Apple is finally embracing the chaos of Android

For years, I kept a pretty spare iOS home screen. Two or three rows of icons at the top of the screen, sometimes arranged so that the app icon colors complement each other, and three apps in the dock. Due to Apple’s resistance to allowing its users to tinker with the appearance of the home screen, I wasn’t able to make things as simple as I would have liked.

I’ve watched Android’s more customizable home screens with envy. I’ve had an iPhone since the day the first one came out, and even though Apple’s smartphones have become increasingly powerful, capable, and larger, the company has forced me to arrange my apps from the top of the screen for 17 years. .

Sure, my home screen generally looked nice. But I wanted options to add more style to my home screen, which I see dozens of times a day — the kinds of tools Android users have long had — even if it meant I’d make my phone look worse. iOS 14 widgets were a step in the right direction and with Some Siri Shortcuts Magicyou could do a good amount of themes.

But in iOS 18, the dam is finally breaking loose: As part of the new software update, Apple is offering users some tools to easily customize app icons on their home screen, no jailbreak or Siri shortcuts required. You can make all your apps the same general color with a tinting tool, and icons can become darker when you switch to dark mode. You can too – again, finally – Place your app icons wherever you want, which means you can make them easier to reach or arrange them to better fit your wallpaper.

How did I use these new powers? Finally, I could make the minimalist home screen of my dreams.

I love that. This is how I’ve wanted to design my iOS home screen for years: a few apps at my thumb’s reach and little else to clutter things up. Best of all, it only took a few minutes to assemble.

Let me explain everything.

First, I immediately made my app icons gray and boring so they would match my boring gray wallpaper. The gray tint makes apps harder to distinguish from one another, and that’s the point: I wanted to add some friction to my phone so I don’t spend so much time on it.

Then I moved my apps from the top to the bottom of the screen. This makes them more accessible when I need them on my iPhone 12 Mini. (I can see this being really useful with an iPhone Plus or Pro Max.) An unexpected benefit is that any new apps I download are added to the main of the screen, where they stand out.

I’ve already made it known how I try to have as few apps on my phone as possible. All the apps displayed at the top of the screen are glaring reminders that I need to organize them on the home screen, put them in the app library, or delete them from the phone. (It’s usually the latter.)

me too I hid the labels in my apps so there is basically no text on the screen. I wish I could remove the word “Search” from the button above the dock so there would be no words at all. Maybe we’ll get that in iOS 36.

I used iOS 18’s new Control Center features to make my phone more boring, too. You can now natively toggle the Color Filters accessibility setting, which I turn on to make everything grayscale on my phone. I’ve found this makes my phone less interesting, and I consider the gray a visual cue that I should be doing something else instead of using my phone. But when I want to see a color photo of my child for just a second, I can press the button to turn off the grayscale.

Yes, the changes I’ve made are ugly and sometimes irritating. But they are my choices, and I’m glad Apple gave me these tools. People put weird things on the outside of their phones all the time, and with iOS 18, that chaos could spill over to what’s on their home screens. When the update rolls out to everyone this fall, I expect an explosion of delightful and wacky designs.

What if I get tired of my minimalist grayscale iPhone? It’s easier than ever to do something new.