10 iPhone Home Screen Customization Tips

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you some creative and productive ways to customize your iPhone's home screens. 

I want to start off with something simple here. You can eliminate the labels underneath the icons on your Home Screen and at the same time make the icons a little bit bigger. To do this, like a lot of things I'm going to show you, you want to tap and hold in some blank space on your Home Screen. Then everything will start to wiggle like that and you'll get the Edit button here at the top left. Tap the Edit button and then go to Customize. Now at the bottom you get some controls here that allow you to customize how the icons look. The little button to the top right of that control will make the icons larger and take away the labels underneath. So if you don't really need the labels, but the icons are enough for you and you like them to be a little bigger, this is an easy change that will make your iPhone's Home Screen a little better for you. 

Now whether or not you use that or leave icons at the normal size with the labels you can use these buttons here below to change how all the icons look. So the default is just the default icon created by the developer of the app. But you can go with the Dark Version of that as well or use the Auto Setting here to have it change between default and Dark depending on the time of the day. You can also go with Clear here and then it's going to basically be see-through icons so you will see more of your wallpaper. But you can also choose the Dark Version of Clear if you like or Auto to switch between them according to whether it is night or day. 

In addition to that you can go with tinted. Then you've got three options here. Tinted the color of your iPhone. So if you've got, say, the blue iPhone it will tint it blue. You've got the wallpaper kind of auto-setting here so it's going to look at the entire wallpaper and try to choose a color that's better and you can adjust afterwards. But you can also use this last one here and then pick a spot in the wallpaper and it will use that color as the color for the tinting. You can still adjust afterwards. So you can make it, really, any color you like. 

Another thing you can do with your Home Screen is remove some of the apps. Now I don't mean Delete the apps! A lot of times people think that if they remove something from the Home Screen it is the equivalent to deleting the app. But that is not true any longer. So, for instance, say you wanted to make some room here on this second page of your Home Screen. You find that you just don't use the Translate App much. You can tap and hold that app there and then you get the little Context Menu. You can select Remove App. When you do you'll be prompted as to whether you want it removed from the Home Screen or Deleted. If you want to keep the app on your phone just use Remove From Home Screen. That saves some space here. I'll do it here for the iTunes Store as well. I'll remove and then say just Remove From the Home Screen. Now those apps are still on your iPhone.  You can get to them either using Spotlight, so swipe down in the middle like that, and then Search for the app by name. You can tap there to launch it. Or you could simply swipe all the way over to the last screen, which is your App Library. Here you'll see all your apps categorized. The top three in any category you can just tap on the app to launch it. Or if it has more than four you can tap on the bottom right set there and it shows you all of those. Using this you can get to any app you want, but you can also tap here at the top to Search. Without even searching you can still scroll an alphabetical list to find all of your apps there. So you don't need to have an app on the Home Screen to actually have it on your phone. For apps you rarely use you may want to not have them on the Home Screen at all and rely on the App Library Screen or Spotlight to launch them.

Now if you like you can also Lock most apps. For instance if you, maybe, hand your phone to your kids so they can play games in some situations you may want to prevent them from accessing an app. Like I'll use Calendar here as an example. Tap and Hold Calendar and you'll see Require Face ID, or if your phone uses Touch ID, it'll say Require Touch ID. If you select that then in order to launch this app it will require Face ID. For me it did it right away because it can see my face. But for somebody else it won't let them in the app. You can always Tap and Hold an app here and turn Off that option. So, you can Lock most apps this way. 

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Now you may notice here the default Home Screen has a Weather Widget and a News Widget at the top. You can use the Widget as a way to access the app. It's kind of like just a big App Icon. Like tap on that Weather Widget takes me to the Weather App. Which means I really don't need to have the Weather icon here as it appears on the second screen. That's true for a lot of apps. For instance you can Tap and Hold on the Stocks App here and you can convert that to a Widget. See these controls here. If you see that for an app, not all apps will have it, that means that there's a widget alternative to the app icon. The first one here represents a small square widget. It takes up the space of four icons. The is a wide one. It will go all the way across the screen. And this is one that will take up half the screen. So if I want to convert the Stocks app icon to a widget I can just tap here and it will convert it to a widget of that size. I can then Tap and Hold it and Edit Widget and now I can set things. Different Apps will have different settings. In this case I can choose the Watch List, for instance, to show. If I want to convert a widget back to an icon I can do that as well. I can Tap and Hold and then convert it back to an icon like that. 

Now as well as converting app icons you can add other widgets. One widget that's particularly handy for a lot of people to add is a Photo Widget that shows their favorite photo. I'm going to Tap and Hold in a blank space, tap Edit, and then choose Add Widget. I'm now going to Search for photos and look at the Photo Widgets. The first set are featured photos. Instead of that I'm going to go right to Albums. I'm going to select this small widget here and I'm going to add it. That will add a widget there and I can choose the album and then choose an album that only has one photo in it. This one is exactly that. So it will show the album but it only has one choice of photo. So that's the key there. Create an album called Home Screen Widget of something like that. Only put one photo in it and choose that as the one to show for that widget. 

Now you probably know that the four apps at the bottom in what's called the Dock, they are available no matter which Home Screen you're looking at. But what if you want a fifth or sixth one that's also available on all of the Home Screens. Well, you can add an icon more than once. For instance, the Camera App is on this Home Screen but not on this Home Screen. But you can add it to the second Home Screen too. So you can go to the App Library here, find it, in this case it's just one of four here so I can Tap and Hold. Then I'm going to drag it and drag it to the left to go to this screen here. I'm going to place the Camera App there. Now you can see it is on the second Home Screen and also on the first Home Screen. There's no limit to how many times you can place it. So, you can actually even place it twice on the same screen. Like I could have it down here below as well just to make it easier to hit no matter how I'm holding my iPhone. 

Now all these icons represent apps. You launch an app by tapping the icon. but you could also use them to access webpages. So when you go into Safari here if there's a webpage that you want easy access to just go to the three dots button at the bottom and then tap Share. Then tap View More. Then look for Add To Home Screen. Tap that and you can change the name here. You probably want to shorten the name. It uses the icon for the website and you can choose whether or not it opens as its own little web app or it's just a bookmark to go to Safari. 

So I'll add it here. Now I have a quick way to get to a website that I need to access probably far more frequently than some of these regular apps. You could add as many of these as you want. Add an entire screen or two filled with your most frequently visited websites. 

Now you can add multiple Home Screens. There are two here, but you can certainly go and add more. Put some more icons on this and continue to add four, five, six, seven, or more Home Screens. But there's another option. You can also use folders. Folders have been around for a long time, longer than most of these other features. You can just Tap and Hold any icon until everything wiggles. Then drop one onto the other and then continue to drop more and more into folders. You can Tap to go into the Folder. You can rename the Folder. You can have multiple screens inside of a folder. So you could have a lot of apps easily available through one more Tap to go into the Folder first. 

Another useful technique is to have your Home Screens automatically change based on your focus. In other words the time of day. So, for instance let's say at night you don't want to have all of these app icons easily available to you. You only want to have certain ones. So, I'm going to go to the App Library here and I'm going to start with just a few, like for instance the Podcast App. I'll place that in there. I'll also add the Music App to that Home Screen. Books App for reading. The Weather App in case I want to check the weather just before going to sleep. So I'm just going to have these four available to me on a single Home Screen that I see in the evening. I can arrange them however I want. So, I've got this as a third Home Screen here, duplicating icons that are already on the first two. So the next step is to go into the Settings App. Then in there look for Focus. Then you see all your Focus Modes, including some default ones. I'm going to use the default Evening one here and I'm going to go down to Customize Screen. I'm going to go to the second part here where I can choose my Home Screen. I'm going to say I only want this one. Then I'm going to say Okay and now when I switch to Evening Focus, which should happen automatically in the evening, this is the only Home Screen I have. You can see there is no other one available. So you can create all these additional Home Screens that are for specific times of the day or Focus Modes and just assign those screens to those Focus Modes and not other ones. 

Here's a Bonus Tip. One thing you'll see on your Home Screen, in addition to the icons and the widgets, are Badges. Badges are things like this little number here that tells you there's a Notification for this app. You could turn them Off. You could do it on an app-by-app basis. So go into Settings and then go to Notifications. Then you're going to scroll down and find the App that you want to turn Badges off for. So Reminders here. Then simply turn off Badges like that. Now you won't see the Badges here on your Home Screen anymore. 

Here's on last tip. Say you've experimented a lot with your Home Screens and you want to just start from scratch. You want to put the Home Screens back to how they would be by default if you just setup your iPhone. It's going to include all the default apps and all of your other apps as well. Then you can basically start from scratch and customize from there. There's a way to reset your Home Screen. Go into Settings and then go to General. At the bottom of General you'll find Transfer or Reset iPhone. Doesn't sound like the right place for this. But this is where it is. Go in here and you tap Reset. Don't worry. It's not going to reset everything right away. You are asked what you want to reset. Yes, there are some dangerous things here like Reset All Settings. You probably don't want to do that. But, there is the Reset Home Screen Layout. If you use that it just takes away all the customizations there. All of your app icons and widgets are set to the default for a new iPhone. Then you can start customizing again from there if you like. 

Hope you found these tips useful. Thanks for watching.