When I want to find an app I haven’t pinned to the home screen I swipe up from the bottom of the home screen to bring up a search bar where I can search for an app by name or scroll through list of all apps on the phone.
Thing is the search bar on my new pixel phone is actually a Google search bar that will search apps locally at the same time as providing web results, especially if it can’t find the app by name.
It’s a nice idea in theory but in practice I find it annoying, especially if I’ve just made a typo. Also, I’m just never going to use this search bar for web searching anyway because for that I would want my chosen browser so the web results are of no use to me.
I actually remember my old phone used to do what I wanted it to do, then one day it switched to what my new phone currently does and after a long time I found the solution to return it back to it’s previous behaviour except now I’ve forgotten what I did.
I only want to search my phone’s local storage for apps matching my keyword when I access the app drawer. How do I get rid of this Google search bar? (I’d love to get rid of the Google search bar from the home screen itself as well but I understand I can’t do that without root on stock android.
I don’t think there’s a way to disable this in the official launcher. There are many launchers that look and feel pretty similar to the stock one though. I think Lawnchair is the best example. I wouldn’t recommend Nova Launcher (https://lemmy.ca/post/19914345). You can also just get rid of all the Google bloatware altogether and install GrapheneOS.
Yeh Graphene is the plan long term but I have to stick with stock for the time being.