They shouldn’t.

Most include features such as a (subpar) news feed and weather.

These things are nice, but there’s no need for a launcher to have them. They can, and should be done by other, dedicated apps. Someone mentioned widgets, but the launcher doesn’t talk to the widget’s app via Internet… it talks to it via IPC (inter-process communication). Ergo, no Internet permission needed.

Same with keyboards. They give you access to stuff like “ID this song”, “get user-created themes” or “better swiping and handwriting recognition”, all the while doing god-knows-what with your data.

It’s basically a ruse. Give the users something thst needs the Internet permission, even if optional, so you can sensibly request it. Wheb you do, you get the unlimited, impossible-to-control permission (revokable only via ADB), allowing any and all Internet traffic.

As they say, “with power comes responsibility”. This is a lot of power. And most apps in the Play Store don’t give much confidence in their devs’ data responsibility.

You can try looking at Settings to disable Internet access, but YMMV depending on the exact flavour of Android.

Kvaesitso launcher on my phone works fine with internet access cut off (which is a thing you can do on GrapheneOS). Weather, calendar, etc. still work because it integrates with external apps for all that. It’s also FOSS.

I guess if they have a built-in weather or news widget, or something like that. The same with a keyboard if it has a gif search or something. Though, there’s no knowing that they’re not using that internet connection to send your data somewhere.

They might need access so that widgets can work?

I use Lawnchair which is FOSS rather than some company scraping data (like Nova which was bought by an analytics company and is being shut down)

They shouldn’t. Unless they have a web search feature or similar. Just use one from F-Droid or don’t use one with internet