It’s been 2 months since I release an update to ReZ Launcher, some of you might wonder where have I been & is this project going to be abandoned just like the old one?

The truth is, I was that “unemployed friend at 3 am” before this January, it’s the reason why I can pump out feature after feature until Version 1.9. And partially thanks to this project, I got an Android developer position and started working since mid January.

The sad thing about being employed though is that now your time becomes your employer’s, so I don’t get much of it left to work on ReZ except weekends, and sometimes even in weekends I don’t even got the time because other more important things came out of nowhere.

What’s the future of ReZ Launcher?

The development is still going, just going to be really, really slow. Because of this, I’ve planned two things that might help keeping this launcher afloat in the future:

1. Open Beta

Starting today, I’m opening up beta testing for ReZ Launcher. This is for some of you that can’t wait to try out the new features and are not afraid of the risk. The beta version will be the development progress I’ve done so far at the time of release. And It won’t be as stable as the release version.

Ideally I would like to release a new beta version biweekly, basically a more frequent but unstable update. But it’s hard to say what might happen, so I’ll see if I can manage.

Starting today, you can go to the Play Store page and register to become a beta tester.

2. Open Source

Later down the road, I plan to make ReZ Launcher open source, let the community helps with development.

But don’t expect it to come any time soon, I still got a lot of planning to do before open sourcing it, I don’t want to just throw the source code out and call it a day, I want guidelines in-place & I want the code to be workable by others before I hand it out to the public.

So I’ll say it again: DON’T expect it to come any time soon.

That’s all I have to say for now, hope you all have a wonderful day.

Funny things about this job I’ve got, they knew my whole shtick was in Compose and they are still using XML & Java 8, I still got hired. Furthermore, I don’t think they even have the resource to switch to Kotlin & Compose any time soon. So to this day I’m still confused why was I hired…