The Shifting Icons
The Launchpad on macOS is meant to mimic the home screen of an iPad, giving you a grid of all your installed applications. You might spend ten minutes carefully dragging and dropping your most essential applications onto the first page, and grouping lesser-used utilities into dedicated folders on the second page. However, you might notice that after a system update or after installing a few new apps from the Mac App Store, macOS suddenly “helps” you by completely reorganizing your icons. It might shove your carefully curated icons out of order to make room for new Apple-branded software, or worse, alphabetize everything, destroying your custom layout entirely.
How to Lock Your Launchpad Layout
macOS does not offer a simple “Lock Layout” button in the System Settings. The Launchpad layout is stored in an SQLite database hidden deep within your user library. To stop macOS from automatically rearranging your icons, you must change the file permissions of that database to “Read-Only,” effectively locking the system out of its own file.
1. Open Spotlight Search (Command + Spacebar).
2. Type Terminal and press Enter to open the command line.
3. First, you need to find the exact location of your unique Launchpad database. Type or paste the following command and press Enter:
echo $TMPDIR../0/com.apple.dock.launchpad/db/db
4. The Terminal will output a long path (e.g., /var/folders/xx/yyyy/0/com.apple.dock.launchpad/db/db). Copy this path to your clipboard.
5. Now, you will use the `chmod` command to lock the file. Type chmod 444 followed by a space, and then paste the path you copied. It should look like this:
chmod 444 /var/folders/xx/yyyy/0/com.apple.dock.launchpad/db/db
6. Press Enter.
You have now revoked write permissions. macOS can read the file to display the Launchpad, but it cannot alter it. Even if you install a new app, or an OS update tries to push an icon to the front, the database will refuse the change. Your layout is permanently frozen.
How to Revert the Change (Unlock Launchpad)
Because the database is locked, you also cannot move icons or add new apps to folders. When you want to organize your Launchpad again, you must unlock it.
1. Open the Terminal.
2. Run the exact same command as before, but change the 444 to 644:
chmod 644 /var/folders/xx/yyyy/0/com.apple.dock.launchpad/db/db
3. Press Enter. You can now drag and drop icons normally again.