Two years later, Kevin Barry left Branch and is no longer involved in Nova’s development. In his announcement, Barry revealed that he had been the sole developer for the past year, spending recent months preparing to open source Nova Launcher and clean up its codebase. However, Branch ultimately asked him to stop both development and his open-sourcing efforts.
Read a bit further:
Yeah, I read it. But they still promised open source, nothing about Barry working on it or not.
That’s why I said “keeping their promise”
The fact that the company forced him to stop getting ready to open source it strongly suggests they aren’t interested in it being open sourced.