Thursday, January 22nd, I had a meeting with a couple of employees from Instabridge, the company that has acquired Nova. One of those included the CEO, Carl, and various different things were discussed in that meeting. These are my thoughts as well as statements that I made or questions that I asked within the meeting. The responses you’ll see from Carl aren’t necessarily word for word, but they are as close to that as possible.

I will be posting this to Reddit, and sharing it all with The Verge, as they reached out to me a few days ago about all of this. I don’t know if The Verge will do anything with it, and if not, that’s fine. I’m not looking for clicks and views. I simply want to provide as much clarity as possible to the Nova community as they deserve transparency and communication as much as possible and if I can still be that voice, then I’m happy to do so!

The items below are in no particular order. I simply wrote them down as they came to my mind of going over yesterday’s meeting in my mind and while looking at the chat transcript that was shared with me after the meeting had concluded.

If anyone has additional questions about any of these bullet points, feel free to ask and if there’s additional information that I remember or see in the transcript, I will definitely provide it or at least provide my opinion based on the feeling I got from yesterday’s meeting.

Open Sourcing Nova: The first thing that I mentioned was that Kevin has stated to me to pass along to them was that he would be willing to offer any help that he can to Instabridge if they were to agree to open source Nova in some way. Carl stated that they had reached out to Kevin via Twitter, but since Kevin doesn’t use Twitter, he never saw it. I provided them with Kevin’s email address to which they stated they would for sure reach out.

With regards to open sourcing Nova, Carl mentioned that they definitely aren’t against open source stuff, as they already open source some of their stuff within the company currently. It’s more a matter of figuring out what exactly to open source, be it something like releasing Nova 8.0 or Nova 8.1 as open source and letting the community have that. Also it’s a matter of figuring how to release it, as far as licensing and other similar stuff like that. They understand the community wants the open source to happen, but there’s different information floating around as to what the original contract between Kevin and Branch stated as to when Nova would become open source.

Some say it would happen if/when Kevin left Nova/Branch and stopped working on Nova while some say it would require Nova to be shut down or abandoned in certain ways for it to happen. This is something I feel Instabridge and Kevin really need to discuss privately and go from there possibly.

Why acquire Nova at this point: I asked them about why they decided to acquire Nova at this point in its life cycle, as Nova is coming on its 15th birthday on December 11th, 2026. Carl responded with, he feels that Nova is still the golden standard of not just launchers, but apps in general. Even with everything it’s been through since the acquisition at Branch, the lay offs in August 2024 and then Kevin finally leaving towards the end of 2025, Carl stated that data from Sensor Tower shows that Nova has one of the best retention numbers globally, even better than Facebook, X, and TikTok.

IB has already included ads into Nova: Instabridge has already put ads into Nova, as they want it to make them money, but not to the point where they get rich off of it. They simply want the acquisition to be sustainable and worth it. While Nova 8.2.2 was showing ads for all users, including those who owned Nova Prime, Carl stated this was a bug and was quickly fixed with the release of Nova 8.2.4. As of that release, only the free version of Nova should be showing ads and any Nova Prime user should not be seeing ads at all.

There was discussion about how to properly show ads or even where to show ads. Could be in Nova Settings, Nova Now, the app drawer or other places. They want to do it right and not flood the app with ads. It was even discussed that since they do try and provide free internet to everyone, that the possibility of having a user setting to where they could see more ads to possibly get free internet time or something along those lines. It was a brief discussion and not really detailed and not something that is happening right away and possibly never will.

IB’s plans for customer support for Nova: I asked about their plans for customer support and how they plan on handling that. It’s known that since I was laid off in August 2024, there was never anyone put in place to answer emails coming into the inbox. Support has been non-existent because that’s how Branch wanted it to be.

Carl explained that they rapidly set up a new support system by rerouting support emails through DNS, as they lacked access to Branch's support email server and website infrastructure. Carl acknowledged they are ramping up quickly and will likely make mistakes but they are going to do everything in their power to learn from those mistakes and make things the best they can be.

The deal between IB and Branch: It appears this deal only took a few months at the most and was mostly done between IB(and their parent company), and Harish at Branch. From what Carl stated, David Karnstedt, the CEO of Branch, was not involved in any way. In fact, Carl nor anyone else from IB has ever spoken to David, had a meeting with David or anything similar. Harish pushed this deal through completely and simply had David sign the docu-sign documents to finalize the deal. That speaks volume for how little Branch cared about Nova nor did it see the value and potential that Nova truly has and has had all along.

Communicating with the community: With regards to communicating with the community and being transparent, it definitely sounds like this is something they want to do, but realize they also have to be cautious while doing it. To me, that makes perfect sense. There’s definitely a fine line between not communicating enough and trying too hard and over-communicating.

I praised IB’s initial transparent post about the acquisition, noting it was a good start, especially compared to Branch’s legal and PR teams that strictly controlled and often prohibited communication. I emphasized numerous times that actions will speak louder and that the Nova community, which wants answers immediately, values transparency and communication. Carl agreed, emphasizing that trust is built slowly and the difficult balance will be meeting community demands while maintaining financial sustainability.

Privacy and GDPR Compliance: Carl affirmed IB’s commitment to privacy, noting that as a Swedish company, they must comply with GDPR, the strictest privacy law in the world. I acknowledged that Branch was also trying to be GDPR compliant and emphasized that IB should be very vocal about their compliance due to the Nova community's protectiveness of their data. Carl added that their due diligence found no signs of shady or malicious data collection at Nova under Branch, noting Nova lacked even a user database. This is very important for the community to hear since a large portion of them always felt Branch was sneaking malicious code into Nova, especially with the updates that happened after Kevin left in late 2025.

Final thoughts: Overall the meeting went really well. It was fun and enjoyable with lots of laughs. It didn’t feel like a corporate style meeting and neither of us were in a rush to be done and end the meeting. In fact, it was originally scheduled for 30 minutes and it went for more than an hour.

While a lot of things were stated, and all of my questions that I asked were actually answered with meaningful answers, the community is going to take them simply as words. IB needs to really step up and step in front of the community and be vocal as much as possible. They need to show the community that they want a similar Nova like Kevin, Rob and myself built. Something that is community first, but also as Carl stated they need to make it sustainable. It’s going to take time for that to happen, and it’s going to take trial and error. When IB makes a mistake by the community, the community will speak and IB needs to listen and make changes as quickly as possible to try and at least meet in the middle.

Ads in Nova makes sense to me and even to Rob, and I’m sure to others within the community. It can be done in a non-obtrusive way, but still be worth it and still make Nova sustainable along the way. Nova Prime users however should never experience that since they are a paying customer in some way, even if the current method of payment changes, which is definitely something that I could see happening.  

I had a Google doc that I typed up prior to our meeting that had various thoughts and about 12 or so questions. We didn’t get to all of those questions obviously because of time, but I have shared that document with Carl and IB and stated that I’d like for those questions to be answered if at all possible. Certainly no rush, but I’m hoping that happens and that they also respond to the thoughts and ideas I proposed within that document with regards to various things concerning this acquisition and Nova itself.

As of now, nothing has been answered, but it’s early and I didn’t expect it to happen overnight. Hopefully within a week or so. If/When things do get answered, I will share everything that I can with the community as I want to be as transparent as I can, as I am still very passionate about Nova and the community.