The folks behind the popular Niagara Launcher are rolling out a major update today, bringing a useful digital wellbeing feature as well as the ability to backup your settings!

The new digital wellbeing feature is called Usage Breaker and it's designed to give you gentle nudges that tell you you may be using an app for too long. It's not as restrictive as setting an app limit which is good because app limits can get in your way and some even override them as a result. You select the apps you think you spend too much time in, and Niagara will send a reminder about the duration of your current app session.

Usage Breaker is available in Niagara Pro. The devs realize it's very similar to the screen time reminder feature that Google recently rolled out, but hey, what can you do: great minds think alike. (They were obviously working on this separately.)

The other major new feature is backup support. This lets you reliably transfer your setup of Niagara from one device to another. It's available for both Free and Pro users under the Advanced menu in Niagara Settings. The feature is in preview right now so the devs warn everything may not transfer yet. Also it's not designed to transfer your home screen setup.

Lastly, the team has some big personal news: working on Niagara Launcher is now their full time job! They've opened up a proper office in Germany and did the paperwork to turn the project into a proper company. Going full-time has allowed them to work on long requested features like backup support as well as fix many bugs.

To make this sustainable, the Niagara devs will be raising the price of Pro, but only for new subscribers starting in February 2025. Lifetime purchases are unaffected.

Congrats to the team on this big launch!

With Android 16 DP2 on Pixels, Google Keep is not only preinstalled but the Notes role is FINALLY enabled by default, with Keep being set as the default role holder.

This brings us one step closer to the launch of the Android's note-taking feature, which was originally introduced in Android 14. The feature lets you open a default note-taking app in a floating window by pressing the tail key on a stylus, and it also lets you open a new note on top of the lock screen by pressing a new shortcut.

Currently, the Notes role is disabled by default, but you can enable it by toggling a developer option. Keep supports the Notes role, but Google isn't rolling the feature out, with the app simply displaying a "coming soon" message.

Android 16 DP2 introduces the repeat keys feature that I first spotted in development in Android 15 QPR2 Beta 1.

When it's enabled, repeat keys lets you "hold down a key to repeat its character until the key is released." Disabling this could help users who have trouble picking their finger back up quickly enough after they press a key, as it would stop them from accidentally repeating characters they didn't intend to.

Android 16 DP2 tweaks the keyboard settings menu to add a new subpage for the four physical keyboard accessibility options (sticky keys, bounce keys, slow keys, and mouse keys).

Along with the new subpage, some keyboard accessibility options now have their own menu. For bounce keys and slow keys, you can adjust the threshold (0.2s, 0.4s, 0.6s, or custom). For mouse keys, there are now instructional images on how to use it.