For years, I’ve kept a fairly stock iOS home screen. Two or three rows of icons at the top of the screen, sometimes arranged so that the colors of the app icons complement each other, and three apps in the dock. Due to Apple’s resistance to letting its users mess up the look and feel of the home screen, I haven’t been able to make things as simple as I’d like.
I’ve been eyeing Android’s most customizable screens with envy. I’ve had an iPhone since the day it first came out, and as Apple’s smartphones have gotten more powerful, capable, and larger, the company has forced me to organize my apps starting at the top of the screen for 17 years. .
Of course, my home screen usually looked nice. But I’ve been looking for options to add more flair to my home screen that I see dozens of times a day — the kinds of tools Android users have had for a very long time — even if it meant I my phone looks worse. iOS 14’s widgets were a step in the right direction, and with some Siri Shortcut magic, you can do a fair amount of themes.
But iOS 18, the dam is finally breaking down: as part of the new software update, Apple gives users some tools to easily customize the app icons on their home screen, without requiring jailbreaking or Siri shortcuts. You’ll be able to make all your apps the same general color with a tinting tool, and icons can fade when you switch to dark mode. You can also – again, At last — place your app icons wherever you want, meaning you can make them easier to reach or adjust them to better match your background.
How did I use these new powers? Finally, I could make my dream minimalist screen.
I like it. This is how I’ve wanted to design my iOS home screen for years: a few apps that are easily accessible from my finger with little to clutter things up. Best of all, it only took a few minutes to put together.
Let me break it all down.
First, I immediately made my app icons gray and boring so they would match my gray and boring background. The gray color makes apps harder to distinguish from each other, and that’s the point: I wanted to add some friction to my phone so I don’t waste so much time on it.
Next, I moved my apps from the top of the screen to the bottom. This makes them more accessible when I need them on the iPhone 12 Mini. (I can see this being really handy with an iPhone Plus or Pro Max.) An unexpected benefit has been that every new app I download gets added to HEAD of the screen, where they come out.
I’ve already talked about how I try to have as few apps on my phone as possible. Every app at the top of my screen is a bright reminder that I need to organize them on my home screen, put them in my App Library, or delete them from my phone. (Usually, it’s the latter.)
I also hid the labels in my apps so there is basically no text on the screen. I would like to remove the word “Search” from the button above the dock so that there is no word at all. We’ll probably get it from iOS 36.
I used iOS 18’s new Control Center features to make my phone even more boring. Now you can make a native change to the Color Filters accessibility setting, which I turn on to make everything grayscale on my phone. I’ve found that it makes my phone less interesting and I take the gray as a visual sign that I should be doing something else instead of using my phone. But when I want to see a picture of my child in full color for just a second, I can press the button to turn off the grayscale.
Yes, the changes I made are ugly and sometimes irritating. But they are OWN choices, and I’m glad Apple gave me these tools at all. People put weird things on the outside of their phones all the time, and with iOS 18, that mayhem can trickle down to what’s on their home screens. When the update rolls out to everyone this fall, I’m expecting an explosion of cool and weird designs.
And if I get tired of my minimalist grayscale iPhone? It’s easier than ever to do something new.