4d ago

Improve app search: accent-insensitive search and package/original names

I would like to suggest an improvement to the app search functionality. 1. Accent-insensitive search Currently, searching for an app whose name contains Latin characters with diacritics requires entering the exact accent for the app to be found. For example: - App name: Câmera - Search: "camera" → No result - Search: "câmera" → App is found It would be much more convenient if the search were accent-insensitive, so that "camera" would also match "Câmera". This is already supported by some other launchers and makes searching significantly faster and more practical. 2. Search using original app names and package names Some apps use localized or region-specific names that differ significantly from their original name. For example, in Brazil, the McDonald's app is displayed with the localized/friendly name "Méqui". However, a user searching for "mcdonalds" would reasonably expect the app to appear in the results, but currently it does not. If the launcher has access to this information, I suggest allowing the search to also consider: - The app's displayed/localized name - The original app name, if available - Relevant parts of the Android package name For package names, the search should ideally use the meaningful components rather than treating the entire package name as a searchable string. For example: "com.mcdonalds.app" could make "mcdonalds" available as a search term, while generic technical components such as "com", "org", ".app", etc. should be ignored. This would prevent package-name-based searching from polluting the search results with generic terms that are common across thousands of applications. Suggested behavior The search could normalize and match applications across multiple identifiers: - Ignore accents/diacritics when comparing text ("camera" → "Câmera") - Consider the localized/displayed app name - Consider the original app name when available - Consider meaningful components of the package name - Ignore generic package-name prefixes/components such as "com", "org", "net", etc. The app's normal localized name should still be displayed in the search results. This would make the search much more forgiving and useful, especially when users know an app by a different name than the one currently displayed by the launcher.

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