The app drawer

Opening ready to type

Swiping up puts the caret in the search box and raises the keyboard in the same motion, so opening the drawer and starting a search are one gesture rather than two. The box then stays live for as long as the drawer is open: backspacing a query away brings back the app list, but keeps the caret and keyboard up, ready for another search. This always happens — there is no setting for it.

Frosted glass drawer

Opening the drawer progressively blurs both the wallpaper behind it and the home screen underneath, behind a translucent panel. Settings → Drawer → “Frosted glass drawer” turns this off and on, and defaults on. Flipping the switch — or a device condition changing while the drawer is already open — updates the drawer’s look immediately, with no need to close and reopen it.

When blur isn’t available — battery saver is on, a developer option has disabled window blur, or the device doesn’t support it — the drawer falls back automatically to a plain, opaque background: the home screen underneath is hidden rather than blurred, and there’s no visual sign that anything was skipped.

Under the hood

Two separate blur effects run together: one blurs the wallpaper behind the launcher window, the other blurs the home screen’s own icons, widgets, and labels in place. Because the home screen stays visible (blurred) rather than fading out, the dock and page dots stay on screen too during a search — but both are marked inaccessible to a screen reader while the drawer is open, so nothing reads out decoration sitting behind the sheet.

Where it doesn’t apply

Frosted glass only applies on a phone’s main home screen. On a tablet or an unfolded foldable, the drawer uses a different layout with its own background and never blurs; the same is true on a secondary or external display. The setting still appears there, but has nothing to affect.

The app list’s tabs

The drawer’s app list has a Personal tab, plus a Work tab on a phone with a work profile, and by default a Folders tab too — a setting can move folders into the app list instead, which removes that tab. On a phone with no work profile, that setting change leaves no tabs at all: the app list becomes a single plain A-Z screen. Settings → Drawer → “App list opens first on” picks which of the remaining tabs it opens to, where there’s more than one, and defaults to the first one.

Search results as cards

Search results in the drawer render as grouped, rounded cards rather than a plain list. A card wraps one run of adjacent rows that all come from the same source, so contacts group into one card and calendar events into another. Text in the results uses a modern variable font, and the cards — along with the sheet behind them and the rest of the drawer’s chrome — take their colors from the system’s own Material color roles, so the whole drawer recolors together with your wallpaper. A row without a photo, such as a contact with none, shows a plain glyph circle in its place instead of a blank gap.

Under the hood

A card’s corners are decided from its two neighboring rows’ types: a run of adjacent rows sharing one type forms a single card, and only the contacts and calendar sections actually group this way — see Limits for what stays outside it.

Limits

Some devices opt out of window blur entirely; on those, the plain fallback is the drawer’s normal state rather than an occasional one.

App results keep the platform’s existing icon-grid rendering instead of being grouped into cards — only the contacts and calendar sections group into cards.