How To Use the iOS 14 App Library

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at using the iOS 14 App Library on your iPhone.

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So one of the best new features of iOS 14 on the iPhone is the App Library. This is a screen that shows all of your apps. That means that you can now clean up your Home Screens and still have a place to find apps that you only use occasionally. 

So in iOS 14 you have your regular Home Screen just as before. You can swipe right to left to go to the next one and go through as many Home Screens that you have. At the end, the last screen, is your App Library. Now your App Library shows these little squares boxes with four icons in them. They start off with Suggestions and Recently Added.  After that they are broken up into categories. Things like Utilities, Games, Social, Entertainment. You can scroll through the list here and see all the different categories. Those categories are from the App Store. Whatever category the app is in in the App Store, that's where it's going to fit here in your App Library.

Now wherever you see a large icon, like under Utilities, you can see Settings, Apple Watch, and Calculator have a large icon. I could tap on one of those and it will simply launch the app. If there are more than four items in a category the fourth item will be a grouping of smaller icons. If you tap on that then you'll go to a screen that shows you all of the icons in that category. You can swipe up and down to scroll through them if there are more than can fit on a single screen. You can tap anywhere outside of the icons, like at the bottom here, to go back up. 

Now in addition to that you can get an alphabetical listing. You can do that one of two ways. One way is you can tap in the Search field at the top. As soon as you do that you'll get an alphabetical listing. But another way is simply swipe down slightly and that puts the cursor in the Search field at the top and also brings up an alphabetical list. Once you have an alphabetical list you can scroll through them. You can also tap on the letters at the right side to jump to a letter. You can tap and scroll through the letters on the right side to move quickly up and down the list.

Of course if you start searching at the top you will narrow down the apps really quickly using those letters. So you can see the letters have to appear inside of the app's name. But sometimes subtitles are used as well. For instance  Find My appears here because Find My iPhone is a common name for that app. You can always hit the X to go back to the full alphabetical list or the Cancel button to jump back up to the categories view for the App Library.

Now in the App Library the icons behave just like they normally would. So for instance I can tap and hold the Settings icon there and I can get the options. The same ones that would be on the Home Screen if I tapped and held the Settings icon. But I can also tap and hold in a blank space, say a space between the boxes there, and everything will wiggle just like a normal Home Screen and I can actually delete apps right here from the App Library. 

One of the great things about the App Library is you no longer have to have apps on the Home Screen since the App Library lists everything. You can remove apps from the Home Screen and still have them installed on your iPhone. So, for instance, let's say I want to remove the Tips App from the Home Screen here. I can tap and hold and then I have the Remove App option. When I tap that I now have two options. One is to Delete the app like I would have before. But I could also Move App to the App Library. It's already in the App Library but by selecting that it's now gone from the Home Screen. It's not anywhere. It's not in the Folder, it's not on any of the screens. But it is still here in the App Library. I can search for it and it comes up. 

So for those apps that you don't use that often you can remove them from your Home Screens knowing that you can get to them easily in the App Library. In fact you can even remove entire Home Screens. So if you still want to have this Home Screen here intact with all these icons but you don't want to see it for awhile you can tap and hold and make everything wiggle as before. Then tap at the bottom where you see the dots. Now you can uncheck that screen. You can do that for any page on the Home Screen except the first one. Now I've got this one Home Screen and when I swipe over it goes right to the App Library. That page of the Home Screen is now hidden. So you can set your iPhone to have just this one Home Screen page and as soon as you swipe over you're at the App Library. I think that for a lot of people that's how they are going to set it up.

There are a couple of settings for the App Library. If you go into the Settings app and you go to Home Screen there you can decide what happens when you download a new app. You can have it Add to Home Screen which is exactly how it worked before. But you can also select to have it go to the App Library Only. So apps get added to the App Library but they won't appear on a Home Screen unless you add them. You can also choose whether Notification badges are shown in the App Library. Those are those little numbers that appear over the app icon when you have a Notification or alert concerning that app.

Now if you have a lot of apps in your App Library but they are not on a Home Screen you can add them to your Home Screen by just dragging them. Just the same way you would do for moving an app around on the Home Screen pages. For instance we removed that Tips app. So let's go and look for that Tips app. Here it is. I'll tap and hold and wait until everything wiggles. Then I can drop it back there on the Home Screen. It even jumps back to that page. I can also get it off of the Home Screen by dragging it to the right to the App Library and now it knows that that means I want to remove it from the regular page. You can also just tap and hold and you can see one of the options there is Add to Home Screen. It will put it on a Home Screen and then you could drag it around from there. You notice I don't even have to tap and hold and wait for things to wiggle anymore. You can just drag and icon directly.

Here's a tip. When you do a search for an app in the App Library if you just hit the Search button at the bottom right it will launch the app that's at the top of the list. So right now it will launch Calendar. I don't have to go and move my finger to the top of the screen to launch the app.

So it looks like the App Library will make it much easier to manage your iPhone if you have a ton of apps. I know for me it's going to mean I can get rid of an entire Home Screen filled with folders that are filled with apps that I rarely ever use. I could remove all those from the Home Screen and access them by the App Library whenever I need them. Then maybe just have two or three Home Screen pages with the apps I most frequently use along with a few of the new widgets.