I’ve been self hosting for 2 or 3 years and haven’t been hacked, though I fully expect it to happen eventually(especially if I start posting my blog in places). I’d suggest self hosting a VPN to get into your home network and not making your apps accessible via the internet unless 100% necessary. I also use docker containers to minimize the apps access to my full system. Best of luck!

I’m not aware of a new interface. Did it just change or something?

I use the Nextcloud News app. It’s not as fully featured as others, but it does the job for me. Just requires a lot of setup and has a lot of extra stuff with it if you don’t want to actually use all the Nextcloud features.

Overall, Smart Launcher is great. The things that annoy me are mainly things like: Not being able to add multiple app screens and have home in the center, lack of gestures(compared to Nova), and there was also something to do with setting the wallpaper.

My only near dealbreaker is that it’s not open source.

I can’t wait to see what they come up with next, feature wise, though.

Same, been using Smart Launcher since I heard they were getting bought. No lie, I miss Nova’s customizability, and some of Smart Launcher’s quirks annoy me; but I vastly prefer it to being data harvested. Smart Launcher is good enough for me, and leaps and bounds better than ANYTHING else I tried.