Hone the Home Screen
Once past the Lock screen, you’re presented with the Home screen—the grid of icons that you tap to launch apps. Resting at the bottom of the Home screen is the Dock, which makes it easy to get to a fixed set of your most-used apps regardless of which Home screen page you’re on. On an iPhone or iPod touch, the Dock can hold icons for four apps.
Learn Home Screen Basics
To return to the Home screen from any app, press the Home button on your device. If your device doesn’t have a Home button, swipe up from the bottom of the screen—this also works on the iPad. Except as otherwise noted, this gesture acts the same as the Home button.
The Home screen is divided into pages, which iOS automatically adds and removes as you install and delete apps. The small white dots above the Dock indicate which page is currently visible on the Home screen (Figure 22). To flip between pages, flick the screen left or right.
Manage the Home Screen
From the Home screen, you can move and delete apps, and arrange them into folders.
Move Apps
To move app icons around the Home screen:
Touch and hold any icon for a few seconds, until all the icons start to shake.
Touch, hold, and begin dragging the app icon you want to move.
To move multiple icons, tap them with another finger as you’re dragging the first icon. They’re added to a stack beneath your fingertip, and a blue badge appears in the upper-right corner of the stack with the number of apps you’re moving (Figure 23).
Figure 23: You can move multiple apps at once. While dragging an app, tap additional apps to add them to the stack. The blue badge tells you how many you’re moving. Drag the icon or icons to where you want them. To move an icon to another page, move it to the edge of the screen and pause until the page flips.
Once you’ve moved the icon or icons where you want them, you can move more as long as the icons are still shaking.
Press the Home button or tap Done in the upper-right corner to exit editing mode.
Delete Apps
Deleting an app’s icon from the Home screen also removes the app from your device and deletes all the data stored in the app, except for anything that might have been stored in the cloud.
To delete an app:
Touch and hold its icon for a few seconds until all the icons start to shake.
Tap the delete
button in the upper-left corner of the icon, tap Remove when prompted, and the icon disappears.While the apps are shaking, you can delete another app—or move apps, if you like.
Press the Home button (or, on an iPhone X, XS, XS Max, or XR, swipe up from the bottom of the screen) to exit editing mode.
Make and Delete Folders
A folder is a handy way to group apps. To create one:
Touch and hold any icon until all the icons begin to shake.
Move one app icon on top of another and hold it there for a moment. iOS displays the new folder and suggests a name for it.
If you like the suggested name, tap Done on the keyboard. If you aren’t enamored of the suggested name, tap the delete
button to the right of the suggested name, type a new name, and tap Done on the keyboard.
You can now tap outside the folder and continue to drag app icons into your new folder. Press Home when you’re finished.
To remove a folder, simply move all its icons outside of the folder. The folder disappears automatically.
Manage Home Screen Notifications
We discussed the Lock screen and Notification Center in Manage Notifications, but those aren’t the only places you’ll receive notifications. Notification badges appear on the Home screen, and badges and alerts can appear on the Home screen or in any app:
Badges: These small rounded images display on app icons to show how many unread items are in an app (Figure 24). Enable these for only the apps that truly need them, so the badges you see are important to you. For example, my email inbox has thousands of unread junk messages that I haven’t pruned, so I disable the badge for Mail. But I leave it on for Messages, since I read all my messages.
Figure 24: Badges are hard to miss, but if they’re overused, they’re easy to ignore. To turn badges on and off per app, go to Settings > Notifications > App Name and flip the Badges switch.
Temporary Banners: Banners drop down from the top of the screen and disappear automatically after a few seconds. This has been the default notification style since iOS 5 and is usually a safe choice.
To open a banner notification in order to interact with it, pull it down like a window shade. Tap it to open its associated app (Figure 25). You can also swipe up on it to dismiss it for later.
Figure 25: Banners and alerts appear at the top of the screen. Pull them down to open, or tap them to open the app. Persistent Banners: These are the more annoying version of banners. These banners do not disappear automatically—you must act on them before they’ll go away. Persistent banners are useful for notifications that you absolutely don’t want to miss, like Calendar events or alarms.
To set the banner style, go to Settings > Notifications > App Name > Banner Style.
When you launch an app for the first time, if it has a Notifications feature, you’ll be asked whether you’d like to receive notifications from that app. I suggest denying notifications from apps that you don’t need notifications from, like most games. You could also adjust the app’s notification settings so that notifications only show up in Notification Center and don’t otherwise disturb you (Figure 26). The new Instant Tuning feature of iOS 12 is also helpful here—refer back to Manage Notifications.
Use Reachability
To make it easier to use big-screen iPhones with one hand, Apple introduced Reachability. Double-tap the Home button while in portrait orientation—not a double-press, but two light taps. On the iPhone X, XS, XS Max, or XR swipe down on the bottom of the screen. The entire screen drops down so you can access interface elements near the top with your thumb. To exit Reachability, tap the empty space at the top. On the iPhone X, XS, XS Max, or XR you can swipe up on the bottom of the screen.
Reachability works in all apps. If you don’t need it, you can disable it in Settings > General > Accessibility.
3D Touch Tricks
On devices that support 3D Touch, you can use 3D Touch on Home screen icons to access a shortcuts menu. Here are some of the things you can do:
Firmly press the Camera app icon to quickly take a selfie, record video, scan a QR code, or take a regular photo.
If an app has a corresponding widget, a firm press on its icon displays it.
Firmly press a folder to rename it.
If an app inside a folder has a notification badge, a firm press on the folder lets you open that app directly (Figure 27).
Figure 27: 3D Touch lets you quickly rename folders and access contained apps with notification badges. Firmly press a downloading app to pause or cancel the download.