An app drawer is the center button on an Android's home screen dock that easily lets you view all of your apps. You can sort them in any order you like by selecting a toggle from a drop-down menu: alphabetically, chronologically, most to least used, most recently to least recently used. Depending on your stock launcher, and Android let's you easily download other launchers, you can further customize or organize it. You can create different filters for every app you have: for example ALL, Productivity, Games, Social, Utility. These can then be sorted according to the above criteria. You can choose to hide an app from any menu, and you can choose for any app to show up in multiple menus.
I can't live without order. I'm OCD. My friends will hand me their iPhone, tell me to look at something, and if they aren't already on that screen, or if I'm a sausage fingers, accidentally exiting the app, and sending myself back to the home screen, I am met with this pig sty of apps strewn across their screens with no rhyme or reason. If you have 10 apps, that's fine, but what if you have 200? I ask them, "How in the hell do you find anything when you want to use it?" They always shrug, "I put it on the first page." So they have page after page of apps strewn across their home screens. It's an intolerable mess. I can't even neatly organize these screens. If I move apps around, changing their order, it automatically always keeps them in one long continuous single queue. I can't, for example, create as many screens as I want, and organize the apps on different screens: (1) first screen, the true "home" screen is most common apps (2) next screen is entertainment apps, (3) next few screens are games, etc. It won't let you have these screens partially filled. There are only as many screens as there are apps needed to house them. They are auto-created by iOS, and every page is fully filled until the final one on the right.
I don't want anything on my home screens that doesn't belong there. Everything else should be kept in the drawer. The home screen is for commonly used apps and widgets. The way Apple
forces me to do it, here, not only do I not have a real app drawer, since these screens are effectively my jerry-rigged app drawer, but I can't even create intelligent filters with these screens. On Android, I can make as many screens as I want, fill them however I want, and set whichever one I want to be my true "home" screen which I like to make the centermost screen, not the one furthest to the left.
Apple's solution is the pull-down search from the home page. That's
viable (I don't like it) if I know what I'm looking for, but what if I forgot the name of the app? What if this is a time sensitive feature? What if I'm drunk?
For example, sometimes I catch a song while I'm eating at a restaurant, or when a commercial is playing on the TV. I want to Shazam as quickly as possible. On Android you can customize a feature to a gesture-- or even shaking the phone. So all I have to do is shake the phone, and my flashlight comes on; or for it automatically to wake up, and initiate the Shazam search.
iPhone probably has an app that will do the flashlight thing, but you're always dependent on some app, which often cost money, and this takes control of a very limited feature set. On Android you can customize every ability the phone has (ex. shake to wake up just mentioned) and attach it to a particular app or task. On iPhone you better hope some developer out there did it, that it's free, and that it won't conflict with an app you previously downloaded by another developer who wrote his code to use the same feature. .
A more everyday, practical approach with Android is just to put the Shazam widget (a blue button) on your uncluttered home screen. You can make it any size you want. You can make it a big button in the center of the screen. You turn on the phone, you touch the button. It's Shazaming. On Apple, I have to wake up the phone, I have to pull down the search menu, type in Sh (because just "S" means I have to browse through contacts and every other app on my phone), open the app, launch the search...what a mess. If I put Shazam somewhere on my home screen, hopefully somewhere I don't forget, that works better, but I can only do this so many times.
It's just...I can't stand it. I can't stand iOS. It gives me cancer.
