I've got no idea what it does now. Other than that sometimes useful things are under it, sometimes not.
Apparently its an old icon but I never really saw it (that I can recall) until mobile got popular.
I had a teacher in high school who thought the "graph" icon in Microsoft Word was "library books." She called it the "library books button." I guess 3 lines isn't enough information to convey meaning. Even though the button meant "put this information in graph form" she didn't see that the icon represented a bar graph.