When Branch bought Nova, I moved on to use Lawnchair [1], which is open source. Although it has been in beta like forever, with occasional glitches, it works well enough and has enough features to satisfy my customization cravings.
I literally just want a vanilla pixel experience, but be allowed to change the search engine on the home screen searchbar... This got me into the weeds on the widget and launcher ecosystem and they're all very bad.
Also great on foldables, since it lets you have a different home screen for different display sizes.
You don't acquire something like this, as a metrics company, who does cohort analysis and touchpoint tracking[0] simply to make a bit of ad revenue.
Nova is dead. No room left for optimism.
People that work for money will want money, and ultimately can be bought.
People that work for love produce the best they can with limited resources, and are often broke.
I don't think we've found a way to bridge the gap. I've come to generally rely on work people do for love, and I contribute to them, but it's clearly not sustainable unless they have another source of income.
Anyone who solves this will produce immense value.
While I'm sure there are plenty of exceptions, exceptions that we rarely hear about because they are smaller companies that don't monopolise our attention, it is important to realize that capitalism is just a high level theory. It says things that sound good. over a long enough time period and a large enough samples it may be roughly correct. Yet it has no value over short time periods, small samples, or when it's underlying assumptions are violated.
That last bit is particularly important, even though it probably isn't applicable to Nova Launcher. Everything from the asymmetry of information, to anti-competitive actions of the business itself, to regulation will disrupt those assumptions.
I purchased Nova Launcher Prime years ago thinking it was the best investment I put on Google Play, well, maybe I should've spent the money on something else.