You can also have folders in your app drawer (another big one for me). And it's quick and easy to show your hidden items in the app drawer if need be.
*begin rant*
I hate this. The app drawer is not supposed to be another fully customized home screen. That's what *gasp*
the home screen is for. It's supposed to be where you go to when you need to reliably find something you don't regularly access from the home screen. Instead, when I give up on looking for something on the home screen I end up spending JUST AS MUCH TIME hunting for it in the app drawer.
For example, I recently loaded my visiting brother's Galaxy Note 3 up with music. He had never used his phone for that despite having it for a year and a half (and a Note II for a couple years before that). Even though it used to be my phone, updates made the navigation completely foreign to me (I used it for a year on JB4.3 TouchWiz). This was made much worse due to the app drawer behaving like it was a custom home screen. I had to do a lot of storage and SD card management not possible through the MTP interface and the mSD card was encrypted, so that meant using Settings and a file manager on the phone. The menu key just brings up some home screen customization options now, as if that needed a dedicated capacitive key.
Settings was no longer accessible from launcher menus and had to be launched as an app... which meant I had to HUNT for something as basic as Settings! Yes, I am aware that some notification menus have a shortcut but I am also aware that some have a fear that just takes you to settings that customize the quick toggle or the notification menu stuff so I usually don't bother seeing which it will do on a phone that isn't mine.
My Files is a Samsung product so I knew to look in the Samsung folder in the app drawer, but that was still pretty silly. How much do they expect the average user to know about what company provides what apps?! I'm still kinda mad that there is no standard AOSP file manager, especially now that user apps can't access other files on the SD card. Now, I put the music on the internal storage where he had plenty of space but it turns out that he had attempted to back up his photos and videos and had them duplicated in three different places. After I consolidated files I had freed up enough space to get his music on the SD card. I moved them there.
He assured me that there was a shortcut to Music on his home screen but he had never used it and neither of us knew what it looked like. We spent an awkwardly long time looking for it before I decided to dive into his app drawer. Some pages only had an app of two and nothing was sorted alphabetically so I went through pages and pages of apps looking for it. Assuming that is was Samsung-customized and not AOSP, I looked all in the Samsung folder and somehow glossed right over it. I went back and flipped through all pages again. Eventually, I gave up and launched Google Play Music from the Google folder. I avoided it in the first place because I knew it would give me all kinds of first-time issues due to my brother keeping data and WiFi turned off all the time (paranoid type). Sure enough, I had to dismiss a ton of errors. It's clear that Google does not intend for this to be used as an offline player. When I went back to the home screen I finally spotted a shortcut to the Music app. Now that I knew what it looked like, I quickly found it in the Samsung folder.
Now, let's compare it to how it should be: A launcher with a customizable app drawer should EITHER have a toggle for a secondary view that sorts things as a list OR a proper app search bar, like Windows Start menu or WebOS Just Type or iOS Spotlight. Here's how iOS Spotlight works: If someone put the Music app somewhere I couldn't find in less than 2 seconds I would simply pull down on the home screen and type "M-u-s..." and the rest of the app's name until I see it. I usually see it on the very first letter, or even sooner if it's an app the user uses frequently: MRUs show up as soon as you pull down (Most Recently Used). This is smart, universal, design. Something similar should be part of AOSP and Google Launcher so that people will notice where other launchers are lacking and demand similar functionality.
How many customizable home screens do we need to give Android users for them to stop demanding pointlessly customizable app drawers at the expense of usability?! At the very least, demand an omnibox search within the app drawer. It's just good basic UI design.
Facebook
Twitter