Drawer home

What you see when the drawer opens

Instead of the full alphabetical app list, opening the drawer lands on three things, top to bottom: a shelf of app icons across three swipeable pages under “New,” “Recent,” and “Most used” tabs, with an “All apps ›” button alongside them; your next couple of calendar events under a tappable “Calendar” heading that opens your calendar app; and your most recent drawer searches. Settings → Drawer → “Show drawer home” turns this off, which sends the drawer straight to the A-Z app list instead — on by default.

Swiping to the app list and back

Home and the full A-Z app list sit on one horizontal axis. Swipe left from home and it slides across to the A-Z list; swipe right from the A-Z list — or press Back — and it slides home again. The motion is sideways only, and each side remembers its own place: swipe out to “S” in the A-Z list, then swipe back, and you land on “S,” not back at the top.

On the shelf itself, a left swipe first pages between New, Recent, and Most used, the same as always. Only a swipe that runs out of pages on Most used carries on into the A-Z list, in one continuous motion rather than stopping. The same swipe continues across whichever of the A-Z list’s tabs your phone has, in a fixed order — Personal, then Work on a phone with a work profile, then Folders if it has its own tab — so a right swipe from any tab but Personal pages back one tab, and only a right swipe from Personal returns you to home. Settings → Drawer → “App list opens first on” only decides which of these tabs you land on when you enter the list, whether by swiping in or tapping “All apps ›” — it doesn’t change their order once you’re there.

Under the hood

There’s no page indicator showing how many swipes away you are — with only two surfaces today, home and the A-Z list, what’s on screen makes it obvious which one you’re looking at.

The app shelf

Recent and usage counts normally come only from apps you’ve launched through this launcher. Granting Usage access (Settings → Permissions → Usage access) widens that to apps you’ve opened anywhere on your phone — from a notification, from Recents, or from a link. “Most used” is the exception to that: it counts only launches made through this launcher regardless of Usage access, and its tally never fades over time the way some other counts on this launcher do. “New” lists newly installed or updated apps; work-profile apps there are ranked by install time only.

Work-profile apps are always counted from launches through this launcher only, even with Usage access granted.

Which tab you were last on isn’t remembered — every time you open the drawer, the shelf starts back on Recent. There’s no long-press menu on a shelf icon either; open the full A-Z list, one tap away via “All apps ›,” for that.

Under the hood

The phone only reports app-usage stats to the profile that’s actively asking for them, and reading a work profile’s usage from the personal side needs a system permission this launcher doesn’t request — so Recent and Most used stay launcher-only for work apps no matter what.

Calendar at a glance

The calendar section shows your next couple of events over the next 7 days, and follows the same Settings → Drawer → Calendar switch and permission that calendar search itself uses — turn calendar search off and this section disappears with it. Event rows here can carry the same Directions and Join buttons search results do; see Calendar in search for how those work.

Under the hood

This section’s 7-day window is narrower than drawer search’s own calendar window, and it deliberately doesn’t exclude an event that’s already under way — an all-day event that started earlier today can still appear, since excluding anything already started would also drop today’s all-day events entirely in some time zones.

Recent searches

The last few searches you actually ran appear at the bottom, with a “Clear all history” control and a way to expand past the first three. Only a search you followed through on is recorded — typing something and backing out of it without tapping a result adds nothing to the list.

Limits

The A-Z list’s tab strip isn’t available on the home surface itself: work apps still appear in the shelf, badged, but folders aren’t reachable from home — you have to swipe or tap through to wherever the A-Z list shows them, its own Folders tab by default or the Personal page if you’ve moved folders into the app list. If Settings → Drawer → “App list opens first on” is set to Folders, swiping back to home costs extra swipes: two on a phone with no work profile (Personal, then Folders), three where there is one (Personal, then Work, then Folders), since each swipe back only rewinds one tab at a time. A multi-day event, such as a week-long trip, sorts to the front and can fill both of the section’s two slots for its whole span, so what’s shown may not be your very next actual appointment.