Chrome OS may soon let you sort your apps in the launcher

Kyle Bradshaw | Jul 9 2021 - 10:35 am PT

Chrome OS is set to get a new quality of life upgrade, allowing you to automatically sort the apps in the launcher.

On Chrome OS today, apps that you install are placed on various pages of the launcher in a sometimes unpredictable way. By click-and-dragging any app’s icon, you can place it elsewhere on the page or move it to a different page entirely.

While this is handy, any and all rearrangement of your launcher needs to be done manually, one app at a time. According to a newly posted code change, which adds a new flag to chrome://flags, Chrome OS’s launcher is gaining the ability to sort your apps sometime in the coming months.

Productivity experiment: Reorder Apps
To evaluate an enhanced Launcher experience that enables users to reorder their apps in order to find them more easily.
#productivity-reorder-apps

For now, there aren’t any specifics about how this sorting option for Chrome OS’s launcher will work or whether it will be enabled by default, but we’ll be watching it develop over the next few weeks. It’s possible this could be a simple alphabetical sort, or there could be alternative sorting options like your most commonly used apps.

Whatever the result, this should be a great quality of life upgrade for Chrome OS when it launches later this year. As development is only just beginning, I wouldn’t expect the launcher sorting to arrive until Chrome OS 94 at the earliest.