Swipe up from Home to open the drawer. Swipe back down, or drag the handle at the top, to close it.
Recently opened
The drawer opens with a row of the apps you launched most recently, under a Recent heading. It holds one row whatever your density setting, and reorders as you use things rather than growing.
Two deliberate limits:
- It counts apps opened through Toolrack. Something you opened from a notification or another launcher will not appear. Reading the system-wide list would mean asking you for usage-access permission — a standing grant to read every app’s activity — which is a steep price for one row.
- A hidden app never appears here, however recently you opened it. Otherwise hiding would be undone by the drawer itself.
Turn it off under Settings › App drawer › Recent apps. The row also stays out of the way on its own: it is hidden while you are searching, and on a fresh install it does not appear until you have opened something.
Two views
Settings › App drawer › View mode
Grid is a plain alphabetical grid of everything.
Alphabetical sections the same grid under letter headings and adds an A–Z rail down one edge. Tap a letter to jump to its section, or drag along the rail to scrub through them continuously without flinging the list. Only letters that actually have apps behind them are drawn, so the rail never offers a jump that lands nowhere.
Which edge the rail sits on
Settings › App drawer › Handedness puts the rail on the right or the left. Right-handed puts the A–Z selector on the right edge, with the letter headings on the opposite side — so the heading you are scrubbing towards is never sitting under your thumb.
Density
Settings › App drawer › Density controls how much fits on screen.
| Density | Columns |
|---|---|
| Comfortable | 3 |
| Balanced | 4 |
| Compact | 4 |
| Dense | 5 |
Comfortable and Dense change the column count; Balanced and Compact differ in the spacing around each icon and its label.
Those counts are for a phone. On a larger screen the drawer fits more columns at the same icon size, so a tablet shows more apps per row rather than the same few spread across it — and it re-fits when you rotate.
Search
The search field can sit at the top or the bottom of the drawer (Settings › App drawer), and it searches several things at once.
| Layer | What it matches | |
|---|---|---|
| Apps and actions | Installed apps and their app shortcuts | Always on |
| System settings | Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Display, Battery, NFC, Apps | Optional |
| Web search | Anything else, handed to your browser | Optional |
Results always appear in the same order — apps, then shortcuts, then settings, then the web fallback — so the thing you want stops moving around between searches.
Settings › Search settings also chooses whether results come back as one combined list or separated under category headings.
The long-press menu
Long-pressing an app in the drawer opens a menu with its app shortcuts, an App info entry, and the controls for hiding it and for adding it to a bubble.
Holding and then pulling instead drags the app out onto Home — see Home screen.