From the earliest versions of iOS, the iPhone’s Home Screen has required apps to be placed on a strict grid. Want an app in the bottom corner? First you had to fill in all the space above it with other apps.
iOS 18 brings introduces much more freedom to the app grid. Now, you can leave empty space anywhere on the screen and put, say, just a couple apps or a single widget near the bottom of the screen. This can be especially nice when you have a wallpaper subject that you don’t want covered up by apps.
iOS 18 also offers new tools for changing how app icons look on your Home Screen.
You can apply a tint to all your app icons so they look uniform. You can choose to make all your app icons larger and hide their names from being displayed.
How to rearrange apps on iPhone Home Screen
To rearrange icons, press on an app and hold, as ever. When a pop up menu appears, you can choose Edit Home Screen, or just wait for a moment longer.
In either case, all of the apps on your iPhone start wiggling and gain a minus-sign icon at top left. To move the apps around, you can again press and hold while it’s wiggling, and drag it wherever you want.
That now means to any position on the screen, or rather to any position in Apple’s invisible grid. Drag the app to any point and when you let go, it snaps to the nearest neat spot.
Moving lots of apps around at once is a little more fiddly, but it can be done and it lets you whole sets of them to new positions, or new home screen pages.
This time when you let go of multiple apps, they again fall into neat slots, but fill out rows starting from wherever your first app lands.
How to rearrange multiple apps at once
- Press and hold on an app until they are all wiggling
- Keep pressing on that first app
- With a different finger, quickly tap on each of the other apps
- Now drag the original app to where you want
- Let go and the apps will fall into place
- When you tap the other apps, while holding the first one, those apps fly to underneath your finger. When you let go, all of them fly back out, but now landing in the nearest empty places in the grid.
How to customize app icons on Home Screen in iOS 18
For more than a decade, it’s taken jailbreaking or other workarounds to customize iPhone apps with a unique look. Now, iOS 18 includes the ability to change iPhone app colors and more natively. Here’s how it works.
- From the Home Screen, press and hold in an blank spot
- Tap Edit in the top left corner
- Now pick Customize
- Choose between Automatic, Dark, Light, and Tinted
- You can also pick between small (default) and large app icons
- Choosing tinted lets you change all iPhone app colors to a single choice
How to Hide App Labels on Your iPhone Home Screen
As part of its Home Screen customization overhaul, iOS 18 lets iPhone users hide the labels on app icons for a cleaner look.
Turning off the labels causes the icons to expand and take up the space where the text usually appears underneath. Here’s how it works:
- On the Home Screen, press and hold on an empty area.
- Tap Edit then Customize
- In the customization menu that appears, tap the Large button. Your iPhone will now have larger icons without any app labels and it looks awesome.
More on iOS 18: