Creating the SharePoint 2016 User Profile Service Application using PowerShell does not Display the App Launcher

While writing my second book “Beginning PowerShell for SharePoint 2016” I stumbled upon a weird situation, where when creating the User Profile Service Application for SharePoint 2016 using PowerShell, the App Launcher wasn’t showing up. As you know, in order to have the App Launcher displayed in your SharePoint 2016 environment, you need to have an instance of the User Profile Service Application. The code I use to instantiate the Service Application in PowerShell was the following:

$account = Get-SPManagedAccount "contoso\<App Pool User Account>"
$appPool = New-SPServiceApplicationPool -Name "UserProfile" -Account $account
$userProfileSA = New-SPProfileServiceApplication -ApplicationPool $appPool -Name "UPS"
New-SPProfileserviceApplicationProxy -ServiceApplication $userProfileSA -Name "UPSProxy"

But even though that code did instantiate the User Profile Service Application, the App Launcher still didn’t appear.

The problem is that in order for the App Launcher to appear, one needs to associated the User Profile Service Application Proxy to the DefaultProxy zone. This is achieved via PowerShell by simply adding the -DefaultProxyGroup switch to the line of code where we instantiate the proxy instance:

$account = Get-SPManagedAccount “contoso\<App Pool User Account>”
$appPool = New-SPServiceApplicationPool -Name “UserProfile” -Account $account
$userProfileSA = New-SPProfileServiceApplication -ApplicationPool $appPool -Name “UPS”
New-SPProfileserviceApplicationProxy -ServiceApplication $userProfileSA -Name “UPSProxy” –DefaultProxyGroup

Executing the code above automatically enabled and displayed the App Launcher in my environment.