Stop Hoarding Apps With IOS 14
I have a lot of apps on my iPhone. There are many applications installed on your iPhone. This is life in the digital world. Things got so bad that at some point there were apps on my phone that weren’t even compatible with the thin bezel of my iPhone X. I had apps on my phone that were so old that they wouldn’t even launch when I finally took the time to streamline my device a bit.
Fortunately, iOS 14 is here (or coming soon, depending on your preference for beta ) to provide you with additional help in managing all the crap you’ve installed on your iPhone. I really would like it to be as simple as a button that allows you to sort apps across many home screen pages alphabetically (or by frequency of use, or even by installation date), just like you sort all the junk by your computer desktop. … Alas, this is not the case, but iOS 14 comes with another better thing.
As we discussed earlier, upgrading to iOS 14 will open a new App Library page at the very bottom of the Home screen pages – just keep swiping left to get there. It may seem a little intimidating at first, but it has a brilliant design.
As you will see, from an organizational point of view, you have nothing to do in the Application Library. All of the apps on your phone are already organized into the categories that Apple deems most appropriate for them. The new Suggestions and Recently Added categories at the top of your app library showcase the carefully curated apps you think you use or need the most, as well as the apps you’ve recently installed on yours. iPhone. (As someone who hates crawling pages to see where a new app is, I applaud this feature.)
Oh, but we’re not done yet.
The App Library is great for organizing your apps, but the move to iOS 14 does nothing with the myriad apps that still clutter up all those home screen pages. To hide them, you have several options.
Upload any apps you don’t want to see to the app library.
One cool feature of the new App Library is that you can move any app you want into it – you don’t even need to select a category. Just press and hold to bring it up, swipe across the app library, and release your finger anywhere on the screen. The app will disappear from the page it was on, but it will remain installed on your device and can be invoked using an icon in the App Library or the standard “use Spotlight to find the name of the app I want to launch” approach.
It will take forever to do this one by one, especially if you are an application hopper like me. So let’s combine that with another trick: press and hold your finger to “grab” the app, and keep holding your finger. Then use your second finger to touch other apps to “collect” them into one large collection of apps, all of which you are currently holding. Drag this collection to your app library and release your finger. With this technique, you will clean up all of your stretch pages within five minutes.
And, yes, you can return apps from the app library to your home screen pages at any time – just drag and drop them from the said library, as if you were moving any app on your phone.
You can also send all applications from folders directly to the Application Library by pressing and holding the Delete Folder button. Likewise, if you want to submit one app to your App Library without dragging and dropping it there, just press and hold and select the Remove App option.
Save new applications you download to the Application Library.
Open the Settings app> Home Screen and you will see the following new option:
Select “App Library Only” and whatever you download will go to your device, but not to any of the pages on your home screen. This is the tweak you’ll need if you need extra clutter protection, especially if you’ve already customized your (less?) Home Screen Pages with the exact apps and widgets you need.
(Alternatively, from this same screen, you can enable notification icons for apps in your app library. They are disabled by default – presumably to reduce clutter.)
Hide home screen pages
Another way to get rid of iPhone clutter is to simply hide the home screen pages. Any apps installed on them will still appear on your device, and you can display these pages whenever you want. You just won’t see the specified pages filled with apps.
To get started, press and hold anywhere on any of your pages — in an app or in an open space, it doesn’t matter — to trigger the “wiggle apps” action that you would otherwise use to uninstall or move apps. After that, click on the page controls at the bottom of the screen:
Your screen will then expand to show you all of your active pages, and you can hide most of them by clicking the checkmark icon below them. And no, you cannot hide them all ; there must be at least one page on your device. Otherwise, what would you look at?
Speaking of pages, here’s another fun trick: press and hold the page controls in iOS and you can slide your finger left and right to quickly scroll through different pages, like Sonic the Hedgehog. It’s infinitely faster than swiping, which is fast enough anyway.