When I want to find an app I haven’t pinned to the home screen I swipe up from the bottom of the home screen to bring up a search bar where I can search for an app by name or scroll through list of all apps on the phone.
Thing is the search bar on my new pixel phone is actually a Google search bar that will search apps locally at the same time as providing web results, especially if it can’t find the app by name.
It’s a nice idea in theory but in practice I find it annoying, especially if I’ve just made a typo. Also, I’m just never going to use this search bar for web searching anyway because for that I would want my chosen browser so the web results are of no use to me.
I actually remember my old phone used to do what I wanted it to do, then one day it switched to what my new phone currently does and after a long time I found the solution to return it back to it’s previous behaviour except now I’ve forgotten what I did.
I only want to search my phone’s local storage for apps matching my keyword when I access the app drawer. How do I get rid of this Google search bar? (I’d love to get rid of the Google search bar from the home screen itself as well but I understand I can’t do that without root on stock android.
You can do that with an alternative launcher. They didn’t require root and there are some that are made to be very similar to the pixel launcher just with more settings.
I use lawn chair and have the search bar hidden normally, but it appears for local app only search when I swipe up.
I’m using action launcher and I really like the search. It searches apps but then has quick links too, so you can send the search query to a search engine, Google play or others
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Niagara Launcher is not FOSS, it’s closed-source. If you want an open-source search-based launcher, there are Kvaesitso and KISS Launcher for example
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It’s a very reasonable cost
Ok, cool.
which you pay annually
Pffffft. Nah.
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Yeah. I’m really not going to rent an app launcher.
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Paying a subscription for a product isn’t a donation. It’s a subscription fee.
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Niagara launcher, kiss or kvaesto are the way to go. If you want a decent app search. I would also recommend Smart Launcher 6; the search bar is pretty good. Not to mention the automatic app categories you get for all your apps.
On my pixel, if I type something in to the search bar so it displays search results (any results) and then scroll all the way to the bottom, there is a settings button I can click on that takes me to settings for the search. If I turn all the options off, then I get just my local apps in the results.
That does it. Thanks mate.
Graphene OS is a de-googled veraion of android you can install via a simple website. It has the exact feature you are looking for.
Quite a big change for a small feature
Its usually a small thing that is the last drop to make a change.
Planning to switch to Graphene OS for several reasons, but I have a reason why it will be better for me not to do that until a bit later so until then I’m just trying to be comfortable with stock.
I don’t think there’s a way to disable this in the official launcher. There are many launchers that look and feel pretty similar to the stock one though. I think Lawnchair is the best example. I wouldn’t recommend Nova Launcher (https://lemmy.ca/post/19914345). You can also just get rid of all the Google bloatware altogether and install GrapheneOS.
Yeh Graphene is the plan long term but I have to stick with stock for the time being.
Nova launcher
You can add a search bar to the app drawer from the launcher settings that searches the app drawer.
As for system wide search. I ended up using sesame
Go to the play store and search ‘on this device’.
I think this is a sign that you might have too many apps
It sounds like it but, in general I prefer to have 1 maybe 2 home screen pages of stuff I know I’ll use all the time right away and anything else I’d rather just search.
I suppose if you have only enough apps to fill maybe a single home screen page then by that standard I’d have a lot as between my less frequently used apps and all of Google’s pre-installed ones that’s probably a few pages, but generally I try to be sparing with them.
I like to use folders in my app drawer to organize them, maybe it’s something you can try? I run an old version of Nova before they got bought out
