple of false starts, but it's now my launcher of choice. I even supported the dev.
Just gave Octopi a spin for the first time in ages. Seems solid - smooth, ad-free. Only thing I couldn't figure out is doing custom backgrounds for icons (e.g., having a colored squircle behind Arcticons icons).
A little more user-friendly than Lawnchair, but less polished than Nova. Not open source, but not (currently) owned by an ad company. It's a nice middleground.
The ones I have used before are Kvaesitso and Lawnchair. The former is focused for search (might be awesome on a smaller tablet and/or one with a flappy keyboard!), while the latter is closer to the normal Android launcher.
I switched to lawn chair after nova added ads. No complaints, but my main requirement is the option to get rid of the home screen search bar.
I use downgraded version of Nova (free of ads).
I like Action launcher. I have been using it for years.
Ballista.
I have never tried it on a tablet, but I really like Kvaesitso on my phone. It's a very customisable search-based launcher.
You can tag and/or rename apps to make them appear in relevant searches, and in tag-based views with the ability to include a single app in multiple categories/views.
Your home screen can include a section of favorites, where you can pin apps + other shortcuts, and order them manually, or based on frequency of usage, or a combination of those. This is where you can switch between favorites and any pinned tag-based views.
The search bar can search for many different things. Apps, contacts, files and the web, of course, but also other sources through various integrations, and custom search engines where you supply the search URL with a variable in place of the search string.
There are even more features to uncover, depending on your user preferences, but this covers the stuff that makes Kvaesitso useful to me.