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!