How To Stop LauncherPro From Taking Over Your Phone

Reports have been cropping up across the net that our favourite Android launcher, LauncherPro, has been rendering some devices unusable. Here’s how to fix the problem.

Certain older versions of LauncherPro expire after a certain date, and yesterday was that day for many people. When it expires, it takes over your phone and won’t let you perform any action except enter the browser to download a new version. The problem is, LauncherPro’s mobile site is down and thus not loading in the browser, so people weren’t able to update LauncherPro. And, since they were stuck in the browser, they couldn’t make phone calls, uninstall the program, or do anything else but stare at a blank page. The developer explains the problem:

As for the expiration problem, that’s partly an oversight on my part. See, the expiration comes from the beta days of LauncherPro, where I had that in place to keep people from using stalled/unsupported versions of LP. The intention was never to “take over” the phone, when LauncherPro starts, it checks for expiration, and if it’s past the expiration it will close itself and send the user to my website to download the latest version.

That’s where my mistake was, because I didn’t realize that if the user has LauncherPro set as the default launcher, after closing itself, it will try to open again, creating a “loop” of closing and opening again.

I should note that the expiration was already removed in the latest version available (0.8.2), so the problem is only affecting users with older versions of LP. Expiration is gone for good so this will never happen again.

So if you’ve updated, you should be fine. In addition, the problem is now gone and LauncherPro should continue to function as normal. As far as the site and the forums being down, the developer says he can’t see the problem on his end, but he’s looking into it with his web host.

If you’ve run into the problem, the easiest fix is to head to this article and click here to install the newest version from the Android Market.

While I’ll still be using LauncherPro on my phone for its amazing speed-boosting powers, we understand that this could be a deal killer for many. If you’d like to try a different launcher, we’ve recently mentioned a few other great launchers we’d recommend checking out, notably the very intuitive Go Launcher and the super customisable ADWLauncher EX. That said, the developer has eliminated the problem from LauncherPro, so as long as you’re up to date, you should be fine.

How to Uninstall Expired LauncherPro from Android Phone [orly going thirty]