How To Organize The Icons On Your iPhone Home Screen

Many of us have hundreds of app on our iPhone and iPad home screens. Keeping them organized can be a chore. But you can use techniques like app folders and searching by keyword to help. It is also a good idea to delete apps you rarely use, knowing you can download them again easily. When organizing apps, you can drag more than one at a time.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Is your iPhone packed with apps and you can't seem to find anything? Let me show you how I keep my Home screens under control.
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So I hear from iPhone and iPad users all the time that they have a ton of apps spread across all these different home screens. They just can't seem to find the apps they want to run when they want to run them. I have a ton of apps too and there's a variety of techniques that I use to keep things under control. This isn't my normal everyday iPhone. My regular iPhone is packed with a lot more apps than this. But I can demonstrate here the techniques I use. 
So the first thing I do is I like to organize things into folders. A lot of users don't know that you can do this even though it's been around for years. Organizing into folders is pretty easy. All you need to do is tap on an icon and wait until everything jiggles. Then you can move it around. You probably know you can do this already to reorganize things, put something earlier on the screen, or move it to the next screen by dragging it to the edge and then it goes to the next screen and then back again to go backwards.
But you can also use this to organize things in folders by dragging one icon onto another. You can see when I did that it put those two into a folder. If I go to look at that folder by tapping on it you can name this folder. That's key because you want to name it something where you can figure out what's inside pretty easily. So, for instance, I may want to call this games or solitaire games or something that makes it easy for you to find. There is no one size fits all system. It really depends on how you think and how you want your apps to be organized. So maybe this is entertainment and not games. Maybe these are solitaire apps or just solitaire or card games. You want to come up with a system that helps you. Don't worry about what other people call their folders.
Now once you have these folders like that can continue to drag and drop more things into them. I can select and drag another app into this folder and it goes in there and I can keep adding to that folder. As a matter of fact folders can have multiple screens inside them. So you can pack a ton of apps in there.
Now if you're in a situation where you have hundreds of apps across like ten, fifteen, twenty screens you're going to have to do this in small increments. Spend five minutes here, five minutes there, organizing things maybe taking apps that are one particular type and putting them into a folder. Maybe creating a bunch of folders combining two apps and then just adding more to them over time removing all the apps from a different screen into a group of folders. A few of these five minute sessions and you have things under control. From that point on you just have to remember when you add a new app to put it in the right place. It does take time and patience but I guarantee you can get it under control if you just take the time to do it.
Now another technique that I like to use is to simply delete apps. If you've got hundreds of apps chances are there are some that you never use. You may not want to get rid of them because you think, well one day I might need that app. Well guess what. Once you download an app from the App Store, even if you've paid money for it, you can go back and download it again anytime you want. It's okay to delete the app now, save the space on your iPhone, save the space on your Home screen with the icons and if you ever need that app again you go back to the App Store and you redownload it.
So, for instance, I'll go here and say I rarely ever use iTunes U. I might need it in the future but now it will get rid of it and save me that space. If I ever need it again I can go back to the App Store and if I search for it it'll come up here and it'll have a Get next to it or a little cloud icon sometimes for downloading it. That means I already purchased it. I already own the app and I could just get it again when I want. You can also go to Updates at the bottom. Tap on your name there and then you can look at Purchased. This will show you a list of all the apps you've purchased before. So if you're worried that you may not remember an app, what it was called. You can always look through that list. You can even search this list. It even has a category there for Not On This iPhone. You can look at the ones that you've removed and easily add them back when you need them. So don't be afraid to delete apps. It's okay to not be 100% sure you'll never need it again.
So even after organizing things in folders I still end up with several screens full of apps. You can set these up anyway you want. Obviously on the front screen you may want to have you're most frequently accessed apps. Or you may want to have the default apps that Apple includes. I always remember which apps are like the default apps that come with your iPhone so I like to have those on the first screen, because I know I can find those there. Then my most frequently accessed apps maybe on the second screen. Then from there on maybe I have a screen filled with folders and then maybe after that screens that fit different categories. Like maybe a screen filled with photography apps.
When you're moving apps around on the screen you don't have to do one at a time. You can tap and hold an icon until it wiggles. Then start dragging it. Once you start moving it around you're in movement mode and now you can tap other apps with another finger to load them up there. Now I can move all those apps to another screen or into a folder.
Now one of the ways I like to find apps is not necessarily to look through the screens but to search for them. I know a lot of you know that you can drag down from the middle of the screen like that and then you can search. But search doesn't have to match the name. For instance I can search for music and I can see I get GarageBand and iTunes there even though music is not in the name. If I search for camera you can see I'm going to get camera apps even if camera is not in the name. So these apps have these little key words that the developer applies to them when they put them in the store. So an app that's a camera app, even though it's not called that, has the key word camera there and will show up in a search. So you don't have to remember the exact name to search for and find an app.
Also, of course, you've got the Dock at the bottom of your iPhone. You can drag apps in and out of there as well. So I can take music out, if I don't use music that much, and drag on of my favorite games in there. Now if I go from screen to screen those stay the same. That's just like the Dock on the Mac and you actually have more than four slots on an iPad. 
So if you have a lot of app icons take your time to organize them in small sessions until you get it under control. Use folders, Use multiple screens. Don't be afraid to delete apps. Remember you can drag and drop multiple apps at the same time to make things quicker. Also remember you can search for apps. Not just by name but by key words as well.

Comments: 8 Responses to “How To Organize The Icons On Your iPhone Home Screen”

Richard Fuhr

5 years ago

One useful technique that I apply when organizing apps, when I need to drag an app across multiple screens, is the following. Have only three apps permanently in your dock. Take the app you want to move to a remote screen and drag it into the dock. Then swipe until the remote screen is displayed. Then drag the app from the dock to the screen where you want it kept (perhaps into a folder already on that screen).

Chris Proudlove

Brilliant Gary - thanks so much. I took your advice and began the five-minute sessions, so I'm on the way. I didn't know the tip about moving multiple apps, so thanks for that too.
Regards
Chris

Howard Brazee

I like to have only one folder on my home screen, with only my most used apps. My iPad has zero folders on it (my most-used apps folder is in the dock). I like showing my background photos. On my iPad, there's a photo of my granddaughters in front of one of Utah's arches. When I turn the iPad to portrait mode, I pop up on top of that arch.

I have used that technique to move apps from screen to screen. I dearly miss the ability to move apps around from within iTunes on my Mac.

Randall Huleva

I’ve been using folders to organize apps for a LONG time, but I am very frustrated that we are now in 2019 with iOS 13 to be released very soon, but we STILL do not have the ability to NEST FOLDERS on the iOS home screen.

This can not possibly be that difficult of a feature to add. i have been repeatedly suggesting that Apple add it since iOS 4...and I will continue to do so until they add it or I DIE!

I NEED sub-folders!!!

Tom Gifford

Great info - thanks!

One quick question - when I search for an app by pulling down from the top of the screen and typing a name and I see the app that I am searching for in the search results, is there a way to see where that app is located on the iDevice (which page and/or folder has that app that shows in the search results list)?

Gary Rosenzweig

Tom: If you do a search like that and the app icon is in a folder, you will see the name of the folder to the right of the app icon on the search screen. But it only appears after you narrow it down to 1 app after typing enough characters.

Robert Lanz

Searching for the app using a keyword or even the correct app name -complete spelled- is not working on my iPhone. However if I go further on to click "Search in the App Store" I will find 'my' app in the store and click on Open. I realize now it's a work around I have been using all the time. I'm glad you tell us in this post the search result should be shown on my iPhone and also indicating which folder if that is the case. Is there anything in settings to be changed?

Robert: There are settings in Settings, Siri & Search. But you usually have to disable an app from appearing on an app-by-app basis. It is odd that apps you have installed are not appearing.

Comments Closed.

How To Organize The Icons On Your iPhone Home Screen

Comments: 8 Responses to “How To Organize The Icons On Your iPhone Home Screen”

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