An iPhone proprietor’s information to dwelling off the app grid

The grid is a snug place to reside.

The app grid, I imply: the rows and rows of app icons in your iPhone’s homescreen. It’s acquainted. Secure. It’s how I’ve lived with my varied telephones over the previous decade. However sooner or later, it began to really feel oppressive.

All these icons looking at me within the face, vying for my consideration. The litter! The distracting little notification badges! The grid was an inexpensive technique to arrange apps once I had like, ten of them. There are sixty on the iPhone I’m utilizing now, and I set it up from scratch a number of months in the past. 

Naturally, dwelling off-grid or in a non-traditional homescreen association has been potential for for much longer on Android. Google’s OS enables you to preserve your display screen clear and simply discover your apps within the app drawer, which is at all times a swipe away. You possibly can even exchange the launcher completely. However iOS — the place each new app you obtain winds up in your homescreen by default — hasn’t precisely made it simple to desert the grid.

That began to alter when iOS 14 added widgets, an app library, and the flexibility to cover apps out of your homescreen — although I haven’t developed the muscle reminiscence to make use of it a lot. Now, iOS 18 provides much more flexibility. You possibly can put apps and widgets anyplace you need in your homescreen, change their colours, and put extra features into the Management Heart. However even because the apps and customization choices have multiplied, most of us are nonetheless utilizing our homescreens in principally the identical manner as we did with our first smartphones. 

With the brand new choices in iOS 18  — and getting a peek at different peoples’ well-curated homescreens — I made a decision it was time to perform a little cleanup. Why ought to an app I solely open as soon as a month once I park downtown take up area on my homescreen year-round? Higher but, does any app should occupy that treasured actual property?

I spent about an hour deleting icons, arranging widgets, and including controls to create my new homescreen. The digicam management button on the iPhone 16 renders that icon pointless; the motion button launches the oft-used daycare app, so that might go too. After I was achieved, my haphazardly maintained system of folders with cute emoji labels was whittled down to only 4 apps within the dock and a handful of widgets unfold throughout two pages, which I’m affectionately calling “Home windows Cellphone 2.0.”

Was it scary? Slightly. However you understand what? I don’t miss these rows of icons in any respect. 9 out of ten instances the app I’m in search of is within the Siri urged apps that pop up once I open search. If not, I kind within the first few letters of the app title and there it’s. You possibly can swipe over to the app library, I suppose, however I infrequently do. 

The most important disadvantage is that I’ll see a notification, dismiss it, after which neglect about it for days because the app icon and its little pink notification badge aren’t in my face anymore. However I missed issues right here and there even once I was dwelling on the grid, and people badges are an actual downside for me: I’m the form of one that wants to achieve badge zero, so I’ll continuously open apps simply to filter the notifications and get the pink dot out of my face. Residing off the app grid removes this distraction, and it’s the primary factor I respect about my new life-style.

I’m pleased with my new homescreen, however a few of my colleagues take the off-the-grid philosophy to the following degree. Weekend information editor Wes Davis may educate a masterclass in useful iOS homescreens. He retains a number of apps within the dock, and Wordle will get a spot on his grid, however outdoors of that it’s simply widgets and shortcuts. 

“I hate in search of issues on my telephone,” he advised me. “All of this sort of began with me leaping on the bandwagon of ‘I wish to use my telephone much less, and have it’s much less distracting.” The grayscale shortcut icons on his homescreen minimize down on visible litter, and he doesn’t really feel as drawn to opening time-suck apps like TikTok when the icon isn’t proper in entrance of him. Lots of the shortcuts additionally comprise drop-down menus, so he can launch proper into the duty he’s in search of. 

Better of all, this technique permits him to arrange his telephone by the motion he’s making an attempt to take. An icon labeled “Podcasts” launches no matter podcast app he’s utilizing in the intervening time. If he ever begins utilizing a special app, he’ll preserve the identical shortcut icon and have it launch a brand new app. “I don’t need to put a brand new app in there and get myself used to in search of that icon.” 

Information editor Jay Peters takes a extra simple method. Like me, he finds the fixed presence of app icons distracting. “If I don’t see the app proper on my homescreen I’m manner much less doubtless to make use of it and simply scroll with it.” He has a complete of seven apps on his homescreen — together with three within the dock — and can often enable an app icon again onto the grid if he’s going to be utilizing it lots in a brief time period. “If I’m happening a giant street journey or one thing, possibly I’ll transfer the maps app [at the top of the homescreen],” he says, “However in any other case I attempt to preserve it to only these seven apps.”

Each of my colleagues have achieved a degree of stability of their digital lives that I like. I additionally heard from many extra who mentioned that they nonetheless preserve a homescreen crammed with app icons, however they nearly at all times skip the grid and go to Highlight search when they should open an app. And none of us is aware of fairly when it occurred, however a couple of particular person I talked to agreed that the Siri urged apps on the prime of the search pane bought actually good sooner or later prior to now. As a rule, the app I’m in search of is true there earlier than I even kind a letter into the search bar.

That form of factor provides me hope for a future the place customized AI will help me discover what I’m in search of on my telephone, with much less enter from me. But when I’ve discovered something from this train, it’s that you just don’t have to attend for AI or the metaverse or ambient computing or no matter to make your digital life much less annoying. There are instruments in our fingers already; you simply want a bit braveness to go away your consolation zone behind.