I love LineageOS and have used microG services for so long but forks like this strike me as sad as needing to assimilate to the look and feel of iOS. It comes off as cheap and unoriginal. Now this is harsh criticism I understand but I do appreciate how much effort it must have taken to make all of these app forks. I only wish the effort was spent building something more interesting.
Android launchers are like Linux desktop environments. There are plenty of options, and everyone can pick the one that works best for them. It's easy to install another launcher and set it as the default.
/e/'s Bliss Launcher is going to feel more familiar for people who are coming from iOS. For a more traditional Android experience, Lawnchair* would be a better fit. It's just like how GNOME and KDE are closer in design to the desktop environments of macOS and Windows, respectively.
Every Android distribution has to pick a default launcher. /e/ choosing an iOS-like launcher by default is their way of attracting users who want a simpler user experience.
To me it comes off as Apple fans doing Apple-type shit. I'm not an Apple UI fan, but if someone is, they should imitate what they like instead of trying to invent some entirely new garbage paradigm, without any particular inspiration, when they really just wanted to make a nice distro that they would enjoy using.
I think they have even less amount of effort that they can spend. And all of that is spent keeping the builds up to date, the infra up to date and working, and other low level things like that. I wish they get enough resources to employ more people to increase efforts on QA, UX and other such things.
the forks create a great burden of keeping them up to date, and they can't keep up of course with constrained resources. Though it gives them independence to achieve orthogonal goals.
Having default apps colors aligned is soothing, not sad at all. It's not iOS-y beyond the launcher.
It does look like /e/ mimics iOS by default, though, which is where I think the original poster's criticism is aimed. The screenshot in this article showing bliss is very iOS-y.
