And while those are cool and all, they have sever limitations due to the frequencies they use and can not scale past a hobbiest load.

If we want what we consider a “full featured” internet alternative, it will have to be built as a layer on top of the existing internet. Similar to the dark web, it’ll be sort of a grey web where tech savvy people convene and don’t cause enough fuss to be a target for crackdown. So long as encryption remains legal there are no major barriers. If we lose that it becomes much more difficult.

I think one of the main selling features that made Octopi stand out from the others was the multiple home screen layouts. I agree with you and would prefer only one, but supposedly it’s a killer feature for people who have folding phones with multiple screens so they can have different layouts for each mode the phone is used in. Hopefully a toggle will be made for us normies somewhere down the road to just have one. Or, maybe I’m being closed minded and there’s another way I could be using s landscape homescreen that I haven’t thought of yet.

Yes, it has some rough edges. I remember a few months back icons would be different sizes depending on how you added them to the home screen, but that’s been fixed.

I agree that I’d rather it be open source, but I haven’t found one that can handle folders within app icons like Nova, and this is the closest one. The price is reasonable and the updates are regular, so I’ll stay here for a while. It definitely has promise.

I don’t know if it’s exacly what you’re looking for, and it’s early so still has some bugs, but try Octopi Launcher. It allows you to stack widgets into cards and gives you pretty granular grid flexibility.

There’s really no reason something like that couldn’t exist. A foundation would just have to decide to dedicate the resources to it.

The issue is it would have to gain significant adoption in order for web admins to think to include it. This list here is actually a lot larger than you usually see. It’s often just the big 2 or 3.