What alternate style launchers would you recommend then rather than the standard grid of icons? I agree that it doesn't look very good with few icons and has a bad UX with too many icons, but it seems hard to find something that fits perfectly in the middle.

Twitter, Tweetbot, tumblr, Instagram, Skype and Wunderlist (my most used apps) all get away with the 5 icons on the bottom. They mostly contain 4 main options, plus another screen with configuration and advanced options.

Tweetbot's fourth button allows you to rapidly change its behavior, it's fast enough and the best UI I've seen so far.

This thing is full of pointless UI weirdness. For example:

* None of the back buttons look like iOS back buttons or state where they lead.

* The tab controls are taller than usual, taking up room for no good reason.

* The open in Safari icon looks like nothing I've ever seen and it displays an alert view instead of an action sheet.

* The People view has a tabs on bottom and a segmented control on top. The segmented control is treated as primary (changes the entire view including tabs).

* It takes five taps to get from your stream to the posts of a particular circle.

It's also straight-up incorrect in places, claiming my list of circle members is displayed on my public profile when adding someone (I have explicitly disabled this via the web interface).

I am quite honestly surprised that the brainplex released something with this many sharp corners.

I don't think it's terrible UI design, even if it isn't the best. It is familiar, which is smart for a new product which is aimed at converting users.

It's still less familiar than the bottom tab bar which is optimal for 5 or less tabs. (fewer taps required to browse between screens).

Yelp has an app like this, too among many other services.

Looks like the same UI as on Android. Does Android have a UITabBar equivalent?

"it's explicitly regarded as bad UI design by Apple"

I find that hard to believe considering that launcher concept is implemented by Apple in the iOS home screen.

See http://cl.ly/0J082m04082N1G3C1C2o

For 5 or less tabs it requires two tabs to browse between tabs, vs. 1 tap for a bottom tab bar that is persistent.

Also as mentioned in the talk the user has just arrived from a launcher, which is why it's poor design to show another one.

The image in that link appears to be broken.

I thought you were referring to the launcher style in general as "bad design," not in the context of an in-app sub-launcher which is why it made no sense to me.

One aspect of this is that it is easy to abuse. Three20 (the framework currently backing the iOS app) has an implementation of the launcher control but doesn't provide support for the zooming launch animation.

As a result, we've seen apps like rdio using the launcher in a way that goes against the user's expectations of how a launcher should work. Instead of zooming the controller in from the center of the screen, the controller gets pushed onto a navigation stack. In rdio's case, they should have built a simple table view with each 'sub-application' having its own row. Tapping one of those rows would then push the controller onto the navigation stack in the same way that it currently does with the launcher.

-- From a holistic user experience applications "spring forth" from the system launcher, creating a consistent feeling of two functional modes in the operating system. The first being finding and launching applications, the second being using the launched application. Introducing a third layer of launched sub-applications complicates that model, oftentimes unnecessarily.