In macOS 26 Tahoe the classic Launchpad is gone. Apple replaced it with an Apps view inside the new Spotlight: alphabetical or by category, no folders, no custom layout, no full-screen paginated grid.
For many it's a step back. Old muscle memory — the hotkey, the full-screen view, clicking the right slot — stops working. That's exactly what Swiftli Launchpad is for.
A native macOS app that brings the old behaviour back — and adds a few things Apple never built in.
Paginated icon grid with five size presets. Trackpad swipes and mouse wheel both turn pages.
Reorder apps freely — neighbours make room live. Drag onto another icon and hold briefly to create a folder. Drag apps back out by gesture or right-click.
Type and the grid filters instantly. Enter launches the first hit. Drag is disabled during search so the layout stays put.
On first launch, matching apps are grouped by category: Utilities, Games, Social, Development, Media, Productivity, iWork, AI. Plugin suites and large vendor bundles get their own folder on top of that.
50 Arturia synths, a Softube bundle, a Native Instruments library, an Adobe Creative Cloud install, a Waves or iZotope rack, an Affinity trio? Apps from the same maker land in the same folder — no manual sorting needed.
Swiftli, Classic, Monochrome, Black/White, Light, Sunset, Forest, Ocean, Aurora, Vintage Cream, plus an iOS/iPadOS-inspired Transparent mode where icons blur into a frosted backdrop.
A frosted full-screen backdrop with the wallpaper showing through. Native macOS materials, no private APIs.
⌘⇧L opens and closes Swiftli Launchpad — on every screen, from any app.
Five grid presets and two icon sizes. Switching the layout repacks your existing apps automatically.
Menus, settings and the default folder names follow your system language. Pick another inside the app at any time.
Click any scheme below — the mock launchpad re-tints live in your browser. Same effect inside the app, with your real apps.
Swiftli — turquoise, pink, purple over deep navy.
The menu bar icon gives you everything you need to control Swiftli Launchpad without navigating an app window: show, auto-start, settings, menu bar settings, background settings, quit — all one click away.
Pick a grid size, a colour scheme and an icon size. Live previews — no preset hidden behind a dropdown. Language follows macOS by default; pick another at any time.
Apps are grouped by category, bundle id and path. Pages, Numbers and Keynote land under iWork; Xcode, VS Code and JetBrains IDEs under Development; system utilities under Utilities; Spotify, VLC and Logic Pro under Media; Slack, Discord and WhatsApp under Social; Claude, ChatGPT and Perplexity under AI. Grouping happens once per folder name. Delete a folder and it won't come back next launch.
When creating a folder leaves a gap, the apps after it slide forward automatically. A page with only one icon left collapses into the previous page.
Trackpad swipes paginate natively; mouse wheels are detected separately so a single click of the wheel turns one page, with a short cooldown to prevent accidental multi-page jumps.
When you drag an icon close to the horizontal edge of the screen, the page automatically advances after a short delay — cross-page reorder without releasing the icon.
