One of Lawnchair’s core developers has ceased his involvement with the launcher
One of the most used launcher apps by enthusiasts in recent years has been Lawnchair. We’ve covered it positively plenty of times for being based on the AOSP Launcher3 codebase while bringing extensive customization capabilities. The project was initially created by Tillie Kottmann, with a new development team moving in for the second incarnation of the app, which is currentlyactively updating it. Just over one yearafter the app resumed its development, though, it’s now involved in some newfound drama.
Patryk Michalik, one of the core developers of the launcher, has decided to part ways and stop contributing to Lawnchair, announcing his decision in a very public way — through nothing other thanLawnchair’s official Telegram channel. The reasoning? He believes one of the app’s core contributors has been submitting portions of code to Lawnchair’s codebase from a proprietary app they don’t own the source code for.In further clarification on Twitter, the team said that the offending code being added to Lawnchair was reverse-engineered code taken from the Pixel Launcher. The developers also know what’s the offending code, and they plan to remove it soon.
Per the original statement, Patryk was never informed about those actions and disapproved of them. As a result, he’s ceasing his involvement in the app. He’s even going so far as to remove all Lawnchair-related announcements signed with his name.
It’s not clear how this will affect Lawnchair’s development or if it’ll have any kind of negative impact. If the launcher keeps using reverse-engineered, non-public Google code, the door is open for further problems in the future. Given that Lawnchair is open-source, its source code is available onGitHubfor people to check out, report issues on, contribute to, or even fork.
UPDATE: 2022/07/19 11:40 EST BY AROL WRIGHT
Clarification from Lawnchair
The original version of the article included a sentence saying that it wasn’t clarified if the offending code would be removed from Lawnchair. Since the article went up, Lawnchairconfirmed to uson Twitter that the development team knows which code the issue revolves around, and plans to remove it soon. The article has been updated to reflect this info.
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