Home Screen

You’ve probably seen some beautiful custom iPhone Home Screens on social media. Some people go to great lengths to creatively customize their Home Screen. You can go for a specific theme and aesthetic using custom icon colors and widgets.

Why spend so much time and effort? For one thing, you likely look at your Home Screen dozens (or even hundreds) of times every single day. A custom Home Screen that matches your style can bring a little spark of joy to your daily life every time you whip out your iPhone. And iOS makes Home Screen customization easier than ever.

Keep reading (or watch our video) for a quick introduction into the world of custom iPhone Home Screens. You’ll find out about new features in iOS 26, how to go above and beyond using Shortcuts, and how you can top off your iPhone aesthetic with widgets. I’ve scoured the internet (Reddit, mostly) to find the finest examples.

You can hide apps on your iPhone so they’re completely invisible, and you can lock all kinds of apps so they require Face ID to open.

Why would you want to? Maybe you have sensitive content you don’t want anyone to see, or you don’t want anyone to know you’re using dating or hookup apps. Hiding apps is also good for staying off social media or away from addictive games. Plus, it’s a great way to declutter your iPhone’s Home Screen. You can really clean things up without deleting apps you might want to keep.

There are, however, a few essential apps on your phone that can’t be hidden. Here’s how it all works.

After spending a few days trying out all the new features in iOS 18, I think it really is one of the biggest updates in a long time. However, hands-on testing shows there’s a lot that needs cleaned up before September, when it’s expected to ship.

The new customizable iPhone Home Screen opens a wide world of possibilities — but you’ll have to wait for third-party apps to update their icons to really make it sing. I’m impressed with the level of customization in Control Center, too, though it’s understandably pretty buggy in this first developer beta. The new Photos app is proving controversial, and I think there are some obvious areas it could be improved, but I like where it’s going overall.

I think there’s a lot to look forward to in iOS 18.

iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 remove many of the previous restrictions on Home screen customization. User now have far more control in placing app icons. And they can even change the color of icons.

iOS 16 brings a lot of exciting changes, but no one seems to like the new Search button on the Home Screen.

It can clutter your aesthetic theme, it’s easy to press accidentally, and it’s not any faster than using the swipe-down gesture for search. Luckily, it’s possible to turn it off — read on to see how.

Sometimes in life, it’s the little things. iPadOS 15 makes one of those small changes that bring a big result. For the first time, you can increase the size of the application icons on the iPad Home Screen.

This setting debuts in iPadOS 15 beta 5, released on Tuesday. This is one of a few other tweaks in the latest pre-release version.

Take your iPhone back to Apple’s roots with a set of replacement iOS icons inspired by early Macintosh computers. Keep the links to your 2021 applications on your iPhone, but sub in icons that have the look of the first Mac’s 72 dpi screen thanks to the iOS (Old School) collection from designer Ben Vessey.

iOS 14 ships with brand-new Home controls that make it easy to interact with smart devices from within Control Center. They’re handy, but they take up a lot of space, and not everyone owns HomeKit gadgets.

So, here’s how to remove those new Home controls if you don’t need them.

Apple gave the world its first look at iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 at WWDC 2020 on Monday. And while these are still closely linked, one of the signature features added to the iPhone version, the App Library, isn’t making the jump to the iPad version.

And placement of Home screen widgets is very limited for tablet users.

According to rumors, iOS 13 will bring a redesigned home screen to the iPad. It’s about time. The grid of apps might have worked fine on the iPhone before the App Store, but after nine years of using the expanded version on the iPad, the joke is starting to get old.

So, if Apple is finally ready to make a home screen worthy of the iPad, we have a few suggestions.

The iPad’s home screen is a waste of space. The 4X5 grid of icons looks absurd on the 13-inch iPad Pro. In fact, the fact that you’re limited to a grid of app icons is itself absurd. Where are the live readouts from your weather app or stock ticker? Where are the actions to send a message direct to your spouse/boss without opening an app first?

Worse, because the iPad doesn’t have 3D Touch, you can’t do anything useful with those icons other than launch the app¹.

Today we’ll fix that. Using a combination of shortcuts, you can add actions to your home screen, instead of apps. For instance, you can create a grid of custom icons which can email a contact, create a new blank file in your text app of choice, create a quick reminder, and so on. Check it out.

What’s on your main iPad home screen? Is it organized so that you can find your most-used apps quickly? Or have you decided to arrange the icons by color? Or divided up the grid by adding a row of blank spaces? Those are pretty neat ideas, but today I’m going to suggest you do something even more radical. How about keeping your home screen entirely blank? No icons, no folders, nothing. Just the Dock, Spotlight search, and an easier-to-use iPad.

If you have a website you visit frequently — and who doesn’t? — then you might like to have quicker access to that site. You might appreciate an icon on your iPhone’s home screen that you can tap to launch that site, just like you’d launch an app.

Today we’ll see how to add a bookmark to your iPhone home screen. And if you already know how to do this, check out the post anyway. There are a couple of neat extra tricks in there.

Do you have an album or a playlist that you listen to over and over? Or maybe you have kids, and all they ever want to listen to is that Abba record you hate, again and again. And AGAIN. Are you sick of firing up Apple music and searching around for that record every time you want to play it? Well search no more! Today we’ll see how you can add any music to your home screen, and play it just by tapping an icon.

It’s not like you can ever find the app you’re looking for on your various home screens anyway, so why not do something fancy with those icons instead? Like, making your home screen an expression of your inner chakra, man. Or getting in tune with the color harmonies of the universe or whatever.

Whatever hippie crap you’re using to justify it, the results can be amazing. And who knows — if you arrange your home screens by color, then maybe you’ll actually end up finding things faster.

Some of the most creative iPhone home screen designs we’ve ever seen use blank gaps to separate icons into groups or to create interesting stepped patterns. But how is that even possible? After all, if you delete a home screen icon, the others close ranks to fill in the space.

The answer is to add blank icons to create those gaps. Then, you can add a blank row to organize your iPhone home screen, or move all your apps the the bottom of the screen instead of the top.

With WWDC 2017 right around the corner, it’s that time of the year when Apple can fix all the annoyances of iOS 10 and unveil something truly revolutionary for the next generation of iPhones and iPads.

Apple is expected to show off all the major features of iOS 11 at the WWDC in a couple of weeks. Surprisingly, the rumor mill has been quiet on what to expect, but that hasn’t stopped a flurry of speculation. We’ve got some ideas of our own too that we really want to see come to iOS 11.

This is what we want in Apple’s next big update:

It’s about time Apple made our Home screens more useful. It could start by taking tips from this iOS 11 concept, which imagines more informative icon badges and support for complications similar to those on Apple Watch.

If you’ve ever tried to set a square photo as your lock screen or homes screen wallpaper, you know that iOS will zoom into the photo, resizing it to fit the entire iPhone screen.

This is fine with some images, but square ones, like the ones you save on Instagram or take with your iPhone’s square photo feature, just zoom in too far, obscuring much of the photo.

Here’s a quick and easy work around that will let you see the whole square photo when you use it as wallpaper.

Sure, it’s nice to know you have a bunch of unread email messages. And it’s understandable that iOS apps notify you about every little activity. But after a while, all the little numbers in the red circles on my iPhone’s home screen start to feel like a chore.

I hate having to open up apps just to clear out the taunting little numbers. I could ignore them, but they’re designed to bother me (or, more politely, to get my attention). I mean, I have healthy emotional boundaries, but this is getting ridiculous.

So I turned them off — and you can, too.

iOS 7 was a major reinvention of Apple’s mobile operating system, but despite all of the new colors, animations, and fonts, it’s still just a grid of apps in a day in which every other smartphone OS has moved on.

Nepalese designer Sangam Bhandari thinks Apple can — and should — further. In his latest concept, he imagines a new home screen that is more than just an app launcher, but something like a mash-up between Notification Center and the current Home Screen.

We think it looks great. Check it out after the jump and tell us what you think.

Ever go to add a website to your Home Screen in mobile Safari and notice it just looks like a jumbled, unidentifiable mess?

This doesn’t happen too often any more, as most sites have learned how to create a special icon for Home Screen bookmarks on iOS, but every so often, you’ll come across a site that won’t have a custom icon.

When that happens, here’s a quick and easy way to make that Home Screen icon look a bit better.

iOS has undergone a ton of small changes over the last six years, but never we have we seen as drastic changes as Apple has made with iOS 7. Don’t think iOS 7 is that big of change? Take a look at the image above that shows the evolution of the iOS home screen.

Jailbreakers have been able to customize their phones to look similar to iOS 7 now, but this is the first time that Apple is breaking away from some of the UI design principles that have made iOS so successful. The high res version can be viewed here.

Source: Reddit

There are some nifty tweaks for jailbroken iOS devices that allow you to add blank spaces to your home screen and arrange your app icons any way you like. Well now you don’t need to jailbreak to have this option, because a newly-discovered glitch in iOS lets you create blank spaces with a bit of trickery.

Jailbreaking allows you to do all sorts of wonderful things to your iPhone that Apple wouldn’t trust you with. It’s totally awesome and can completely change the look of your iPhone, which could be great, or horrible depending on your taste in design, fonts, and wallpapers.

We’ve seen some really beautiful iPhone themes and tweaks over the last year, which got us thinking, “How beautiful could you make your homescreen with jailbreak tweaks?”

We could go down this lovely path alone, but we’d love to have our pals accompany us. So what do you say? Make your iPhone homescreen as pretty and different as possible, take a screenshot, and then post it in the Cult of Mac Flickr group. The five best homescreens will win a free copy of Kuvva Wallpapers, so hurry up and beautify your homescreens.

Here’s how to enter the contest: