Managing Your Home Screen App Icons On iOS 15

Here are the basics and some advanced tips for arranging the icons on your iPhone's Home screen. Also learn how to create folders, change the order of the screens, and only show a small selection of apps on your Home screens instead of all of them.
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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. On today's episode let me show you how to arrange the App icons on your iPhone is iOS 15.
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So here are the basics for arranging the App icons on your iPhone. There are some new tricks in iOS 15. I'm using a Bluetooth mouse with my iPhone so you can see this red circle here whereas you won't be able to my finger on the screen. So if you want to arrange the icons on the screen it works just like it did before. All you need to do is tap and hold an icon, I'll tap and hold Settings here, and wait. You'll see a menu appear and then if you continue to hold everything will start to wiggle. Then you could drag this icon around. You can move it to another position and drop it there. That's how you can rearrange the icons on the screen. 
Note that this really is just one long list starting with the top left going over to the right and then down with each row. So you can't, for instance, place one of the icons down here in the bottom right corner. It has to be the next one in the list. However you do have the Dock down below. So on the iPhone this can show four different icons. You can remove one from the here just as easily as moving anything. Now the great thing about the Dock is that you see it on all screens. So you should put your four most used apps down here in the Dock. You could move anyone that you want into the Dock by just dragging it down just like you were moving it anywhere else on the Home Screen. 
Now you can see here if I swipe over I've got a second screen here with some more app icons on it. If I want to move an icon from one screen to the other all I need to do is tap and hold, wait for everything to wiggle again, and now I can move to the right side of the screen and it will eventually go to the second screen and I can drop the icon there. I can do the same thing with the left side of the screen to move it back one. 
You can also create App folders. This is when you combine two or more apps into one folder. All you need to do to create those is to drag and drop one onto another. So, for instance, I could take this game app here and instead of dragging it to another location I can actually drag it on top of another app. If I wait long enough a folder is created and I can place the second icon in there with the first. I can then tap here and rename this folder whatever I want. Hit Done and then to get out of this mode I can just tap anywhere outside here. You could see now I've got this folder. If I want to access the apps in the folder I just tap it once to get into the folder and again to launch the app. As you can see here it can hold nine icons here in this but you can have multiple screens. So if you have ten you would just swipe over and go to the next screen. Now to add more into a folder once the folder exists all you need to do is tap and wait and drag to the folder. So you could add more apps to it like that. To get apps out of it just go into the folder and drag to someplace outside and then you can drop it out there. To delete a folder all you need to do is drag all of the items out of it and the folder will go away. Like that. 
Now you don't have to have all your apps on Home Screen. I have many more apps than this on this iPhone. But you don't see them all here. You will see them all on the last screen which is called the App Library. Every app you have is going to be in one of these categories. In any one of these categories the first three apps can be tapped simply to launch the app. Everything else inside you need to dig down inside the category. You would do that by tapping the fourth item here that would open this up. Then you can scroll through all the apps in that category. So this is a complete categorized list of all of your apps. You don't get to decide which category items go into because it's decided by which category they're in in the App Store. But at the top you do get suggestions what your iPhone thinks you might be looking for and you do get Recently Added here at the top right as well. So when you add a new app you'll find it here really easily. 
In addition to that you can get an Alphabetical List. You can get to that a couple of ways. One is just swipe down slightly and you could see it goes into the Alphabetical List here. You can scroll through. You can tap on one of the letters here to jump around. You can Search here. So, for instance, if you know the app you're looking for starts with the letter G, just start typing like that and it quickly gets you where you want. You could also get to the Alphabetical List by simply tapping in the Search field at the top and it immediately goes there. 
Now because you can access any app from the App Library it's no longer necessary to have all of your apps on a Home Screen. That's why I have a ton of apps but only these few apps are on one of my two Home Screens. If you want to get rid of an app from a Home Screen, so it's only in the App Library, simply tap and hold and one of the options is to Remove App. Now if you tap that you actually get two removal options. One is to Delete the app like before. The other one is simply to remove from the Home Screen. So it disappears from here and you can still get to it from the App Library. 
Now what if you want to put an app back. An app that is not on your Home Screen but it's in the App Library. How do you get it back onto the Home Screen? Well, there are a couple of ways. One is to find the app here in the App Library. Then tap and hold it and then one of the options you'll have here is Add to Home Screen. Do that and it will appear in the Home Screen in the last slot. Now you can move it to where you want. You can do the same thing by bringing up the Alphabetical List. Tapping and holding and you get the same option. But another thing you could do is a Spotlight search. I'm going to drag down in the middle of the screen there and bring up Search. I'm going to search for an app there. I can tap it and drag and as soon as I drag now I'm dragging onto the Home Screen.
Now you could see here I've got two Home Screens. You may have many more. One of the problems in the past that people have had is if they want to move the Home Screens around. So you have seven Home Screens and you want to switch which order they are in. You can actually do that by tapping and holding anywhere on the screen, it doesn't have to be one of the app icons here, until you're in wiggle mode. Then those here the dots that show the different screens. If you tap that you go into a mode that shows all of your Home Screens. You could actually drag the Home Screens and change their order. Better yet you could actually turn Off a Home Screen, there's a little checkbox at the bottom there. Turn it Off and then Done and now you've only got this one Home Screen. If I swipe over it goes right to the App Library. You can get it back. Just go in wiggle mode again, tap here, and check that screen to bring it back. 
So here are a few more advanced techniques. You don't have to drag app icons one at a time. I'm going to use my fingers here for this because I'm going to need two fingers and it's not going to work with the mouse. But if I tap and drag this one icon here I can use another finger here and tap anyone of the other icons and they will go into a stack. I can move these, say, to another screen or place them before everything else here like that. You could also use this as a quick way to reorder things. So for instance I can drag Files here and then think, okay the order I want being on the screen is Files, then Watch, Calculator, this, this and then go through in exact order that I want things and then drop and they will be laid out in that order. Or if I wanted to grab a bunch of apps, like let's grab all these games here. I want to grab this one and then we'll do it in a particular order like this, this, and this. Then drop them all here in that order.
Now let's go into the Settings app. In the Settings app look for Home Screen. Here you get to decide where newly downloaded apps go. So if you want every app that you download to appear on the Home Screen then you can set it like this. You could still Delete it from the Home Screen leaving it in the App Library later on. But if you want new apps to only go to the Library, not be put on a Home Screen, select this. You could still go to the App Library and then choose to put one of those apps on the Home Screen later. But having it set to App's Library only avoids a lot of clutter if you're always trying out new apps. You're not going to keep cluttering up your Home Screens with them. It will just go to the App Library unless you deem them important enough to be moved to one of your Home Screens as well. 
Here's another trick. If you go to Focus you have these different Focus modes. I talked about this in a video before. It's one of the great new features of iOS 15. You could actually customize your Home Screens based on your Focus mode. So here's a Focus mode I created called Evening. If I go into that I can go to Home Screen and I could customize pages. Here I can decide which pages are shown when I'm in that mode. So, for instance, I could have a page of games that's shown in my Evening Focus mode but not shown during my work Focus mode. 
Now I haven't addressed Widgets in this video. That's a whole other subject. But very quickly of course you can add widgets to a Home Screen and move them around as well. So you just tap and hold anywhere to go into wiggle mode. Tap the Plus button here and then add the widget that you want. I'll add a Weather widget here. Add it and I can tap and hold and move that around as I want. Move it to another Home Screen if I want or back to this one. It just behaves as an icon there. Of course you can't stack them or put them in folders or anything like that. But you could certainly fill up another Home Screen with just widgets that are useful and then decide whether or not that Home Screen is shown or not or shown or not in certain Focus modes. 
So that's how you arrange the app icons on the Home Screen on your iPhone. It works basically the same way on the iPad as well. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.
Managing Your Home Screen App Icons On iOS 15

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