What are Multiple Launcher Activities in Android Apps?

What is a Launcher Activity?

Sometimes when an app is installed, multiple icons of the app (not necessarily the same) may show up on the launcher screen; this scenario occurs when the app has multiple launcher activities.
An Android application is made up of various components like activities, intents, services, broadcast receivers and content providers. Activities specify the UI layout for app screens and handle user interaction. Intents are actions that can be performed on the app like, launching an activity or communicating with a background service. Launcher Activities are the activities that can be launched for a given intent. For example, when you press an app icon on the home screen, the StartActivity intent starts the activity you have specified as the launcher activity.

Why multiple launchers?

With multiple launcher activities, developers can achieve the presentation of multiple launcher interfaces with the installation of a single app. This could be used to separate an app’s actionable functions on the Android OS launcher. This way, the user can directly click on the respective icon to launch the instance of a specific activity.