It’s putting whatever you want and what you don’t want on the home screen, including for example launching into search.

My phone stock launcher search dialog that once would have been to type the app name became a ‘multi-search’ that would do internet search and AI search and app search was sluggish and third set of results. So I go for a launcher that keeps the app search field just a quick name based search of applications.

It does also do things like let me opt into fitting more icons on the screen at a time, since the default launcher has some ludicrous small number of icons on screen at a time.

Also, the scrolling lets me scroll letters to rapidly get to apps starting with ‘m’ for example without typing, though I never use that.

It also presents a different ‘folder’ design where a tap on it launches a default app from the group, and a quick slide opens it up to select a less popular, alternate app quickly.

Also, two finger swipe from top takes me straight to typing app name to launch.

Someone else I knew swapped launchers just to have a different wallpaper behavior that their stock launcher wouldn’t do.

Currently using Octopi.