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BlackBerry Launcher for Android has received a new update which allows users to swipe down from any black spot on the display in order to see their notifications. Similar functionality has been available on a ton of other launchers for years now, though on most launchers you don’t even need to swipe down from a blank spot, swiping down from wherever on the home screen brings down the notifications tray… which is obviously not the case here, for some reason.
That being said, this seems to be the only new feature that the company pushed out to the BlackBerry Launcher, along with general optimizations and bug fixes, of course. For those of you who do not know, BlackBerry Launcher is available on the Play Store for pretty much any modern Android device (Android 5.0+), and you can use it for 30 days without ads. After that period is done, ads will start popping up in the launcher, though you can pay 99 cents a month for the BlackBerry Hub+ subscription, which will remove ads from the BlackBerry Launcher. This, of course, does not apply to BlackBerry’s Android device, as all they need is the BlackBerry Hub+ app, and they’re good to go.
BlackBerry Launcher has been around for quite some time, and BlackBerry made it available to all Android devices a while back. Since then, this launcher has seen a number of updates, and aside from the BlackBerry Hub integration, which some people seem to love, this launcher offers some additional features that may interest you. For example, It allows you to call upon a widget for a specific app by swiping across that app on the home screen. This new version of the BlackBerry Launcher comes in for of a 1.1.11.9704 update, and the update is probably available to everyone as we speak, if it is not, it will be in the near future, as this is a staged rollout, of course.