I have a Blackview BV5300 Pro smartphone; I managed to root the phone to gain administrator privileges and now I want to change the default Blackview launcher which is called BvLauncher.
The main reason for using a different launcher is because BvLauncer has a bug preventing to disable the At a Glance widget. Another bug prevents the resizing of widgets, e.g. I cannot have a 3×3 Etar calendar widget or a 3×3 Termux:widget.
I suspect also that the Blackview launcher is somewhat a spyware, because the operating systems tries in any way to prevent you from disabling or replacing it with other launchers.
Obviously I want an open source launcher, so I ignored the plethora of launcers available on the Google Play store. In the past I used the Rootless Pixel Launcher from F-Droid, but unfortunately the app was not ported for newer Android versions.
Then I came across Lawnchair launcher which seems a very promising open source project. Unfortunately it does not have a build available on F-Droid or other repositories, so I resorted on downloading the Version 14 Beta 2 as an apk file.
Being an open source project (souce code available on GitHub), it is not surprise that you can find plenty of Lawnchair clones on the Google Play store or F-Droid. Often the clone does not even mention being a clone and it does not make the proper attributions. I feel very suspicious (and angry) about that packages, so I avoided them by far. Two examples of such sospicious packages are Home Launcher and Pixel Launcher.
After installing Lawnchair I set it as the default Home app, from the Android Settings. The first problem I encounterd was that setting the Home app do not survive a phone reboot: after a restart the Home app is restored to BvLauncher.
To solve this problem I installed a Magisk module called QuickSwitch. This is a zip archive to be added as a Magisk module. Indeed I used Magisk to root my BV5300 systemlessly (e.g. by changing only the boot partition, not the system one).
QuickSwitch was created to permit the user to choose the recents provider on Android 9+. Recents is the list of opened apps accessible through the soft navigation button of Android system bar. You install the zip file from the modules button of the Magisk app. Once installed and rebooted, you will find the QuickSwitch companion app; launch it and you will see a list of recents provider: the stock BvLauncher and the installed Lawnchair. I selected Lawnchair and the app configured the Magisk modules accordingly. At reboot time the module will set something in favour of Lawnchair, all systemlessy as Magisk does.
This action does not work 100%: once rebooted the Home app is set to Lawnchair as I want, but the recents provider is still stuck to BvLauncer (as reported by the QuickSwitch app). I executed exactly the installation steps described in this post, but the problem persists: the recents provider is always reverted to BvLauncher instead of Lawnchair.
De-Blater is another useful app that creates and install a Magisk module. This enables you to hide some apps that cannot be uninstalled (e.g. all the system apps that come preloaded on the stock ROM).
It comes in the form of an app, which requires a device rooted with Magisk. When you launch it, you can select one or more apps to be hidden. Actually the system partition is not modified and the apps remains installed. A Magisk mudule is installed instead which - at boot time - makes some systemless changes, removing that apps only on the running system.
Having installed Lawnchair as an alternative Home app, I thought I could hide the BvLauncher app so that the com.blackview.launcher process would no longer execute and the recents provider would become Lawnchair. Unfortunately it seems tha BvLauncher is somewhat hard-coded into the system, so it is not possible to hide it without nasty effects. Once hidden and rebooted my device switched from Lawnchair to another stock Home app, the Game mode one, and Lawnchair was gone. I had to reinstall Lawnchair an restore BvLauncher in De-Bloater.