Why can't Spotlight Search find my apps in IOS 11 anymore?

Hi Diana and thanks for your reply. The point is that in IOS10, I didnt need to do anything in order to be able to just type the first few letters of an application and it would appear. In IOS11 you either a) type the whole application name or b) enable it in the Search settings for "search and siri suggestions" to be able to go back to being able to search on the first few letters. To give you an example, to open my Amazon application previously, all I did was pull down, type 'Am' and the application would appear. Now I have to enter the whole name or remember to enable it in the Search settings. This is not logical as a) I have approx 95 apps which I would need to manually enable to allow me to search like I used to be able to in IOS10 or b) enter the whole application name which can be sometimes difficult to remember or at the very least require a lot more screen tapping to achieve the same result as before.

This is a huge backwards step and really makes one of the most useful functions I use on a regular basis null and void. I sincerely hope Apple revert this or at least ensure that application names are searchable in Spotlight regardless of settings. For a company that prides itself in its UX, I dont understand why a powerful shortcut like Spotlight used to be for locating applications has been removed 😟

Thank you again Diana. Search Suggestions has always been enabled for me but unfortunately it doesn't fix the core issue here which is apps are not showing up by typing the first few letters of the app name unless you remember to manually enable them under the Siri & Search settings . I know this may seem trivial to some people, but for me its a total headache as I have lots of apps on my phone and finding them individually is a waste of time coming from a situation that used to work perfectly.

I found a subreddit which is also discussing this issue. I hope this problem gets fixed soon. It’s incredibly annoying not to be able to quickly find apps and have to go hunting for them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/iOS11/comments/70bdqf/ios_11_spotlight_search/

Thanks for the continuing replies and suggestions Diana. Its appreciated. I wasn't aware that such launchers existed in the app store, but I'll take a look. However, in this case, I'll choose not install a 3rd party app when there is supposed to be functionality within the core OS, as there was in previous versions of IOS and indeed there exists on my Mac Spotlight search today. Having to remember to go into the Siri and Search settings every time I install a new app and to enable it is simply not sustainable nor friendly. I end up with so many search results when looking for something on my phone, just because I've had to manually enable each and every application in Siri & Search in order to quickly find one of the 50 apps I have installed on my phone. If anyone thinks this is acceptable, I'd love to know the reasoning so we could have a proper informed discussion on the subject, but I feel I simply wont be heard nor will anything ever be done about it. I've registered my complaint with Apple and sent a suggestion to the proper channels. For the meantime, people will simply need to get used to not being able to find their installed apps on IOS 11 (unless they install an app to find them!)

Thamesway - there are other reasons to update to IOS 11, the biggest of which is fixes for vulnerabilities such as Broadpwn among others. This would be far more worrying to me than the lost functionality in Spotlight. As Diana (above) has suggested, you can apparently use 3rd party applications to act as a program launcher, but the point I'm making is that no where did Apple say they were changing the way Spotlight works, and there is no way to restore to IOS 10 once you've jumped to 11. In addition, it should be clear to any logically minded person that the way Spotlight works in IOS11 cannot be thought of as an improvement over the IOS10 version with respect to being able to quickly locate apps installed on your phone.