Folders

Sorting a folder’s contents

Long-press a folder, on the home screen or in the dock, and choose “Sort A-Z” to reorder its contents alphabetically. It’s a one-time action rather than a mode that keeps sorting — apps you add afterward land wherever you drop them. There’s no undo for a sort, matching manual dragging inside a folder, which is also not undoable. The alphabetical order matches the same ordering the drawer’s own A-Z list uses, so a sorted folder and the drawer agree on what counts as alphabetical.

Under the hood

The underlying OS version already ships a complete folder long-press menu, but it’s turned off behind a feature flag that also covers some unrelated, unfinished widget-resize work. Rather than turning that whole flag on, this launcher enables only the folder-menu part of it. The sort itself is a pure reordering routine, tested against eleven cases covering things like accented letters and symbol-prefixed titles.

Choosing which apps are in a folder

Open a folder and tap the vertical ⋮ button in its footer — the same menu you’d get by long-pressing the closed folder icon — to reach Remove, Sort A-Z, and Select apps. Select apps opens a full-screen picker listing every installed app, with the folder’s current members already checked. Tap a cell to check or uncheck it; nothing changes until you tap Save, and Cancel discards everything.

The picker has a search box, plus dropdown filters for folder membership (any app, only apps already in this folder, only apps not in this folder, or apps not in any folder), for category, and — on a phone with a work profile — for personal versus work apps. The membership and category filters take a moment to populate when you first open the picker, since each has to look at every app on the device; both stay disabled until they’re ready.

Only apps appear in the picker. Pinned shortcuts and app pairs already in the folder aren’t shown and aren’t touched by anything you do there. If the same app is pinned into a folder more than once, the picker shows it as a single checked cell — unchecking it removes every copy, and checking it again adds exactly one.

Unchecking apps down to a single item left in the folder collapses it into a plain icon for that item. Emptying it of every app in the picker doesn’t necessarily leave nothing behind, though — a folder only dissolves once it’s down to one item or fewer counting everything inside it, so a folder that still holds a pinned shortcut or an app pair keeps existing even with every app unchecked.

The picker has no way to dismiss it by tapping outside the grid, so an accidental tap can’t discard a large selection — only Save or Cancel closes it.

Under the hood

Saving applies every addition before any removal, even though the on-screen result looks like one atomic change. That ordering matters: removing enough apps can dissolve a folder down to nothing partway through, and applying additions first avoids ever letting that happen mid-save. The “not in any folder” filter is built from a one-time snapshot taken when the picker opens rather than a live query, so ticking a checkbox can never make an app disappear from the list out from under you.

Where your folders live

By default, the drawer’s app list has a third tab, Folders, sitting alongside Personal and, on a phone with a work profile, Work. It lists every folder you have — sitting on the home screen or archived — as a grid of folder icons at the drawer’s own icon size, in alphabetical order.

Settings → Drawer → “Show folders in” switches this to “The app list” instead: the Folders tab disappears, and every folder shows up as a tile among the apps on the Personal page. Settings → Drawer → “Folders at the top” (on by default) then decides how those tiles are arranged — as a block above all your apps, or sorted into the alphabetical run under their own names. That second row only means something once folders are in the app list, so it hides itself while they’re still on their own tab rather than sitting there with nothing to do. Switching to the app list shows a confirmation naming how many apps will be tucked inside folders and hidden from the list; switching back to a tab confirms nothing. On a phone with no work profile, choosing the app list also removes the tab strip entirely, since Folders was the only reason for one — the drawer becomes a single plain A-Z list.

An app inside a folder is hidden from the A-Z list only while folders are in the app list; sorting a folder or picking its members works exactly the same either way. An app inside more than one folder is hidden once and shows up in every one of those folders’ tiles; taking it out of one folder doesn’t bring it back to the list while it’s still in another. The Work tab is never filtered this way — a work app inside a personal folder still appears on the Work tab too, alongside sitting in that folder’s tile.

Making a new folder from the drawer

A “New folder” button sits on whichever surface is currently showing folders — the Folders tab, or the Personal page when folders are in the app list. Tapping it opens the same app picker described above, starting empty, with Save disabled until you’ve picked at least two apps. Since there’s no folder yet to reference, its membership filter drops “In this folder” and “Not in this folder” — the unfiltered “any app” option and “Not in any folder” both still work as they do in the regular picker. Saving names the new folder after the most common app category among the apps you picked — four travel apps become “Travel” — falling back to the generic name “Folder” when there’s no clear majority. The new folder lands on whichever surface is showing folders, already scrolled into view and closed, and can be dragged onto the home screen like any other folder.

Removing, archiving, and moving folders

Tapping a folder tile opens it, with the same Sort A-Z, Select apps, and long-press menu as a folder on the home screen. Dragging a tile onto the home screen moves that folder there — if it was already sitting on a page, it’s relocated, not duplicated.

Removing a folder now asks what you mean. Archive takes it off the home screen but keeps it, and its contents, wherever folders are shown. Delete removes it the way removing a folder always has, with the usual snackbar and undo. Cancel leaves everything alone.

Archiving shows its own “Moved to Folders” undo prompt, and undoing it returns the folder to the exact cell — or the exact dock slot — it came from. An archived folder looks exactly like any other folder wherever folders are shown, with no badge marking it as archived. Archiving is only offered for a folder that isn’t already archived; removing an already-archived tile deletes it outright.

Settings → Drawer → “App list opens first on” controls which tab — Personal, Work, or Folders — the drawer’s app list opens on; Work only appears as an option on a phone with a work profile, and Folders only appears as an option while it has its own tab. By default, the app list opens on the first tab.

Wherever folders are shown, they don’t update live while on screen — the view refreshes when you return to it, when a folder you had open closes, or when the drawer resets, so a change made elsewhere while you’re already looking at it appears the next time you come back rather than instantly.

Under the hood

An archived folder is stored as an ordinary folder whose location is set to a value that doesn’t correspond to any real home screen position — which is what lets it load fully, with its contents intact, while never appearing on the home screen. The same “no real position” trick is also why a single-item archived folder doesn’t collapse into a plain icon the way a home-screen folder would: the collapse needs a home screen cell to land in, and an archived folder doesn’t have one. That collapse becomes possible again the moment you drag the folder onto the home screen, since the drop assigns it a real position first.

An archived folder emptied out because its last app was uninstalled while the launcher wasn’t running is usually cleaned up right away, in that same reload — reaping apps uninstalled while the launcher was closed and reaping emptied archived folders both happen on the same pass. One emptied out by an uninstall that happens while the launcher is running instead lingers as an inert, empty tile — tapping it does nothing — until the next reload that has some other cleanup to do.

Dragging a folder tile out of the drawer carries the folder’s real identity, so the drop moves the existing folder rather than creating a second copy of it; the home screen’s old view of that folder is retired at the same moment the new one appears, so there’s never a moment with two folders for one.

Limits

There are no nested folders — a folder can’t contain another folder. There’s no dedicated archive view wherever folders are shown: no separate section, no badge count, and no bulk restore beyond dragging folders out one at a time. The app picker decides folder membership only; the order of items inside a folder is still controlled by manual dragging or by Sort A-Z.

With folders in the app list, the fast-scroll letter index goes by row, not by app — an app named “Spotify” tucked inside a folder called “Music” is reachable under M, not S. The scrollbar’s size is very slightly off with folder tiles present, though tapping a letter still lands exactly where it should. Folders in the app list and Private Space don’t combine: while a Private Space is unlocked, the list falls back to its plain layout with no folder tiles at all, rather than showing both.