Testing Niagara On My Titan 2 Elite
I just posted a video breaking down the unveiling of a functional Clicks Communicator, where we got our best look yet at how Niagara Launcher would function on that device. I thought it would be fun to install Niagara Launcher on my Titan 2 Elite, try using it for something like five, six days, maybe a week, and see what we can learn about that experience. I've actually tested it on here very briefly in the past, but I'm going to try to hunker down and really give it a fair shake because I didn't really do that before. I tried it for a little bit and I was wanting to go back to my normal launcher with my widgets and so forth, but we're going to really try to turn this thing into a Clicks Communicator.
Visuals and Setup
Once it's set as the default launcher, you can already see that Clicks Communicator appearance. Niagara Launcher can do proper Material You theming for your icons, which is going to give this thing a much nicer look.
One thing I am kind of pleased to see is that the animations actually do look really, really nice and smooth. If I use the home button, it slides down, but if I swipe up to go home, it goes up to the icon. That is actually kind of cool.
The Problem with Empty Space
I can already tell that one of my biggest irritations with Niagara Launcher is going to be an irritation that just comes down to how this launcher works. There's just so much empty, unused space that in a normal launcher I'm going to fill up with widgets and glanceable information to help me through my day. Here, you can't really do that.
You can add one custom widget at the top of the home screen. I thought about using one called Better Partner, an app I actually made myself, but the problem is it's super stretched out across the top and it makes it look absolutely terrible. Standard widgets, things like Google Tasks, it's just not going to work in a spot like that.
Something that really drives home how minimal this launcher is on a device like the Titan 2 Elite or the Clicks Communicator with a very similar size screen is just how much space that media player widget takes up. When you're listening to something or watching something on your home screen, you're going to lose two of your favorites potentially because they're just going off the screen. Because of that, I have had to just kind of disable that widget altogether and I'm not pinning any widget on the screen at all. There's just not room for it.
The good news is you can access widgets another way. You can do this sort of horizontal swipe and you can actually attach a widget inside that pop-up. That does work pretty well. The problem I have is that a widget is meant to be always visible, something that you can sort of reference at a glance. If I have to do this in order to see the widget, I'm going to forget that it exists and it's not going to serve that same purpose.
Software Bugs and Keyboard Conflicts
The ability to just start typing something and have it search like you see on the Communicator is pretty broken on here. Sometimes you go to do this and it actually launched my Pastiera shortcut for W. It didn't even start doing the typing thing. Sometimes it starts searching like you'd expect it to, and sometimes it just starts typing into nothingness and nothing happens at all.
What I've kind of started doing is two different things as workarounds:
You can just try to always remember to hit your home button and then start typing. That actually does seem to work pretty well for some reason.
Use the symbol key to launch your PastiKeyer shortcuts. You can hold down the symbol key and then hit your shortcut, and usually that's going to work.
In this instance, it's not, because something has triggered PastiKeyer to think that it's typing into a text field. This behavior is very, very inconsistent and frustrating for someone like me who has all of these shortcuts appended to individual keys and I'm really used to just clicking on them instinctually. For them to not work consistently is making Niagara pretty hard for me to stick with. There's just so much inconsistency that isn't there when I'm using a normal launcher.
Another really weird issue that I've come across is something that happens in Gemini. A lot of the time I will use the little shortcut in the top for a temporary chat, but when I click on temporary chat, the app has crashed. I do know for a fact that if I set my default launcher back to the normal one and go back in and do that, it doesn't crash. Another weird thing is that really often when I go into my recent apps, Niagara will just sort of be in there as a big empty space without an icon.
I want to be really clear that these sorts of things are not likely to be happening on the Clicks Communicator because they're going to be working together to make these two things work. I wonder if the Clicks Communicator build of Niagara will be available in some way. If we could pull that off that device and put it onto the Titan 2 Elite, maybe that fixes these many, many issues that I'm experiencing.
A Launcher for a Companion Phone
Framing it that way kind of got me thinking about things in a different way, and that's why I think it's so much fun to do these sorts of experiments to kind of push through that initial layer of friction to see if maybe there is something valuable on the other side. When I look at how my foldables tend to look with lots of widgets and lots of glanceable information to kind of help me through my day, and then look at what I've done here with the Titan 2 Elite, it started slowly kind of making sense to me why they went with Niagara Launcher on this thing.
Remember in that initial marketing push, they kind of got themselves into trouble by confusing people by really pushing this thing as a companion phone. I think Niagara Launcher is the launcher by and large of a companion phone. They're expecting you to carry another phone, and that's the phone that's going to have all of the work stuff, all of the widgets, all of that super dense information. This is not supposed to be for that.
When I use my Titan 2 Elite, I'm more often than not only carrying this phone. It is my only phone. Like 85% to 90% of the time when I walk out of the house, this is the only phone in my pocket. And because of that, I'm skeptical that this minimal launcher really makes sense for me.
I think that Niagara could be really, really good for someone who is using something like this as a secondary phone, or maybe for someone who just does even less than I do with their phone, maybe someone who is really truly going for this minimal experience. But for me, there are too many little drawbacks, too many little inconsistencies and bugs and problems, and really no added benefit other than that it looks very, very good.
I have officially switched back to the default launcher. I have a strong suspicion that when I get my Clicks Communicator, it's going to be deployed in the same manner as this. I'm probably going to install a different launcher on it, and I'm sure it very likely won't be the built-in Niagara-based launcher because it's going to be my full-time, number one phone. And for me, that means widgets. I just have too many on the screen with that glanceable information, too many shortcuts, too many things that I personally need.
I do want to hear from you guys, though. I know that the Titan 2 Elite isn't like broadly released yet. There aren't very many of us that have gotten their hands on one early like I've been fortunate enough to. But maybe with the Titan 2, maybe with other phones in general, what is it about Niagara that draws you in? Because I find myself not really getting the point of that launcher for the most part, and especially on the Titan 2 Elite with those little bugs and hang-ups and hiccups and so forth. Is it still something that you think you would use on that phone? Explain it to me. Talk through it in the comments down below.
