The Best Ways to Tidy up Your IPhone Home Screen
I like to keep my digital devices neat and organized. I always have a clean Mac desktop and my iPad home screen is flawless. But the iPhone is a little different: we usually want your most used apps to be the center of attention, but as time goes by, apps inevitably start to pile up, leaving our phones in a mess. If you feel like you’re wasting half your screen time scrolling through tons of apps, it’s time to clean up your home screen.
Hide home screen pages
If you have endless Home screen pages on your iPhone, cleaning up can feel like a chore. You can uninstall apps one by one, but it takes forever and often leaves you more frustrated than at the beginning. Instead of wasting time, energy and sanity fine-tuning numerous home screen pages, just hide them. It’s quick and easy and may be my favorite iOS feature to date. To get started, launch the Home Screen Editor (or “jiggle mode” as some lovingly call it) by long-pressing on an empty part of the screen, or by long-pressing an app and selecting “Edit Home Screen.” Tap the page switcher (dotted oval) at the bottom of the screen to display all existing home screen pages. To hide a specific page from the home screen, tap its checkmark. The only limitation is that you need to leave at least one home screen page active, so choose accordingly. When you’re done, tap Done to return to a cleaner, more organized home screen. You can repeat this process at any time to restore previously hidden pages.
You can also hide Home screen pages while in focus so that only certain pages are shown when you’re at work, relaxing, or relaxing at night.
Personally, I keep one home screen page with a combination of my favorite apps and widgets. If I need to use another app, I can swipe left once on the home screen to activate the app library, which is where all my apps are (more on that later). Or I swipe down on the home screen to find Spotlight and look for whatever app I need.
Hide your apps in the app library
Let’s say your home screen isn’t as cluttered, but it’s not where you want it to be. Let’s also assume that you don’t want to delete any of your apps, but you want some of them to be hidden until you need them. You can put them in folders, but unnecessary folders are a form of clutter in and of themselves.
If you have the patience, hide your apps in the app library. The App Library is a collection of all the apps on your iPhone, tucked away on the last page of the home screen. Starting with iOS 14, the App Library allows us to keep apps off of our home screens without removing them completely from our iPhones.
To restrict an app to just the App Library, press and hold it, then select Delete App. Now select “Remove from Home Screen”. The app will disappear as if you had deleted it, but if you find it or go to your App Library, it will be there waiting for you.
Keep new apps away from the home screen
Why spend all the time and effort building your home screen only to have new apps change its look? By default, iOS adds new apps to the next available location on the home screen, but this is not required. In fact, you can only submit new apps to the App Library while keeping your home screen as is.
To find this option, open Settings > Home Screen and select App Library Only under New Downloaded Apps .
Move apps with ease
If you’re in the middle of rearranging apps on your home screens, whether you’re moving them to a new page or putting them in a folder, and you’re still dragging them one at a time, stop that and select a few apps. once.
Press and hold on one of the apps you want to move, then wait until you get into “jiggle mode”. While holding an app with your finger, tap with another finger on the other apps you want to move. Like magic, they will join the first app you grab. Select as many as you want and then drag and drop them wherever you want.
The only downside to this feature is that you can’t use it to move app packages to the app library; this only works for moving them to a different location on the home screen.
Batch uninstall apps with Apple Configurator
Let’s say you don’t want to move or hide apps on your iPhone, but want to delete them right away. Doing this one at a time takes forever, but the best way to uninstall a bunch of apps you no longer need on your iPhone isn’t the most convenient either: you’ll need a Mac, or a friend with a Mac. and Apple Configurator . This is an application developed by Apple for setting up Apple devices with certain applications, settings and data. Organizations like schools and businesses use it to set up user devices according to their own policies, but you can use it to bulk uninstall apps from your iPhone.
After installing the app on your Mac, connect your iPhone to your computer. Give your Mac permission to access your iPhone, then when your phone shows up in Apple Configurator, double-click it. Click the Apps menu in the sidebar to see the full list of apps on your iPhone. Select as many as you want, just like you would if you selected multiple items in another Mac app. When everything is selected, press the “Delete” key, then select “Delete” from the pop-up window.
Delete Apps Directly on iPhone
If you don’t have access to a Mac, you will unfortunately have to uninstall apps one by one. But you don’t have to scroll aimlessly through the pages of the home screen, deleting apps at random – there are some more efficient and effective ways to do this.
The most organized way to uninstall apps on iPhone is through the app library, which can be accessed by swiping all the way to the right on the home screen. Click App Library in the search box at the top of this page to see a list of all your iOS apps in alphabetical order, and scroll through and delete the ones you don’t need. The process is the same as on the home screen: press and hold the app icon, select Uninstall App, then tap Uninstall on the pop-up window.
Another useful tip for easily uninstalling apps is through the App Updates page in the App Store. (I first learned about this trick thanks to The Verge .) App updates are not just for, well, app updates, but for easy app cleanup. If you see an update for an app that you didn’t even know you had on your iPhone, it’s easy to uninstall it from your device right away.
To get started, visit the app updates page by opening the App Store and tapping your profile in the top right corner. Swipe down on this screen to reload available app updates, then scroll through the list. If you see an app you no longer need on your iPhone, swipe left on it to open the Delete option. Tap it to uninstall the app.
You can also remove apps from Spotlight search the same way: Find an app, press and hold it, then tap Remove. If you only want to uninstall the apps that are taking up the most space on your iPhone, go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage , tap on the problematic app, select Uninstall App, then tap Uninstall App again in a popup window. .