It immediately follows homepages full of the same apps, which you can search by simply swiping down…
Not on my phone. I have my primary home page, largely empty, with four apps and one widget, I have a second home page with some important/frequently used apps. That's it. Easily 90% of my apps are not represented on my home pages at all.
It’s duplicating the same apps and search feature - just with more steps.
Not exactly.
It dynamically organizes all your apps into fixed categories. The swipe-down search is great, and is what I use much of the time ... however, there are times when I forget what apps I have, or what the specific name of an app is, etc, and having the ability to scroll through the categories to remind myself of these things is helpful on occasion and not something that is replicated in the swipe-down search.
To make matters worse they made it IMPOSSIBLE to disable.
Can someone actually justify this logic?
Having the App Library gives users have the ability to remove apps from their home screens (e.g., like I do, to keep things looking clean and tidy), if there were no App Library, we would all be relegated to having page after page after page of apps and folders and yuck.
The App Library provides some really nice clean-up utility for users and provides a place users can go, at any time, to find any app they have on their device whether or not it is present on any of the home screens.
And, since it's at the end of all your home screens, it's entirely out of the way. You have to explicitly choose to swipe over to it. My wife doesn't know it's there. Its existence is not onerous.
I was adamant they would have put in a “disable” toggle by now, but apparently it is so necessary - to show apps twice, that they don’t even allow you to turn it off?
Most of my apps are only shown once (in the App Library). If you keep all of your apps on your home screens, the App Library is still entirely out of the way, but always there if you want to use it to see what apps you have in specific categories.
Ignore it if you don't ever want to use it.