The Launchpad Shuffle
Launchpad is macOS’s built-in application launcher, designed to mimic the grid interface of an iPad or iPhone. While you can manually drag and drop icons to arrange them exactly how you like (perhaps grouping all your Adobe apps on one page and your productivity tools on another), macOS sometimes automatically rearranges these icons. If you install a new app, or if you force-reset the Launchpad database to fix a missing icon, the system will automatically alphabetize your applications, completely destroying your carefully curated muscle-memory layout.
Locking Down the Grid
Unfortunately, Apple does not provide a simple graphical toggle to “lock” the Launchpad layout and stop macOS from automatically organizing or alphabetizing your icons upon a database reset. However, you can use a terminal command to force a specific configuration behavior.
If you want to intentionally reset Launchpad to its default, alphabetical state (Apple apps on page 1, third-party apps alphabetized on page 2), open Terminal and type defaults write com.apple.dock ResetLaunchPad -bool true; killall Dock. To prevent third-party apps from automatically slotting into random empty spaces and ruining your layout when you download them, you can force them to always appear at the very end of the list. Open Terminal and type defaults write com.apple.dock launchpad-sort-by-date-added -bool true; killall Dock. While this doesn’t explicitly “lock” your custom folders, it stops new installations from alphabetically scattering throughout your established grid, ensuring they always append to the last page where you can manually sort them later.