A chaotic home screen on your smartphone also causes chaos in your head. With these tips, you can easily clean up and organize your iPhone home screen.
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Organize and clean up iPhone home screen
A tidy house provides peace in your head. That is no different with your iPhone. Clean up your homescreen and organize your apps with these tips, in order to get more rest and work faster.
1. Return your homescreen to the standard format
If you want to tackle it rigorously, it is possible to completely reset the start screen. If you do this, your home screen including the dock will be reset to the standard format. Your apps will not be lost in this way, but they will be placed in the order in which they are installed.
To reset your homescreen, follow these steps on your iPhone or iPad:
- Open the Settings app and go to ‘General’;
- At the bottom, tap “Set up again”;
- Tap “Restore Home Screen Layout,” then tap “Restore Home Screen.”
This is a way to start with a clean slate and order from there. You can also choose to organize from what your home screen looks like at the moment.
2. Remove apps that you do not use
Chances are that you have installed some apps that you never actually use. These apps take up unnecessary space. Therefore go through all your apps and decide per application if you want to save them, or that you throw them away.
You can always download each app again later. Even if you throw the app from your iPhone, you will not lose it forever. Do you have apps that you have not used for a month, but are still installed for ‘ever’? Throw them away for a tidy feeling.
To throw an app away, keep the icon on your homescreen pressed until a cross appears in the corner of the icon. Press this cross and tap ‘Delete’ to throw the app away.
3. So you arrange apps
The next step in clearing your homescreen is to arrange your remaining apps. You can move apps by briefly holding them down until they start to vibrate and a cross appears. Then you drag them to another place. For the order, you have to take into account different things.
First of all how you hold your iPhone. Your goal is to easily get to the apps that you use most often. For example, if you hold your iPhone with your right hand at the bottom, it is smart to place the apps you use most often at the bottom right.
Then keep in mind that you can fill multiple screens with apps by swiping. It is sometimes easier to swipe with your thumb and start the apps in the bottom right of the next page, then open an app in the top left. However, if you have filled more than three screens with apps, it may be time to work with folders.
Do not be afraid to adjust the order of apps again later. Do you notice that you use an app often, but is it in a tricky place? Then move the icon to a location where you can access it faster.
4. Place your apps in folders
If you have many apps, then folders are the most logical way to organize them. Maps are collections of apps that you reach by tapping the folder. Creating a folder is done by holding down an app and dragging it over another application and releasing it. Then they are both in a folder.
To change the name of a folder, open the folder and press and hold the name at the top. As a nice alternative, you can choose to use emoji as a name instead of text.
There are different ways to organize your folders. It just depends on what works for you. Here are some suggestions:
- By category: Place your apps per category in folders. For example in the categories ‘social apps’, ‘games’ and ‘security’;
- Per verb: Name your folders to verbs such as ‘chat’, ‘play’, ‘look’ and ‘work’ and then divide the apps under these words;
- By theme: Maps can easily be divided per theme. Think for example of ‘traveling’, ‘working’, ‘children’ and so on;
- By color: Apps can also be divided into folders by color. That is nice and tidy, but this makes apps difficult to find.
5. Create more space between the apps and folders
Do you want to create more space between the apps or folders? This is an option through a trick. This way it is possible to keep a whole line empty and place apps lower on the screen. Useful if you only put a few apps on the home screen, but do not want to put them at the top of the screen.
For this trick you have to use a completely black background, otherwise, it will not work. An advantage is that a black background immediately gives a tidy feeling. Follow the next steps for this trick:
- Go to ‘Background’ in the Settings app;
- Tap ‘Choose a new background’, search for the black background and set it up;
- Go to this website on your iPhone via Safari;
- Tap the share icon and choose “Put on home screen”;
- Repeat the above step several times to place more invisible icons as empty space on your homescreen.
Set background
Every new iPhone has its own wallpapers, but you can also install them on your older device. Take for example the backgrounds of the iPhone XR, or the iPhone XS wallpapers. You can also download the wallpapers of all old iOS versions.
