I can not tell you when I last used my Chromebooks app launcher to launch an app. I mean, that’s not entirely true. I use it to search for an app by typing and then tapping the result to open standalone PWAs, but what I really mean is that I have no idea when I last scrolled through the list of apps to choose one manually and I have several reasons for it.
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First of all, I’ve lived a large part of my ChromeOS life in Canary mode, so I’ve trained myself not to rely on anything that always undergoes changes, or that gets consistently corrupted, and the launcher has qualified like everyone else. these things quite often over the past few years.
Second, and probably more importantly, the syncing of apps in the launcher has been ridiculously unreliable for longer than I can remember. I have written a lot about this in the past, especially when I gave my wish list of vital changes that it should be used to be worth using. Although I’m happy to report that many things from that list have already been taken and implemented as feedback thanks to the development team, the damage has already been done. In true Google fashion, the launcher itself has been so unreliable for so long that I have trained myself to avoid it at all costs for visual choice.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the launcher is an important piece in Google’s operating system and allows it to stand out among the crowd. It is a unique feature and lets users store and recall a seemingly infinite number of website icons (web apps) in a standalone way as opposed to constantly entering URLs or visiting websites via Chrome tabs in the main browser with other things so that it feels very personal and the experiences feel more contained. I also love the idea of collecting and organizing app icons so my Chromebook really feels like it’s mine instead of just being a device, I logged into the library and clicked on the Chrome browser to start searching on Google. App icons give that ‘Windows program list’ feel if you know what I mean.
But every time I move an icon to another folder or somewhere in the launcher, or even every time I delete a handful of old PWAs from the list, they reappear after I restart my Chromebook. I thought this would be solved when the company finally released its Productivity Launcher, but I think I was wrong in believing that the issues of performance and experience would be solved when it finally came to reconsider it all in its core – an opportunity Google recently had when it built this from scratch!
The Productivity Launcher is more functional and beautiful than its predecessor, the Peaking Launcher, but if it’s as skewed as to perform the core functionality it’s built for, then I think I’ll keep searching for what I have in there and start the blind. Again, searching is faster and has even become a different nature in my use of Chromebooks, but that does not excuse the fact that I am constantly haunted by icons that keep reviving themselves from the dead and messing around at the top of my launcher .
My fear is that Google will do what Google always does, and focus more on the visual aspect of beautifying things and completely neglecting to fix what everyone has hated about them from the start. It’s famous for launching things half cooked and then implementing user feedback to make the experience acceptable within 5-10 years thereafter, but when it comes to bread and butter on the Chromebook, I hope it stops being the trend.
For now, this is the only time I ever need my Chromebook launcher from a visual ‘select-an-app-icon-and-touch-it’ point of view as opposed to quickly searching and pressing the Enter key on my keyboard , when I ‘I use my Lenovo Chromebook Duet in tablet mode. This is because it makes a lot of sense to have icons for a touch experience. For this reason, I do not believe that Google should get rid of the launcher completely, but I do believe that it has a responsibility to its users to resolve this sync issue. If it does not, and I do not really think it will see how it has already been a prominent annoyance for years, then I will continue to ignore it, and that is just unfortunate.