Launchpad is dead — what replaced it on macOS Tahoe

Launchpad shipped with OS X Lion in 2011 as Apple's attempt to make a Mac feel like an iPad. For fourteen years it was a quietly polarizing feature: people who loved it built elaborate folder grids of every app on their machine, and people who never used it forgot it was there. With macOS 26 Tahoe — announced at WWDC 2025 and released in September 2025 — Apple ended the argument. Launchpad is gone.

What replaced it is an "Apps" view that opens from the same rocket icon in the Dock. It looks a lot like the App Library on iPhone and iPad: apps are grouped into fixed categories like Productivity, Creativity, Utilities, and Entertainment, with a Suggested row at the top. The same view shows up inside Spotlight as one of Apple's new Browse Modes (Apps, Actions, Files, Clipboard). What it does not include is folder customization, drag-to-rearrange, or any version of the old iOS grid you could shape to your hand.

If you used Launchpad as a visual app launcher and now you cannot, this post is the honest map of what to use instead — ranked by how much input each option costs you for the apps you actually open every day.

What actually changed in macOS Tahoe

Three concrete differences matter for anyone who launched apps from Launchpad:

The grid is gone. The new Apps view is a category list, not a customizable page-by-page grid. You cannot make a "Design" folder with Figma, Sketch, and Affinity in it. The categories are fixed by Apple and resort themselves between launches.

Spotlight ate part of the job. Apple's overhauled Spotlight in Tahoe added Browse Modes — press the hotkey, switch to "Apps," and you get a similar grid without leaving the keyboard. For people who already typed app names, this is a small upgrade. For people who scanned the Launchpad grid visually, it is not a like-for-like replacement.

Spatial memory is no longer rewarded. Launchpad was slow but it was spatial. After a year of use, your hand knew Slack was on page two, second row, third column. The new Apps view does not let you place anything anywhere, so that muscle memory has nothing to attach to.

Community projects like Launchpad Revived restore the old binary, and Apple has not (yet) ripped the underlying framework out. For now you can drag the old Launchpad app back into the Dock. But that is a workaround on borrowed time. The interesting question is what to use as a real replacement.

Ranking the replacements by input cost

Here is the honest tier list. The unit is "how much do I have to do to launch one app," counting key presses, mouse travel, and the cognitive step of recalling a name versus recognizing a position.

1. The Dock — zero input events, expensive in mouse travel

The Dock is the oldest spatial app launcher on the Mac and it never went anywhere. One click on a pinned icon launches the app. Zero input events; Fitts's Law handles the rest. The catch is that the Dock is a screen-edge target — your cursor has to travel from wherever it is to the bottom of the display, which gets expensive on a 32-inch monitor. It also has a hard ceiling: maybe twenty icons before recognition starts costing you longer than typing would.

Best for: the five or six apps you open dozens of times a day, especially on smaller screens.

2. Spotlight / new Apps view — two input events, scales infinitely

Press the Spotlight hotkey, type two letters, hit return. With Tahoe's Browse Modes you can also switch to the Apps grid inside Spotlight if you want to scan rather than type. Two events, no mouse travel, and it scales the same whether you have 30 apps installed or 300.

The catch is the kind of memory it requires. Typing forces you to name the app — and "the messaging app I use for the design team" is not a name. You have to think "Slack" first. For apps you reach for by reflex rather than by name, that recall step is surprisingly heavy.

Best for: apps you open by name, including the long tail you launch once a week.

3. Typed launchers — Raycast, Alfred, LaunchBar — two input events, better results

Same shape as Spotlight, but the indexing is faster, the fuzzy matching is more forgiving, and the surrounding features (clipboard history, snippets, workflows, calculator) earn the install. If you already think in keywords, this is the gold standard. The interaction itself — hotkey, type, return — is identical to Spotlight.

Best for: keyboard-first workflows where you want one tool to handle launches plus the long tail of utility tasks.

4. Radial menu — one held gesture, recognition not recall

Hold a trigger (a hotkey or a mouse side button), flick toward the wedge for the app you want, release. You do not type a name. You do not click an edge of the screen. You do not scan a grid. After a week, your hand learns that Figma lives at 2 o'clock and Slack at 8 o'clock and the menu becomes invisible — you flick before it finishes drawing.

This is the interaction Maya and Blender shipped thirty years ago and the one every modern game uses for weapon selection. It is not a typing tool; it is a direction tool. For the eight to twelve apps you bounce between constantly, it is the lowest-friction option on macOS.

Best for: the top of your usage curve — the apps you reach for so often that naming them feels redundant.

Side by side

Why the radial menu wins for the apps that matter

The Launchpad people miss is not the grid. It is the fact that for the apps you used most, you stopped looking at the screen entirely. You opened Launchpad, your hand moved, the app launched. You were doing recognition, not recall.

That is the thing the new Apps view broke. It resorts itself, the categories shuffle, and you cannot place the apps you care about where your hand expects them. So you fall back to typing — which works, but typing is recall. You have to think the app's name before you can launch it.

A radial menu is the only post-Launchpad option that preserves the old "I do not look, I just go" feel. Wedges sit in fixed positions you choose. After a few days, your hand knows them. The visual menu becomes a safety net, not the interface — exactly the same way a competent Launchpad user stopped reading the Launchpad grid.

The "two tools" setup most people land on

One launcher rarely covers the whole day. The honest configuration most heavy users settle into:

• A typed launcher (Spotlight, Raycast, or Alfred) bound to ⌘Space or ⌥Space. Used for the long tail, file search, the calculator, and any app you would naturally reach for by name.
• A radial menu bound to a mouse side button or a function key like F19. Used for the top eight to twelve apps, plus context wedges (toggle Do Not Disturb, run a Shortcut, paste from clipboard history, drop in an emoji).

There is no overlap because the task shapes are different. When you are in keyboard mode, you type. When you are in mouse mode, you flick. Neither tool tries to be the other, and Launchpad is replaced not by one new thing but by the right tool for each half of how you actually work.

If you specifically miss the Launchpad grid

A few honest options, in order of how much they will let you down:

1. Use Spotlight's Apps Browse Mode. Closest visual analogue to Launchpad. No customization, but it is built in and Apple-supported.
2. Restore the old Launchpad binary. Community tools can swap the new Apps.app for the older Launchpad executable. It works in Tahoe today; it will probably break in a future point release.
3. Pin a folder to the Dock. Drag your Applications folder to the right side of the Dock and set it to Grid view. Not as polished, but it is a customizable, spatial alternative that Apple is unlikely to remove.
4. Switch to a radial menu. Different shape from Launchpad, but it preserves the thing Launchpad was actually good at — knowing where an app lives without having to look.

The one-paragraph version

Apple removed Launchpad in macOS 26 Tahoe and replaced it with a fixed-category Apps view inside Spotlight and the Dock. The replacement covers the "show me everything I have installed" job adequately and breaks the "open my favorite apps without looking" job entirely. For the long tail of apps, use Spotlight or a typed launcher like Raycast. For your top eight to twelve apps, the closest replacement to the muscle-memory feel of an old Launchpad grid is a radial menu — fixed positions you choose, one held gesture, no name to type.