Poco Launcher broken animations, navigation gesture lag, & other issues persist with MIUI 12.5; fix still in the works

Poco Launcher has had a pretty troubled history. Sure, the launcher was ahead of its time and came with some really unique features that weren’t present on any other launcher, but its Xiaomi counterpart – MIUI Launcher – has caught up quite quickly.

Fast forward to today and MIUI Launcher has not only incorporated almost every feature present on Poco Launcher but has also gotten other cool new stuff, one of them being some really mesmerizing app opening/closing transitions.

On the other hand, the poor old Poco Launcher has been left behind in the dust and hasn’t really seen any major change since its initial release. Quite pathetically, it still reeks of MIUI 10 and looks pretty out of place among the rest of the fancy MIUI 12.5 UI elements.

But a lack of updates isn’t the only thing the launcher is suffering from as there have also been countless complaints over the past year or so about some issues that desperately need attention.

Now, Poco had earlier announced that they’re working on a major overhaul of their launcher and will be releasing it soon with added support for the new gestures animations introduced by Android 10.

However, that was over a year ago and there’s still no sign of any update. With MIUI 12.5, there was plenty of hope that Poco will be adding a new launcher or will at least switch back to MIUI Launcher but none of that has happened.

The issues that were troubling users have only continued:

1. Missing app closing animations
2. Floating menu option missing on recent apps despite being a highlight feature of MIUI 12 and 12.5
3. Navbar gesture lags when switching between apps
4. No MIUI Launcher-like animations upon unlocking the device

In response to the above post, a community moderator has said that they’re working to fix ALL of the above issues.

However, an ETA was not provided so who knows, Poco might just quietly take yet another year.

Poco sure needs to sort out this mess as soon as possible or at least allow users to switch to the MIUI System Launcher. After all, two OS updates have now passed (MIUI 12 and MIUI 12.5), and barely any improvements have been made.

But if they’re hell-bent on doing neither, then they might soon see a shift in preference among users from Poco to Xiaomi. A launcher is one of the main components of a mobile OS and it definitely has the power to cause that.

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