iOS 18’s new home screen features are a long-awaited win for flexibility

By: ARS Techica - Tech Posted On: September 17, 2024 View: 3

This article was originally published on ARS Techica - Tech. You can read the original article HERE

Icons on an iPhone home screen all tinted blue — Enlarge / iOS 18's home screen color tinting and grid-based app icons in action.
Samuel Axon

Apart from the much-ballyhooed (and delayed) Apple Intelligence, a big change to home screen customization and app icon placement is one of iOS 18’s flagship features, alongside an overhauled Control Center.

With the public launch of iOS 18 this week, we’ll be delving into those flagship features one by one, and I’m starting with the home screen because I have often criticized the iPhone’s home screen experience in the past. iOS 18 promises the biggest update to home screen customization since, well, ever.

Let’s walk through how to use the new features, explore how they work, and try to answer the most important question: does the iPhone finally offer the kind of home screen flexibility that users have been asking for?

How to customize the home and lock screen in iOS 18

First up, let’s talk about how you access the new capabilities.

For the home screen, you still get to the customization options by long-pressing in the open space between the icons on any home screen page. This initiates wiggle mode. In the past, you could simply move apps from here, or you could tap a “+” button in the top-left corner to pick a widget to add.

Now the + button has been replaced by an “Edit” button. Tapping that brings up a drop-down menu with three options: Add Widget, Customize, and Edit Pages. Add Widget does what the + button used to do.

Edit Pages brings up a view of all your home screen pages, allowing you to check or uncheck each to see whether it’s included when you’re swiping around or not. (This is the same screen you got by tapping the dots representing the pages at the bottom of the home screen in wiggle mode before, and you can still get there that way, too.)

Customize, on the other hand, brings up a panel in the lower third of the screen that we didn’t have in this form in iOS 17. It lets you toggle between dark and light modes and change the size of icons from small to large (more on that soon).

To access the new customization options, you start by long-pressing the home screen until you get this wiggle mode...

Samuel Axon
Then you tap the "Edit" button in the top-left corner...

Samuel Axon
...and that brings up this customization panel in the lower part of the screen.

Samuel Axon

Additionally, there are four icons across the middle of the panel: Light, Dark, Automatic, and Tinted. Switching between Light and Dark changes Apple’s built-in icons (and any third-party app icons that have added support for this) to different color schemes, so an icon that was always white before is now just white in the Light setting, but it’s a dark gray in the black. (The Automatic setting switches between these are based on whether the system-wide Light or Dark mode is enabled.)

That’s neat, but things get really crazy with the Tinted option. This will tint every icon on the screen to one color—kind of like you could do with your home screen wallpaper before. These icons tend to resemble the dark mode versions, I’ve found, but the tint is strong. This applies to all icons, not just those of apps that have been programmed to support it.

This is light mode...

Samuel Axon
...and this is dark mode. Notice that some icons changed, but not others; developers need to support this.

Samuel Axon
This is tinted mode, which works whether developers have added support or not. In this case, the color matches the background, but you can go a different route if you want.

Samuel Axon

There’s also a color picker, so you can grab a color from your wallpaper to apply it to the icons, which is neat.

This uniform splash of color won’t be to everyone’s tastes, but it does breathe some life and uniformity into the chaos that was the old home screen of apps.

The biggest answer to that chaos comes in the form of freely placeable app icons, though.

The dreaded wiggle mode gets a little less dreaded

I’m not a fan of wiggle mode, that situation where all your icons shake and you drag them around your home screen as they displace one another in rows.

It’s visually chaotic, and it’s easy to accidentally create a folder or drop an icon in the wrong place. When widgets are involved, you can break your whole layout as a misstep cascades across pages of apps, bumping icons to pages they’re not supposed to inhabit. I found it persnickety and inefficient.

Whether or not everyone else feels quite as strongly about it, I’ll venture that most of us would like to at least be able to put icons wherever we want on the screen, like you’ve long been able to do with Android or a Windows (or Mac) desktop.

Behold, you can place icons wherever you want on the grid!

Samuel Axon
I tried making a smiley face, but would have needed one more horizontal row. Oh well!

Samuel Axon

You still use the old wiggle mode interface to do this, unfortunately. But because it’s now possible to place an icon on the home screen’s grid without another icon in the space to its left or above it, you can avoid a lot of the pain we had to deal with before.

Dragging an app icon amid other closely positioned app icons on the grid still follows the same rules as old wiggle mode: It will displace whatever’s there and shift things around a bit. You’ll still have to deal with that behavior if you want to have a home page screen that’s dense with icons.

But placing an icon in a spot that’s not already occupied just places it there, without affecting any other icons. You can place all your icons along one edge of the screen or alternate spots or make weird shapes. You can do whatever you want!

Yes, each icon still has to fall into a grid spot, so it’s not totally freeform—but it’s miles ahead of what we had before.

Resizing icons

Don’t get too excited by this header; you can’t resize icons individually, and there’s no slider letting you get precise about it. Rather, there are now two display modes for the home screen, one of which offers larger icon sizes.

The default is exactly the same size as you saw in iOS 17. The new large mode simply eliminates the app name text below each icon and expands the icons to fill in the newly available space. There is still exactly the same number of grid spots as before.

Here's the large icons option, which simply removes the app name text and fills up the space with slightly bigger icons.

Samuel Axon

(Relatedly, you can now resize widgets directly from the home screen without opening the customization panel, which is a nice tweak.)

It’s not a dramatic change, but it does give the home screen a cleaner look. Of course, it can make it harder to identify your apps if you’re not very familiar with the icons—especially in tandem with the next big customization feature, colors.

There are lock screen changes, too

iOS associates lock screens and the home screen in various ways, so it’s worth taking a moment to name the updates to the lock screen, too.

There aren’t a ton, but one of them is a doozy: You can now change the two long-press buttons in the lower-left and lower-right corners of the lock screen. Previously, you had the flashlight icon on the left and the camera one on the right.

You access this through the lock screen customization view (reached by long-pressing on the lock screen). There are now "-" buttons next to each of these two icons. Tapping that removes the icon, leaving a "+" sign in its wake. You can in turn tap the + sign to bring up a scrollable, searchable list of controls you can put here instead of what was there before.

From the lock screen customization view, you can now tap these "-" buttons to remove the existing controls.

Samuel Axon
You can replace those controls with anything from this control picker.

Samuel Axon
Here we have the Wallet and Voice Memo controls instead of flashlight and camera. Looks weird after all these years, doesn't it?

Samuel Axon

Options include Calculator, Home, Translate, the dark mode toggle, clock functions like timers and alarms, airplane mode, Apple TV remote mode, Silent mode, Shazam, Wallet, and a bunch more, including numerous accessibility features.

It makes sense for Apple to change this now, of all times; the introduction of the Capture button in the new iPhone 16 series of phones makes the Camera icon here pretty pointless—but you can keep the camera icon here if you have an older phone.

Putting it into practice

There are numerous ways you can approach using these features, of course, but I thought of one that makes a lot of sense right off the bat: I put the icons for apps I use the most toward the bottom of the screen, where I can reach them when I’m holding the phone with one hand.

(If you’ve been reading Ars long, you know how I long for the return of the small, one-handed phone.)

I left the top half of each home screen page completely empty. That means that I can just swipe across the bottom of the screen and tap icons in easy reach of my thumb without ever having to stretch or pull my other hand off the Chicago L train pole that I'm holding on the crowded, rocky train.

Here's my one-handed-user-friendly home screen.

Samuel Axon

I picked a wallpaper that put most of the interesting visuals at the top and color-coded the icons to match it. I have to admit that it looks great.

A win for flexibility

With iOS 18, Apple has shipped the most fundamental change to how the home screen works since the iPhone was introduced.

Obviously, Android phones have been able to do this for ages. Apple’s value proposition for iOS is different from Google’s with Android: It’s not about flexibility or customization but simplicity, among other things. But even given that difference in focus, it’s surprising it has taken this long for Apple to allow free placement of icons.

No, wiggle mode isn’t completely gone—but it’s now possible for users to get results closer to what they might want, and the experience is a lot less frustrating.

This allows users to go more nuts than what was possible before, putting more of a burden of responsibility on them to make sure everything works well. For example, applying a unified color scheme while also resizing the icons to larger sizes, thereby eliminating the app name text, leads to a situation where you’d really better know your app icons well, because there’s not much left to distinguish apps with similar icons, whereas you might have used color or the name of the app before.

But since these new customization features are buried a long-press and few taps in, lots of users will be able to just ignore them and use their iPhones like they always have.

That’s the best of both worlds, really. There’s more to talk about in iOS 18, but this change is the one with the most potential impact, and overall, it’s a win.

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