When you’ve been around as long as Android has, many apps have gone the way of Harvey Dent. Some legendary, trusted names have become completely unnecessary or unsafe to use. Make sure you don’t have any of them on your phone.
Not many Android apps have the notoriety of Nova Launcher. It arrived over a decade ago and has been a fan-favorite home screen replacement ever since. Sadly, its reputation took a big hit four years ago, and it’s no longer a safe recommendation.
Nova Launcher was acquired by Branch Metrics in 2022. At first, the original dev team stuck around, but after a while, it was only kept running by founder Kevin Barry. Then, last year, he stepped away, leaving Nova completely in the hands of Branch Metrics. The company broke promises and started harvesting user data. It’s time to say goodbye.
Android is lucky to have many quality web browsers. One that has been commonly thrown in as an alternative to Chrome or Firefox is UC Browser. So what’s wrong with it? Take a gander at the Wikipedia entry for UC Browser, and you’ll quickly see the issues.
The “ Privacy and security vulnerabilities ” section is over 500 words — here’s the highlights. US Browser saves bandwidth by compressing data, which means your traffic gets sent through proxy servers. As recently as 2021, it was discovered that the browser was sending IP addresses directly to Alibaba servers. Even if you can overlook that, UC Browser is not even that good of an app.
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