How macOS actually works
Launchpad was removed in macOS 26, and the thing that replaced it lives inside Spotlight rather than taking over the screen.
Launchpad is not hidden or disabled in macOS 26 Tahoe. It is gone, and Apple's replacement is a new Apps view inside Spotlight: every installed application in a searchable list or grid, reachable without the full-screen takeover that Launchpad always did.
That is the Apps view. You can browse it or start typing to narrow it.
It is worth learning this even if you never used Launchpad, because the same shortcut is the practical answer to the other complaint about Tahoe's Spotlight: that typing an app name does not reliably surface the app. Filtering to applications removes documents and code files from the competition.
The Dock stack, with no extra software. Drag the /Applications folder to the right-hand side of the Dock, next to the Trash. Right-click the stack it makes, and choose View content as → Grid. That gives you a page of app icons on one click, which is most of what Launchpad was.
A third-party replacement. Several apps have appeared specifically to restore the Launchpad experience, some able to import the old layout with its pages and folders. Whether that is worth installing depends on how much you relied on the arrangement you had built up.
A launcher instead. If what you liked about Launchpad was speed rather than the grid, a keyboard launcher is the better trade. LaunchBar, Alfred, Quicksilver and Raycast all do this and none of them depend on Spotlight.
Launchpad and Spotlight were solving two different problems, and Apple has merged them into one box. Launchpad answered "show me everything I have installed". Spotlight answers "find the thing I am thinking of". Merging them means the second job now has to work well enough to do the first, which is the source of most of the frustration people have reported since.
The same merge is why file search has got noisier: one box, one ranking, and a much larger pool of candidate results competing for the top few rows.
If you want the file half of that separated out again, that is what Everywhere does. It is a search box with one job, showing every match on every mounted volume rather than a ranked selection, in about two milliseconds per keystroke.
Not the built-in one, it was removed rather than hidden. You can get a close equivalent with the /Applications folder as a Dock stack set to grid view, or with one of the third-party replacements written since.
An Apps view inside Spotlight, reached with Command and Space then Command and 1. It lists every installed application and can be browsed or searched.
Apple folded it into the Spotlight redesign, which in macOS 26 also runs shortcuts and takes actions. Apps became one category inside that rather than a separate full-screen mode.
Command and Space to open Spotlight, then Command and 1 to filter to applications. There is no single key that opens it directly the way the Launchpad key did.
Everywhere keeps track of every file on your Mac — including the folders Spotlight hides and drives you have unplugged. Free for a day, then $19 once.
Download for MacVersion 2.12.1 · macOS 13+ · 3.6 MB · notarised