Lawnstate: Building Momentum

Hello everyone.

For a while, the project felt stagnant. Progress was slow, and it often felt like we were waiting for something to happen. That's changing. In the last few weeks, we’ve taken more active leadership to inject new energy into Lawnchair, and the release of Lawnchair 15 Beta 1 is just the first step.

Welcome to Lawnstate, a blog that will now be a regular check-in on our progress, our challenges, and our path forward. No more long silences.

The Release: Lawnchair 15 Beta 1 is Here

Our first priority was to get L15B1 out the door. It’s a massive update, built on the Android 15 codebase, and it lays the foundation for everything that comes next. We focused on core features you've been asking for, like creating folders directly in the app drawer and adding new customization options for the dock.

Crucially, this release was the first major test of our new Lawnchair Triage Team. By efficiently managing the influx of reports on GitHub, they are clearing out duplicate issues and ensuring community feedback gets to the right place. This foundation is critical for allowing us to move faster.

The Ecosystem: Lawnicons, Funding, and Our Strategy

Lawnchair doesn't exist in a vacuum. The health of our entire ecosystem is key to our success.

Lawnicons

Our companion icon pack, Lawnicons, continues its active development. The latest release, v2.14.1, redesigned the app to use Material 3 Expressive and brought our total icon count to over 6,700. The team (particularly x9136) is taking a short, well-deserved break and will resume accepting contributions in August while we investigate some minor stability issues in the app.

Our Financial Strategy

Thanks to your incredible generosity, our Open Collective now has a healthy balance of over $1,700 USD. We've finalized our strategy for these funds, focusing on transparency and impact.

Our first principle is prudence. We will cover all operational costs, like web hosting, to ensure sustainability. Beyond that, our strategy is to reinvest directly into the project's velocity.

We will be running small, transparent experiments to see how we can best use funds to remove development bottlenecks. This could mean investing in a piece of hardware that demonstrably cuts down build times, or acquiring specific devices for testing. Every strategic expense will be discussed internally and its results shared with the community.

We believe this approach—investing in our own infrastructure—delivers more value than a simple bounty system, which we will not be pursuing. Our goal is to turn your contributions into faster, better releases.

The Road Ahead

Our development path is clear and focused on building significant new value. While the current Beta is stable, we know there are bugs and regressions to address. These fixes will be bundled into our next major update.

Our main effort is a User Experience Overhaul. This is where I'll be focusing my development time. The work involves a deep architectural refactor of core systems like Search to make them faster and more extensible, and a major push to improve the UI/UX of our settings and other interfaces.

In parallel, we are supporting our core contributors who are tackling the deeper, long-term challenges, such as the future Android 16 rebase. This division of labor allows us to make progress on all fronts simultaneously, ensuring the next Lawnchair release is a major step forward in both stability and features.

Thank you for being here and for believing in the project.

— TheSuperDragon, from the Lawnchair team

Published on July 23, 2025