Not sure if this is the right category, but why are launchers like yapOS, Index OS, and FunnyOS discouraged?
Who is discouraging them?
Usually even benevolent producers of devices discourage alternate OSs because they cause issues that less educated users complain to the company about problems caused by alternate OSs, complicating troubleshooting.
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Right. Because the custom launchers get in through a security hole to escalate privileges they're more likely to brick a device if something goes wrong. I've got a "launcher sandbox" working that gives a custom Launcher.pdx all of the functions it needs to display all of the games on the device and launch them, but it's not quite ready for 2.7. Hopefully 3.0! We all love the idea of custom launchers, just want to make sure they're safe to use. 
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Custom launchers are pretty safe already! Speaking as the dev of FunnyOS/FunnyOS 2/FunnyLoader, the way everything is installed is very difficult to mess up. I believe the issue where the recovery mode combo wasn't getting recognised is fixed, so any mistakes are pretty easy to reverse now. The only big issue is if there's a bad USB connection things might not get transferred properly, but this hasn't been entirely confirmed. Really cannot wait to see what Panic cooks up for their new launcher!
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Quick update on custom launchers and 3.0: We did not wind up including the custom launcher support in 3.0, because the API that the launcher uses has changed to support groups and I didn’t want to have everything moving around at the same time. After 3.0 is out and everything’s settled down from that we’ll take another look at our launcher sandbox and see what we need to add/change.
I did test updating a device running FunnyOS on 2.7.6 to make sure the 3.0 update wouldn’t break devices. Looks fine, only hiccup is you have to remove your device from your account and re-register before you can run system update. After that the system update overwrites FunnyOS with the 3.0 launcher and everything works correctly. But if you then install FunnyOS on 3.0 it’ll crash on launch! FunnyOS will need to be updated to work with the 3.0 game list APIs, either by reverse engineering them or waiting until we document them to release the launcher sandbox, in 3.1 hopefully.
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Thanks for the update! That likely means I’ll need to update my launcher as well… (for 3.0 at least until we get the sandbox.) Honestly love that you guys are even considering working on this as it’s something most companies would never do, keep up the good work!