Nova Launcher 5.5 beta gets adaptive icons

Android 8.0 Oreo introduced quite a few new features, one of the most interesting ones being adaptive launcher icons. This feature allows launcher icons to display differently depending on the device. For example, a certain phone might display a circular shape around an icon, while the same icon would appear surrounded by square shape with rounded corners.

Adaptive icons are not available in many third-party apps yet, so Nova Launcher 5.5 beta is one of few able to deliver this feature to non-Oreo devices right now. According to Nova Launcher's creator Kevin Barry, the team behind this app also added an option that automatically scales and shapes legacy icons for consistency. He also unveiled that the feature is still in a "work in progress" stage so we might see a few new ideas being implemented by the time adaptive icons reach the non-beta Nova Launcher app.

Those who use the latest Nova Launcher 5.5 beta build can find the adaptive icons-related settings in Nova Settings > Look and Feel > Adaptive Icon Shape. This release also comes with minor fixes and required Android 5.0 Lollipop or later.

Launcher icons in Android 7.1 Nougat and earlier were sized at 48 x 48 dots. Android Oreo's adaptive icons have two layers sized at 108 x 108 dots. The system uses the outer 18 dots on each side to allow various visual effects, such as pulsing or parallax.

Nova Launcher 5.4.1 arrived last week and is the latest stable version of this app. It has been installed by more than 10 million Android users so far and currently holds a Google Play rating of 4.6 out of 5, after receiving more than 1,030,000 user votes.