Invoking Custom Home Screen Layouts with Lock Screen Focus Links

I'm going to show you how to invoke custom home screen layouts with lock screen Focus links. I'm going to long press on the lock screen to invoke the lock screen editor and then here, if I tap the link Focus button, you can see that I can link a focus to this particular lock screen. So when I switch to this lock screen, the work focus is automatically enabled, and thus you see this home screen page that I configured just for this Focus. Pretty awesome. Now, I'm going to switch to another lock screen with no Focus linked, and you can see things are back to normal.

Let's switch to another lock screen and we'll swipe over, and then I'm going to tap the link Focus button, and Link the work Focus to this lock screen. Alright just tap it, swipe up, and now you can see our single home screen page courtesy of that work Focus. So if I open up the settings app, go to focus, and select my work Focus, should update here, you'll see both of those lock screens under customized screens just like that. So I can alter these lock screen Focus links from this page as well.

Now, you can also create a home screen shortcut to switch focuses. I have the shortcuts app open, I'm going to add an action called set focus, and then I can change up the variables so I'm going to turn on the work Focus until it's turned off whenever this action is invoked so we're going to go ahead and go to our inspector, add to home screen, and I'll just give it a name, we'll call it work focus, and then we'll go ahead and add that in. That will add the work Focus to the home screen, and now when I tap that, guess what happens? It switches to the work focus, and you get your custom home screen page.

So we're going to turn off that work focus, and we're back to normal. Now, let's go ahead and tap the work Focus shortcut again, and again, switches over to the work focus with the corresponding home screen and lock screen you can see that linked Focus there. So now, let's unlink the focus from this lock screen/slash home screen combination, and now when I use the shortcut it'll switch to the other linked lock screen/slash home screen.

Resetting the Home Screen to Its Default Layout

You want to open up the settings app, you want to tap on General, scroll down, and select transfer or reset iPhone. Tap reset, and then choose where it says reset home screen layout so you tap that, and then tap reset home screen. Beware when you do this, it will reset the location of all the app icons and all the widgets to their defaults. So if you added any Widgets or change the location of any Widgets or change the location of any of the app icons those will be reset as well, and this also affects any custom home screens you set up for the focus modes, those two will be reset.

Creating a Stock Focus

You can create a stock Focus to quickly make your home screen appear stock. What I'm going to do is just going to set this up to look completely stock here. It's going to move these extra icons from that second home screen page over here to the app library, to get rid of them so now this looks like completely default setup outside of the wallpaper right.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to hide the first two pages because these are the quote unquote stock pages that you get when you first install iOS, and then I'm going to create a custom focus called stock, and Link those two hidden pages so this can be great if you're using or you want to take screenshots of your iPhone or you take photos of your iPhone, and you want that stock look. This will allow you to get that really quickly.

So now we have the stock icon layout with the two widgets at the top on the first page in the various icons in their exact locations that you would find on a fresh iOS 16 install now you could take this even further and change the wallpaper to more of a stock wallpaper if you wanted to do that but you get the point.

Conclusion

So, ladies and gentlemen, that has been my in-depth walkthrough of the iOS 16 home screen. And my remaining question is, did you learn something new? Well either way let me know Down Below in the comment section and be sure to hit that subscribe button for similar upcoming videos this is Jeff with nine to five Mac

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up guys Jeff Benjamin here and yes I am back and I'm very happy to be here thanks for having me but enough about that let's talk about mastering the iOS home screen now you're probably thinking to yourself Jeff the iOS home screen I'm already a master at that and here's my response to that I guarantee that you're going to learn something new in this video for example did you know that you can move app icons from Spotlight directly to a specific page and spot via the home screen page editor yeah there are time stamps for all 85 sections of this guide so definitely check those out and of course if you're new to the iPhone this guide is for you as well in short order it will help you master your iPhone's home screen okay so enough Chit Chat let's go ahead and jump in right now thanks for watching nine to five Mac be sure to Thumbs Up Click the Subscribe button and then enable notifications with the Bell icon so you won't miss any upcoming videos okay so we're going to start off with some extreme Basics launching apps obviously you tap an app you launch that app just like that to close it you swipe up on the home indicator like this to get back to the home screen now stay tuned because I do have an upcoming video with the Deep dive into iOS multitasking so you definitely want to subscribe for that but launching apps closing apps pretty basic Affair let's move on display Zoom allows you to increase the size of on-screen assets let me show you what I mean here so if you go to settings and you tap on display and brightness you'll see at the bottom display Zoom so this allows you to adjust the view for your iPhone larger text will show larger controls while default will show more content and of course it defaults to the default setting so basically choosing the larger text option will zoom in to the interface at the expense of the on-screen content and I'll show you what I mean so you just tap done and then you tap where it says you zoomed and your device will self reboot and it's really quick so once you come back up you can immediately tell you have larger text there but you'll also see that that comes at the expense of displaying less content so here it is without display Zoom now compare with display zoom and you can see that there is less content being displayed in this message thread than when display Zoom is disabled so here's my home screen with display Zoom notice the larger icons and here it is without display Zoom now whether we like it or not the wallpaper is a big part of iOS 16's home screen so we're going to go into settings wallpaper here you can see the currently configured wallpaper and you can see how each is paired with its lock screen companion so you just tap set as current to change your wallpaper and there you can see it changes it just like that so if we go back in the settings wallpaper we can scroll over again and you can tap to add new wallpaper there or right here as well now this will bring up the add new wallpaper interface and you can scroll through there there's a lot of personal photos there so that's why I have those censored out but I'm going to add a new photo wallpaper I just want to show you guys some of the things you can do so I'm going to select this photo right here and now we're just going to tap the add button in the upper right hand corner but notice this you can set as a wallpaper pair so we'll swipe up you can see the wallpaper here on the home screen it's blurred out we'll talk about that in a second but if we lock our device we can see the lock screen wallpaper with that photo unblurred so we're going to go into settings wallpaper and we're going to tap the customize button on the home screen and there you can change the wallpaper from a photo to a color and you can go in and choose any color you can customize the intensity you can do so also for gradients as well just like that you can also select a new photo or we can change the original and blur or unblur so that was a very high level quick overview of wallpaper and there's so much more involved with the lock screen in particular so stay tuned for that I have a dedicated video in the works now let's talk about invoking Spotlight search from the home screen so of course you can swipe down like I just did there and type in your search terms and you can do that from any of the home screen pages but iOS 16 has a search button shortcut right on the home screen you just tap it like that and that will invoke Spotlight as well from any of the home screen pages again just tap like that and you can perform your search now admittedly not everyone is a fan of the spotlight shortcut button right there on the home screen so if you'd like to disable it just go to settings go to home screen and then turn off the show on home screen switch under the search heading now when you do that you'll notice that the home screen is reflected by the page dots at the bottom of the interface right above the dock and each dot represents its own unique page but if you re-enable the spotlight shortcut and you scroll you'll notice that the page dots are still there but they look a little bit different that's because they're embedded within that search shortcut and thus they only appear when you scroll your page like this so This Too allows you to see where you are as far as pages on the home screen and as you'll see in a few minutes there's a lot more involved with these page dots stay tuned so one of the nice things about the dock at the bottom of the screen is that no matter which page you scroll to all the apps that are in the dock are always available to you so place your most used apps there if you have a larger iPhone and you're using it with one hand you may find it difficult to reach some of the app icons at the top but if you do like this swipe down from the bottom of the screen this invokes reachability a tool that makes it easier to reach content at the top of the screen you can toggle this feature by tapping on settings it accessibility and touch and there you'll find the reachability switch which is enabled by default as mentioned earlier the home screen page dots indicate which page you're actually on but there's a hidden feature simply tap and scroll right on the page dots to quickly switch between home screen pages just like that now that's what the spotlight shortcut disabled but what happens when we re-enable that shortcut well you don't see page dots until you start scrolling but regardless if you tap and scroll you can still scroll through each home screen page but you'll also notice a slightly different momentum when scrolling through each page when the spotlight shortcut is enabled the app Library first introduced an iOS 14 provides a storage space for all the apps installed on your device even when not displayed on the home screen and the app library is the next page over from the last home screen page so there it is so you'll notice you'll have all these various categories that are Auto generated for instance recently added or creativity and you'll be able to find every app installed on your device right here now of course you can launch apps directly from the app library and what you're going to notice is that when the app Library categories have four or less app icons you're going to be able to launch any of those apps directly with just a tap like that so Uber I can launch that or the ivory beta which is awesome but what if the category contains more than four app icons well you'll see an example of that here with the creativity category so you'll see in the bottom right hand corner smaller app icons when you tap that it expands the cat category so you can find all the apps within that category and then you can launch from this category page so I can tap to launch for instance the shutter count app and then when I swipe up it goes back to the category page and then if I tap I go back to the app library now you can search for apps using the app Library as well you just simply tap the little search box at the top and then the search interface appears or you can just swipe down like that in the search interface appears that way so you just type in your query so I'll type in over or ove for overcast and it finds that just like that and I can do the same thing for Ivory but the point is this search within the app library is dedicated to apps that are on your phone right now now the app Library also is a great way to list all apps installed on your phone in alphabetical order so you can see here you swipe down and then you can scroll through the list of all the apps you can see them in alphabetical order from A to Z and you can use this little quick scroll shortcut to jump to a specific letter so if I want to launch the Watch app I I just scroll to W just like that app Library search also allows you to find apps from specific developers so if I type in apple it'll filter on apps developed by Apple same thing goes for Google so if I type in Google you can see Drive sheets Google Maps and voice now you may have noticed that the app icons in the app Library lack any sort of notification badges and that's actually a feature that's enabled by default so if you go to settings and then you go down to home screen you're going to find a switch under the notification badges heading to show in app Library so if you enable that now when you go back to the app Library you're going to see those notification badges for the various apps with pending notifications when you download an app from the App Store you can make those newly downloaded apps skip the home screen completely and just go straight to the app Library so right now by default when I download an application you can see it goes to one of the available home screen pages just like this but what if we didn't want that to happen well we can go back to settings home screen and you'll see an option under newly downloaded apps you can just set that to app Library only so now when we go back to the App Store we download an app you're going to notice you don't see it displayed on the home screen but you go over to the app Library you're going to see it's installing right there under recently added so it outrights skips adding to the home screen now did you know that you could pause prioritize and cancel app store downloads mid download well let me show you how to do that so I'm going to download several apps at the same time you can see them add it to the home screen now watch what happens when I long press on an app that hasn't started its download you can see a quick action shortcut to prioritize that download so this app will now download with priority but watch what happens when I long press on an in-progress download you get quick action shortcuts to pause the download and to cancel the download so these three options can come in handy if you have a whole lot of apps downloading simultaneously for instance with a restore so you can prioritize the most important apps for instance a password manager to download First and there are many other quick action shortcuts that you'll find for instance long press on the settings app icon you'll find direct links to specific sections of the settings app for instance you can jump directly to the battery section and in one Fell Swoop you don't actually have to lift your finger off the screen you can jump directly to a specific section of other apps such as the app store or the clock app and third-party apps can take advantage of quick action shortcuts as well but here you can see using the clock app icon I quickly started a timer and you can also use quick action shortcuts with apps in the app Library so you can directly jump to a section of the settings app directly from the settings app icon within the app Library same thing goes for other apps as well so now I'll show you how to remove apps from the home screen but keep them in the app Library so if you long press on an app icon you're going to see the option to remove that app just tap that and now you'll see three options delete app remove from home screen or cancel so removing from the home screen will keep the app in your app Library if you select that option so now when we go to the app library and search for scanner pro we see it right there so you can see scanner pro is still installed on your device even though you've removed it from the home screen it still resides in app library but what if you wish to delete an app completely well long press on the app icon select remove app then choose delete app this will remove the app and its data from your phone it'll keep anything that's stored in iCloud but if you tap delete it will remove the app from both the home screen and app library now you can also delete and restore stock applications you can't do this for every app for instance the messages app you can only remove it from the home screen because it is a prerequisite for iOS but for an app like the music app you can actually delete that app so let me show you how this works I'm going to use it with the news app I'm going to go in remove the app and select delete app and just like it was a third-party app this will completely remove the news app from my device now if I go back out to the App Store and search for the news app there we go so just open that up and I can reinstall Apple news just like it was any other app that I wanted to install now I don't know if you noticed but I have a lot of notification badges on things like mail and phone and messages and honestly while that can be a good thing it can also be a distraction and kind of weigh you down so I'm going to show you if you go to settings notifications you can disable those badges for specific applications so for instance mail go in the mail turn off the badges switch and now when I go back to the home screen no more badge will mail obviously you want to use that carefully but for me I definitely prefer it this way okay so now let's talk about entering edit AKA wiggle mode so one way to do so is to long press on an app icon and select edit home screen there you go you have your icons wiggling hence wiggle mode and your home screens ready to be edited now another way to get into edit mode or wiggle mode is to Simply continue to long press on the app icon like that and another way to enter wiggle mode is to long press on a blank area of the screen like this and you will see it enter wiggle mode now another way is to Simply tap and drag your app icon you'll feel a little haptic feedback and that way you can enter wiggle mode now you can also exit edit mode in a variety of different ways so one way is to Simply tap the done button in the upper right hand corner another way is to Simply swipe up from the bottom of the screen like that and another way is to Simply tap on a blank area of the screen like this now when in edit mode you'll see a little minus sign in the upper left hand corner of the app icons on your home screen if you tap that it will ask if you want to remove that application and you can go through with that if you wish to hence a minus sign remove now one of the benefits of going into edit mode it allows you to move an app icon so let me show you how to do that right now we're just going to long press and select edit home screen it doesn't matter which icon you long press on to do so but then after that you can simply tap and drag any of the app icons you wish to move so I got the app store app icon and as you can see as you move this application the other apps move out of the way it's sort of like having two magnets with the same poles pointed at each other they're going to repel each other the home screen sort of works in the same way so we're going to exit wiggle mode there let's go ahead and enter wiggle mode again and try it again and what you'll notice is that each home screen is made up of an invisible four by six grid and each app icon fits within one of those spaces now what about moving to a separate home screen page well you simply drag to the edge of the screen like that and that allows me to move the App Store icon to a whole new page and no matter the page you're on it still sticks to the same grid based principle so you have that invisible grid where each app icon fits neatly within that grid now another way the app icons are like magnets is that each app icon has to be next to another app icon on the same page so that means that I can't move the App Store icon down to this bottom area here because there's no other app icons to stick to so it's automatically going to reposition itself right next to tips now this is where things get in my opinion really fun moving multiple app icons so we're going to go back into edit mode we're going to tap and hold on one of these app icons you can see here I have the app store just moving it around now watch what happens when I tap on the news app watch this I tap it and it automatically attaches itself to the first app that I was holding and I see a number two badge in the upper right hand corner now if I tap the TV app now I see a number three badge tap another app number four badge so I can move all four of those apps to this position right here let go and then all four of them are placed right within that area of the home screen so let's do this again I'm going to grab the App Store App I'm going to tap on news tap on TV tap on podcast four apps I'm holding right there and I can move those to a desired position on the home screen I can even move it to a whole new home screen page in a position within that page but I'm just going to let it go right here you can see all four apps are available right there on that second page but let's go ahead and grab all four of those apps again I'm going to move back over to the first page and just release right there you can even grab apps from one page like this and then move to another page and grab additional apps if you wish to so I'm going to grab these two apps here tips in free form so I have six apps now what happens when I move over to this page there's only four blank spots in this invisible grid I release it you get four apps and then the other two apps are placed automatically at the top of the adjacent home screen page now this is a super handy tip say I want to move the podcast app to a different page well I grab the app I drag it to the edge like this to move pages but there's a more efficient way to do this use your off hand while still holding the app to switch pages like this so this allows you to quickly switch to the desired page without having to drag the app icon to the edge of the screen in order to find the destination page and this looks like a good location and it should come as no surprise that you can also do so When selecting multiple applications like this so I can just move to the desired page and release like that now let's quickly move back over to the first page like that but what if you want to create a new home screen page so what you want to do is go to the last available page and that's denoted by that last page Dot and now I'm going to go into edit mode and once you do you're going to see another dot to the right of that page signifying that yes there's a blank page there and now it's just a matter of dragging an app icon over to that blank page so let me show you how to do it again long press drag an app icon over to that new page and now that new page is the last page have you ever wondered what the maximum number of home screen pages are in iOS well here you can see I have quite a few pages created but I'm going to create some more and we're going to get to the maximum limit and I'm going to show you what that's like so speed things up a little bit basically just dragging all these icons over to new pages creating as many new pages as I can and this one right here is going to be the last one folks and you can tell us the last available page because I'm in edit mode yet there is no little page dot to the right of the final dot so that indicates it's the last page now the question is how many pages are there well you have this first one so you have one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen so iOS limits you to 15 pages if you swipe on the page dots like this you can quickly jump between the first and last pages in a flash back to the first page you can quickly jump back to the first home screen page from any page simply by swiping up like that now this is similar to my quick switch Pages tip so I'm going to grab the tip sap here but I'm going to use the home screen page dots to move over to the home screen I want to move the app to just like that so you can quickly use this to navigate directly to the page you want to get to and then release like that now this is probably one of my favorite tips you can easily rearrange the order of your app so say I want to put this row of apps into alphabetical order so I have App Store News podcast TV right not hard to do that manually but there's an easier way to reorder your apps to do so you simply grab the apps in the order that you wish them to appear so you want to grab app store first you want that to appear first then you grab the news app you want that to be second then you grab podcast third and then TV fourth you release like this and look it places it in the exact order that you specified so let's reverse that order now just like that now here's another Super handy tip you can interrupt an app icon move what do I mean well I'm going to drag the app store app and say I'm moving it around and I change my mind and say hey I don't want to move it anymore tap done in the upper right hand corner it places that app back to its original position like you never moved it I'm going to do so again but this time I'm going to grab multiple apps from various locations and even move over to a different home screen page but I'm going to exit edit mode to cancel and interrupt this move by swiping up like that and now the apps are in their original position so now let's talk about folders and these are containers that house one or more apps and they can be like apps they could be random apps it doesn't really matter but as you can see you can easily enter or exit a folder simply by tapping on it or tapping outside of the folder and then you can launch the apps within the folder and then exit those apps simply by swiping up it'll go back to the folder View and then you can tap to exit there are multiple ways to create folders the first way you simply drag an app icon place it on top of another can continue to hold the folder will open and create and then you simply release inside the folder like that it'll automatically give it its own name you can customize that later we'll talk about that but once you create your folder you can simply exit edit mode and there you go now another way to create a folder and this way is quicker in my preferred method is to drag your app icon on top of another in release like that now there are several ways to add an app to an existing folder you can drag and release just like that so that's very familiar so you can see shortcuts inside the utilities or you can drag the icon on top of the folder and continue to hold on top it'll open up and then release and then finally you can drag the icon tap the folder move the icon into the folder and release and you can create Pages within folders so each page within a folder contains nine icons and in the utilities folder that I have here I have eight icons I add the ninth and then when I tap on it yes it automatically creates that second page for me and when I exit out of edit mode it just shows the the first nine icons but as soon as I go into edit mode you can see it automatically goes over and shows that blank page for the second page because there's not enough room on the first page and it automatically shows that first page by default so you don't really know how many pages are within a folder until you open it and like the home screen pages you can quickly scroll through folder Pages using yes indeed the pH dots you only have two pages here so not really a great example but you get the point photo are automatically assigned a name based on the apps inside but you can rename that folder simply by long pressing on the folder itself and selecting the rename option it'll put you into edit mode and it will highlight the name of the folder at the top so you can just start typing and edit that name but you don't have to use that method you can edit the name of a folder at any time whenever you're in edit mode you open the folder tap ex and have edit now whenever you remove all the apps from a folder it will remove that folder let me show you so I created utilities right here if I open up utilities there's two apps there of course if I drag shortcuts out it will automatically remove that folder and put translate back on the home screen page as well now I'm going to create a folder with more than two apps so you can see I have three apps here and when I try to do the same thing it doesn't work quite that way so I move tips out I move shortcuts out but utilities is still a folder with translate inside so I actually have to move that out of the folder to get rid of it all together you can move multiple apps to an existing folder simply by selecting multiple apps like this we showed you that earlier and simply drag and drop that stack of apps directly into that folder you can also move multiple apps to a new folder so you select multiple apps to create a stack like this and then place that stack on top of an app icon that you also wish to appear in that folder and no surprise you can also move multiple apps out of a folder so you just drag that first app and tap tap tap and move out of that folder just like that now one of the great things about the dock is it's always present no matter which home screen page you swipe to so with that in mind we can use a folder in that dock to have access to a whole lot more apps from any home screen page like that so now you have access to all those apps in that folder no matter which home screen page you swipe to so if those four available positions on the dock aren't enough then definitely use a folder you can remove a folder and all the apps it contains from the home screen but keep those apps within the app Library let me show you how this works so I'm going to drag the AmEx app here select multiple app icons to create a stack and then we're going to drag on this last app icon to create a folder containing nine apps like that but I'm not doing this because I like these apps in particular I'm doing this because I actually want to remove these apps from the home screen so you can see all nine of those apps I can easily get rid of them long press select remove folder but it's not going to get rid of the apps it's just going to get rid of them from the home screen so you remove those from the home screen like that the apps are still installed on your device but they're no longer on the home screen they're over in the app Library so if I scroll around or if I search I'm going to see apps like Amex Apple Store and any other app in that folder okay so this can be a very annoying issue the jumping icon issue so say you want to create a folder including settings but you want to create it along with an icon in this case tips only adjacent impeach what happens when you move over tips because there's no room left well settings gets moved over to the next page uh so what to do there it's kind of annoying because settings is just gone right well to get this back all you do is you tap and hold like this on a blink spot that brings settings back and now you can create your folder simply by releasing like that super handy trick now let's talk about moving an app from the app Library this time back to the home screen so I'm going to tap and hold on ferrite here continue to hold and then you'll see it jump back to the last home screen page and you'll also see in the upper right hand corner that little green plus indicating it can be added to the home screen now you can also just simply drag from the app Library directly to that home screen page like that now you can move multiple apps from the app Library so you want to just drag your first app like that swipe back over to the app library and then tap the apps to add to that stack so here in this category for entertainment I'm just going to Simply tap on all the apps I want to add to this stack so I have six apps now tap to get out of the category swipe back over go back to the home screen and you simply release to add those apps to the home screen now within edit mode in the app Library you'll notice some differences first of all the minus sign in the upper left hand corner as you can see here on the home screen is an X within the app library now why is that well if you delete an app from the app Library it's gone as you can see here when you tap that ax you get one option that is delete and that uninstalls that app completely from your phone now you can see peacock here on my home screen watch what happens when I delete peacock from the Apple Library it's gone so when I swipe back over to the home screen peacock is no more now you can also move an app from the home screen to the app Library so I'm just going to drag podcast and swipe over to the app library in release like that now what does that do well it simply removes the app from the home screen screen while keeping it installed on your device in accessible via the app library and no surprise here you can move multiple apps from the home screen to the app Library so we're going to create a stack simply tap tap tap tap tap and then we'll swipe over to the app library and release those six app icons into the app Library they're no longer on the home screen but they're still available here now let's talk about how to add multiple app icons for the same app to the home screen now notice I'm on the very last home screen page page 15 I'm going to move YouTube directly to that home screen page now watch what happens when I go back to the app library and try to drag YouTube over again it basically cancels that out because iOS won't let you add a duplicate app icon to the same page if it's the first page that that app icon lands on and because it's the last home screen page page 15 it's always going to be that way because edit mode doesn't create that next page over because I'm already on the maximum amount of pages so to work around this what we can do drag over to page 14 drag YouTube now page 15 you have YouTube and simply drag over like that now this works because each YouTube app icon landed on its own independent page first so I got rid of the last home screen page now and I've left that last page blank so when I go into edit mode it'll create that last page so now when I drag an app over like YouTube it hits that page first and that somehow gives it its own independent identity I guess according to iOS and that allows me to drag it over to any subsequent page like that so yes you can have multiple app icons for the same app on one or more pages and I'll show you why this is extremely useful a bit later now you can also add apps directly from Spotlight search so like Siri suggestions directly to the home screen like that so let's try it again swipe down for a spotlight and then in series suggestions just drag the find my app down to the home screen page now you can also of course search for a particular app so in this case test there's test flight my top hit just tap drag down to the home screen page as well okay so now let's talk about adding widgets to the home screen so if you go into edit mode like that you'll see a plus button in the upper left hand corner you want to tap that plus button and that will reveal all of the available widgets for both first party and third-party applications you'll see different size widgets small medium and large you'll also see different previews for various apps you tap on that preview it opens up the full view for that particular app and this showcases all the available widgets for that app so in this case the clock app I can swipe down or hit the X to get rid of it and there's a handy search at the top you tap that and you can search directly for a widget so in that case I search for a clock but any app that has a widget you can search for of course now the clock app only has two sizes of widgets so let's find an app that has the larger widget as well so reminders as you can see has all three small medium and large now if you scroll down here at the bottom you see a list of all the various apps with widgets that includes third-party apps like timer e and of course first party apps as well so one such first party app is the podcast app so you can see that here so let's go ahead and add a widget to the home screen so I'm just going to grab this preview for the clock so when I tap and hold that widget view will disappear and reveal the home screen and I can drag it to the desired location if I want to remove it I just tap the minus sign and then tap remove like that so now let me show you another way to add that widget to the home screen instead of tapping and dragging you can just tap where it says add widget just like that and it'll place it at the top of the current home screen page so that adds a medium widget to the home screen go ahead and remove that and open up the widget interface again and now I'm just going to tap and drag and I want to show you guys how these widgets work so basically the small widget occupies the same area as four app icons and you can see as I move that Widget the app icons dance out of the way now when I remove this widget you'll notice four app icons return to the home screen these were the original app icons that were displaced by that widget which occupies the area of yes you guessed it for app icons so let's illustrate this again when I add this widget to the home screen those four app icons that were originally on that page are still linked to this home screen page how do we know that well if I tap done and then I go in and remove this widget you're going to see those app icons re-establish their original position on that page so let me demonstrate this again but in a different way so I added that widget you see the four original app icons that were displaced by that widget so one of them being cash app Ivory lumafusion and net newswire watch what happens when I move this app icon over to the other page you see cash app go back to its original page now when I move cache app you'll see Ivory go back to its original page all four of those app icons will go back once that space is available so lumafusion you got one more net news wire now when I move this one you'll notice you'll have a blank space because there are no more linked app icons that were originally associated with that page and when I remove that widget those bling spaces remain when using multiple widgets on your home screen you'll notice that it takes up a lot of space so I'm going to add one widget here I'm going to add another I'm going to add a third and a fourth and you can see you only have a third of that home screen page now available for app icons but you can use widget Stacks to optimize space so go into edit mode and drag one of the widgets on top of another just like that now the widgets have to be the same size to create a stack but you can see that stack has been created you see the little page dots indicating that there are two widgets in that stack now you get three and now you get four widgets in that stack so you can scroll through just by swiping down like that and now we'll exit edit mode just by tapping done you can see that widget stack takes up a whole lot less space than having four widgets on your screen at the same time a great way to optimize space alright so we have our widget stack here I'm going to show you how to change the order of the widgets listed in that stack and also how to remove a widget from that stack so we're going to go back into edit mode just tap on the widget once in edit mode and there you have the edit widget view so you can scroll through like that and then you want to change the order you simply tap and hold and drag to rearrange the widgets as you desire you can also of course tap the minus sign in the upper left hand corner and remove a widget from that stack outright and once you're finished just swipe up in exit edit mode Now widget Stacks have a feature called smart rotate which will rotate the widget's B Stone context and that's great but sometimes you really just want the same widget to always display unless you move it manually so you can go into edit mode disable smart rotate like that you can also turn off widget suggestions and turning off that smart rotate will ensure that the widget that you select is the widget that will always be displayed unless you purposefully scroll to a different widget so I like it like that now I showed you how you could have up to 15 home screen pages but how many widgets can you have in a stack well let's go ahead and start adding as many as we can to this stack here and find the answer to it so I'm going to go into podcast I'm just going to tap hold and drag directly to the stack just like that and we're going to do all this real quick so let's go ahead and continue to add as many widgets to this stack as we can and rest assured iOS will let you know once you've reached the limit and we'll add this last one and you can see it looks like we have reached that limit because the plus sign in the upper left hand corner is now grayed out and you can see we now have 10 widgets within that stack one two three four five six seven eight nine ten so it's a great way to add additional content to your home screen in a very small footprint now you can edit a widget stack or edit a widget individually so here if you long press on the widget you can select edit stack that'll open up stack editor you can also long press and select remove stack if you want to do that of course but some widgets can be added individually you'll see this here when we scroll to an eligible widget you want to long press and now you'll see along with edit stack you'll see edit in the name of the widget in this case clock and this allows us to change the location that that clock is using so we have an accurate time for that location now let me show you how to move widgets out of a stack so we're going to long press and we're going to select edit stack and now we're just going to tap and drag one of those widgets out of the stack and now you can place it on its own just like that but the clock widget looks a little lonely so we'll go back to the stack we'll drag another widget out and we'll use it to create a new stack now here's another tip utilize the series suggestions widget so you'll see that here in the widget browser this provides app suggestions we're just going to add that one to the home screen now what's really cool about this is these are Dynamic app icons here so they will change as you can see right there based on context based on what iOS thinks you're going to want to use and it's fairly smart it'll eliminate the duplicate apps on the same page and you can long press and select don't suggest if you want specific apps not suggested to the left of the first home screen page if you swipe over you'll notice a dedicated page just for the widget so you can use this customize it and place all of your favorite widgets here for quick and easy access that way you're not cluttering your home screen and you have that dedicated spot for your favorites now here's a cool tip you can use third-party apps one app I'm using here is called Gidget I believe that's how you pronounce it but you can use this to create quote unquote blank widgets to further customize your home screen now let me show you how this works so basically you select a photo and then you export that wallpaper to your photos just like this but what this app also does is it creates widgets small medium and large versions based on that wallpaper as well so what I'm going to do is I'm going to add a new wallpaper and I'm going to select that photo that was exported to my photo library from egit so now I have a wallpaper that specifically matches the widgets that Gidget makes I know that may sound a little confusing but really is very simple and let me just show you what I mean here so I'm going to unblur that wallpaper so now we have the background wallpaper so when I add a widget it's basically going to mirror the background so it's going to make it seem as if there's a blank spot there so I go in and you can see already the small the medium and large widgets use the same image as the wallpaper so when I place the medium widget on my home screen guess what it looks like a blink spot when I exit edit mode because that widget it mirrors that exact wallpaper in that exact location now the question I know you're thinking well what if I move that Medium widget down well now that doesn't match but if you tap it you can edit the widget and change the position so now I moved it to the middle I changed the position to the middle and Bam it matches perfectly just like that so you have this Gap it looks like there's a blank there when really there isn't it's just a widget so I can place the large widget there as well do the same thing and for the small widget of course you have many more options because you can place that widget in many more spaces but you can alter that to match perfectly wherever you place it just like that pretty cool little trick right but one of the issues you'll encounter is that when you're scrolling through like that then it is really obvious that you are just using a widget as a so-called blank space and then not only that but when you launch apps you get this Parallax effect that makes it obvious as well you can see that Parallax effect right there on that widget so one thing we can do to help address this is to go to our settings and accessibility and go to motion and enable reduce motion when you do that when your launch apps or close apps that Parallax effect is gone so it isn't as obvious that you're using a widget now I've also downsized to just one home screen page which eliminates the issue when scrolling between Pages now the reduced motion setting is system wide but if you scroll down to per app settings and tap add app you can select home screen yes home screen counts as an app and this allows you to go in not only enable reduced motion for just the home screen but also enable all sorts of other little features regarding accessibility for the home screen let me just show you here so go back into settings you have things like bold text you have larger text you have things like reduce contrast there's all sorts of little tweaks that you can apply on a per app basis in this case just for the home screen so if you don't want some of these changes to be system-wide well as you can see there this will only affect the home screen and the app Library which counts as the home screen but all other apps are unaffected by these changes because you're using per app settings and of course you can remove that just like that okay so now I'm going to show you how to add a bookmark to the home screen from Safari so we're going to open up a safari page tap the share button and then choose add to home screen and then you can see nine to five Max there just tap add in the upper right hand corner so now it adds a shortcut to nine to five Mac directly to the home screen and that can be pretty convenient I'm also going to add another for cellular all right so I have the two shortcuts I tap nine to five Mac it actually works as sort of a standalone Safari application dedicated to nine to five Mac and here's something interesting about bookmarks if I place them in a folder and I remove that folder they are not sent to the app Library only applications are sent to the app Library so all the bookmarks will simply be moved out of the folder and placed on the home screen just like that so just something to keep in mind because if you try to drag this bookmark over to the app Library it's not going to go in that Library it's basically just going to go back to the home screen if you want to remove a bookmark from the home screen you have to choose the delete option so now I'm going to show you how to add shortcut to actions to the home screen so open up shortcuts tap add action and we'll use switching wallpapers as an example so search for switch between wallpapers tap on that as your action tap the wallpaper variable and choose one of your configured lock screens and of course that lock screen has a home screen paired with it as well so tap the inspector button at the bottom and then choose add to home screen and you can give it its own app icon if you want to do that and then also give the shortcut a name so I'll simply call it wallpaper switch and then I'll tap the add button in the upper right hand corner and there we go wallpaper switch on the home screen now watch what happens when I tap this it switches wallpaper just like that so of course this was just a proof of concept but there are all sorts of different actions that you can add directly to the home screen via the shortcuts app now you can also use shortcuts to theme your home screen icons so we're going to open up shortcuts we're going to tap the plus button and we're going to select open app choose the app you want to theme in this case the music app and now we're going to select add to home screen and here's where you can add your custom icon I'm just going to go into the files app I have iris from my friend surenix so I'm going to use the music app icon from his Iris theme rename it to music add to the home screen and there you go so now you have a custom music app icon and this is technically just a bookmark so it doesn't work exactly like an app icon you can't use quick action shortcuts for instance but if you're just looking to theme a specific app icon or maybe multiple app icons this is a way to do so okay so now let's talk about how to access the home screen page editor and you can see I have tons of different home screen pages here but we're going to zoom out using the home screen page editor so just go into edit mode and tap the page dots to open the page editor view so you can see all the different pages and what this will allow you to do is quickly jump directly to a page and you know the exact page you're going to because you can see the preview of the app icons on that page so you can use the page editor as sort of a shortcut to quickly jump to a specific page if you want to so now I'll show you how to hide or show home screen pages with the page editor so to hide a page you simply uncheck that page and now you can access it so this page is now the first page but we can bring back that hidden page simply go back into the editor re-enable it like that and now this page is once again the first page now let's go into the page editor again and you have to have at least one page enabled at all times but watch this I'm going to uncheck every page except that first one and now I just have this one page now let's go back into the editor and let's enable the very last page so now that page acts as page number two you can also use the page Editor to quickly rearrange home screen pages so all you do is simply tap and drag like this just like an app icon to rearrange those pages just like that so now this one is the first page and this one is the second but we can go back in and rearrange it even further so what was formerly the last page is now the first page so let's go back into the page editor we'll disable that first page here's what it looks like now but let's go back to the editor and drag the original first page back to its rightful position so now let's talk deleting a page via the page editor so I'm going to identify a page this one right here I want to get rid of it so I'm going to enter edit mode open the page editor identify that page uncheck it first and then and only then will you see the minus sign in the upper left hand corner of that page when you tap that minus sign you're going to see the option to remove that page so once you tap remove that page goes away and all the apps on that page remain in the app Library so when I exit edit mode you can see that page no longer there here's something I don't think a lot of people know about so what happens when I try to drag an app icon from the home screen directly to the page editor well unfortunately you can't do that because when you try to drag that app the app disappears once the page editor opens but notice what you can do with Spotlight search so open spotlight I'm going to drag the TV app just like that I'm going to tap the page editor and now you see the plus button next to that particular app icon so I can actually drag that app from Spotlight directly to a page that I designate just like that but oh it gets cooler so I'm going to do that again open the page editor but notice as you move the app you'll see those home screen app icons dancing so not only can you specify the page but also the location on the page and now I'm going to show you how to customize home screen pages using Focus modes so if I go to settings and I go to focus you're going to see the various Focus modes but you can tap the plus to create a new one you can create one of the canned Focus modes such as the work Focus so just tap customize Focus so now you can customize your screen so you can choose the lock screen or home screen in this case we're going to choose home it's going to give you suggested new pages so these Pages as you can see are populated with various work related apps and widgets it makes sense because this is the work Focus so you can tap one of the suggested pages and further customize that page if you choose to do so so you can edit that suggested page simply by tapping the edit apps button like that you have your suggested apps you can enable those or disable those but I don't want to get too deep into weed's own Focus because I have a dedicated Focus video coming up that goes really in depth on that but let's now talk about choosing your own custom pages dedicated to this work Focus so I'm going to choose this one right here and I'll just tap the done button in the upper right hand corner so whenever I enter the work Focus the only home screen page that you will see is the one that I chose so let's go ahead and test it out so we're going to invoke our control center tap Focus enable the work focus in its own so now you see that home screen is the one that we configured just a second ago this is a very powerful tool and when we disable that Focus your home screen will go back to the way it was before awesome feature now I'll show you how to access your current Focus settings directly from the page editor while in a focus so I'm in the work Focus going to open up the page editor and now you're only going to see that one page because that's the way that focus is configured but you'll also see an options button below so you can tap options that'll jump you directly to the focus settings within the settings app so now I'll show you how to customize your home screen wallpaper with Focus mode so you can do this by going into focus and customizing your lock screen because the lock screen is linked directly to the way your home screen is configured as well so we saw what I just chose for the lock screen so if we go to settings and we go to wallpaper you can customize the corresponding home screen wallpaper as well and in this case I'm just going to blur that wallpaper like that so that's how I want it to look when I I invoke that work Focus so let's open control center tap focus and then tap work and you can see in the background automatically it changes that wallpaper because it's linked to the lock screen that we chose when we customize the screens within Focus so now we're back to normal now another awesome thing that Focus does is allow you to reveal hidden home screens when entering a specific Focus mode so say this home screen page I wanted to hide that so I'm going to go into the page editor and uncheck that page and hide it from the home screen so the home screen as you can see no longer contains the page that we hid via that page editor so now let's go back into Focus settings and edit that work focus and notice what I have checked there that's the page right here that I hid earlier via the page editor so that is what's going to be enabled when I have the work Focus turned on so you can see that page is hidden but as soon as I access the work Focus it reveals just that one page brought back and now I can go in disable that work Focus and now that hidden page is hidden again so now I'm going to show you how you can strategically use multiple app instances with pages so I'm going to re-enable that page right here and say I wanted the Instagram app to be available whether I use the work Focus or not so that would mean I would need a second copy of the Instagram app icon placed Elsewhere on the home screen so I'll just put it right here on the first page of the home screen so I have the Instagram app here on page one and I also have the Instagram app here on page three right both places now I'm going to go back into the page editor and once I'm there I'm going to again disable that page so now Instagram is available here on the first page with that page disabled and now when I enable my work Focus it's also available on this page now I'm going to disable the work Focus and you'll see that I still have access to Instagram now I'm going to show you how to invoke custom home screen layouts with lock screen Focus links so I'm going to long press on the lock screen to invoke the lock screen editor and then here if I tap the link Focus button you can see that I can link a focus to this particular lock screen so when I switch to this lock screen the work focus is automatically enabled and thus you see this home screen page that I configured just for this Focus pretty awesome so now I'm going to switch to another lock screen with no Focus linked and you can see things are back to normal so let's switch to another lock screen and we'll swipe over and then I'm going to tap the link Focus button and Link the work Focus to this lock screen all right just tap it swipe up and now you can see our single home screen page courtesy of that work Focus so if I open up the settings app go to focus and select my work Focus should update here you'll see both of those lock screens under customized screens just like that so I can alter these lock screen Focus links from this page as well now you can also create a home screen shortcut to switch focuses so I have the shortcuts app open I'm going to add an action called set focus and then I can change up the variables so I'm going to turn on the work Focus until it's turned off whenever this action is invoked so we're going to go ahead and go to our inspector add to home screen and I'll just give it a name we'll call it work focus and then we'll go ahead and add that in that will add the work Focus to the home screen and now when I tap that guess what happens it switches to the work focus and you get your custom home screen page so we're going to turn off that work focus and we're back to normal so now let's go ahead and tap the work Focus shortcut again and again switches over to the work focus with the corresponding home screen and lock screen you can see that linked Focus there so now let's unlink the focus from this lock screen slash home screen combination and now when I use the shortcut it'll switch to the other linked lock screen slash home screen so here's something everyone should know how to reset the home screen to its default layout so you want to open up the settings app you want to tap on General scroll down and select transfer or reset iPhone tap reset and then choose where it says reset home screen layout so you tap that and then tap reset home screen now beware when you do this it will reset the location of all the app icons and all the widgets to their defaults so if you added any Widgets or you change the location of any Widgets or change the location of any of the app icons those will be reset as well and this also affects any custom home screens you set up for the focus modes those two will be reset so you have a completely default icon and widget layout and then one last tip you can create a stock Focus to quickly make your home screen appear stock so what I'm going to do is just going to set this up to look completely stock here it's going to move these extra icons from that second home screen page over here to the app library to get rid of them so now this looks like completely default setup outside of the wallpaper right so what I'm going to do is I'm going to hide the first two pages because these are the quote unquote stock pages that you get when you first install iOS and then I'm going to create a custom focus called stock and Link those two hidden pages so this can be great if you're using or you want to take screenshots of your iPhone or you take photos of your iPhone and you want that stock look this will allow you to get that really quickly so I'm going to choose a stock lock screen and I'm going to go in here and choose those two hidden Pages the two stock home screen pages and tap done so there we go we're set up with a stock look that we can enable we can get back at any time just by enabling that stock Focus just like this so now we have the stock icon layout with the two widgets at the top on the first page in the various icons in their exact locations that you would find on a fresh iOS 16 install now you could take this even further and change the wallpaper to more of a stock wallpaper if you wanted to do that but you get the point and then when you're ready to go back to your normal layout you just disable the stock Focus so ladies and gents that has been my in-depth walkthrough of the iOS 16 home screen and my remaining question is this did you learn something new well either way let me know Down Below in the comment section and be sure to hit that subscribe button for similar upcoming videos this is Jeff with nine to five Macwhat's up guys Jeff Benjamin here and yes I am back and I'm very happy to be here thanks for having me but enough about that let's talk about mastering the iOS home screen now you're probably thinking to yourself Jeff the iOS home screen I'm already a master at that and here's my response to that I guarantee that you're going to learn something new in this video for example did you know that you can move app icons from Spotlight directly to a specific page and spot via the home screen page editor yeah there are time stamps for all 85 sections of this guide so definitely check those out and of course if you're new to the iPhone this guide is for you as well in short order it will help you master your iPhone's home screen okay so enough Chit Chat let's go ahead and jump in right now thanks for watching nine to five Mac be sure to Thumbs Up Click the Subscribe button and then enable notifications with the Bell icon so you won't miss any upcoming videos okay so we're going to start off with some extreme Basics launching apps obviously you tap an app you launch that app just like that to close it you swipe up on the home indicator like this to get back to the home screen now stay tuned because I do have an upcoming video with the Deep dive into iOS multitasking so you definitely want to subscribe for that but launching apps closing apps pretty basic Affair let's move on display Zoom allows you to increase the size of on-screen assets let me show you what I mean here so if you go to settings and you tap on display and brightness you'll see at the bottom display Zoom so this allows you to adjust the view for your iPhone larger text will show larger controls while default will show more content and of course it defaults to the default setting so basically choosing the larger text option will zoom in to the interface at the expense of the on-screen content and I'll show you what I mean so you just tap done and then you tap where it says you zoomed and your device will self reboot and it's really quick so once you come back up you can immediately tell you have larger text there but you'll also see that that comes at the expense of displaying less content so here it is without display Zoom now compare with display zoom and you can see that there is less content being displayed in this message thread than when display Zoom is disabled so here's my home screen with display Zoom notice the larger icons and here it is without display Zoom now whether we like it or not the wallpaper is a big part of iOS 16's home screen so we're going to go into settings wallpaper here you can see the currently configured wallpaper and you can see how each is paired with its lock screen companion so you just tap set as current to change your wallpaper and there you can see it changes it just like that so if we go back in the settings wallpaper we can scroll over again and you can tap to add new wallpaper there or right here as well now this will bring up the add new wallpaper interface and you can scroll through there there's a lot of personal photos there so that's why I have those censored out but I'm going to add a new photo wallpaper I just want to show you guys some of the things you can do so I'm going to select this photo right here and now we're just going to tap the add button in the upper right hand corner but notice this you can set as a wallpaper pair so we'll swipe up you can see the wallpaper here on the home screen it's blurred out we'll talk about that in a second but if we lock our device we can see the lock screen wallpaper with that photo unblurred so we're going to go into settings wallpaper and we're going to tap the customize button on the home screen and there you can change the wallpaper from a photo to a color and you can go in and choose any color you can customize the intensity you can do so also for gradients as well just like that you can also select a new photo or we can change the original and blur or unblur so that was a very high level quick overview of wallpaper and there's so much more involved with the lock screen in particular so stay tuned for that I have a dedicated video in the works now let's talk about invoking Spotlight search from the home screen so of course you can swipe down like I just did there and type in your search terms and you can do that from any of the home screen pages but iOS 16 has a search button shortcut right on the home screen you just tap it like that and that will invoke Spotlight as well from any of the home screen pages again just tap like that and you can perform your search now admittedly not everyone is a fan of the spotlight shortcut button right there on the home screen so if you'd like to disable it just go to settings go to home screen and then turn off the show on home screen switch under the search heading now when you do that you'll notice that the home screen is reflected by the page dots at the bottom of the interface right above the dock and each dot represents its own unique page but if you re-enable the spotlight shortcut and you scroll you'll notice that the page dots are still there but they look a little bit different that's because they're embedded within that search shortcut and thus they only appear when you scroll your page like this so This Too allows you to see where you are as far as pages on the home screen and as you'll see in a few minutes there's a lot more involved with these page dots stay tuned so one of the nice things about the dock at the bottom of the screen is that no matter which page you scroll to all the apps that are in the dock are always available to you so place your most used apps there if you have a larger iPhone and you're using it with one hand you may find it difficult to reach some of the app icons at the top but if you do like this swipe down from the bottom of the screen this invokes reachability a tool that makes it easier to reach content at the top of the screen you can toggle this feature by tapping on settings it accessibility and touch and there you'll find the reachability switch which is enabled by default as mentioned earlier the home screen page dots indicate which page you're actually on but there's a hidden feature simply tap and scroll right on the page dots to quickly switch between home screen pages just like that now that's what the spotlight shortcut disabled but what happens when we re-enable that shortcut well you don't see page dots until you start scrolling but regardless if you tap and scroll you can still scroll through each home screen page but you'll also notice a slightly different momentum when scrolling through each page when the spotlight shortcut is enabled the app Library first introduced an iOS 14 provides a storage space for all the apps installed on your device even when not displayed on the home screen and the app library is the next page over from the last home screen page so there it is so you'll notice you'll have all these various categories that are Auto generated for instance recently added or creativity and you'll be able to find every app installed on your device right here now of course you can launch apps directly from the app library and what you're going to notice is that when the app Library categories have four or less app icons you're going to be able to launch any of those apps directly with just a tap like that so Uber I can launch that or the ivory beta which is awesome but what if the category contains more than four app icons well you'll see an example of that here with the creativity category so you'll see in the bottom right hand corner smaller app icons when you tap that it expands the cat category so you can find all the apps within that category and then you can launch from this category page so I can tap to launch for instance the shutter count app and then when I swipe up it goes back to the category page and then if I tap I go back to the app library now you can search for apps using the app Library as well you just simply tap the little search box at the top and then the search interface appears or you can just swipe down like that in the search interface appears that way so you just type in your query so I'll type in over or ove for overcast and it finds that just like that and I can do the same thing for Ivory but the point is this search within the app library is dedicated to apps that are on your phone right now now the app Library also is a great way to list all apps installed on your phone in alphabetical order so you can see here you swipe down and then you can scroll through the list of all the apps you can see them in alphabetical order from A to Z and you can use this little quick scroll shortcut to jump to a specific letter so if I want to launch the Watch app I I just scroll to W just like that app Library search also allows you to find apps from specific developers so if I type in apple it'll filter on apps developed by Apple same thing goes for Google so if I type in Google you can see Drive sheets Google Maps and voice now you may have noticed that the app icons in the app Library lack any sort of notification badges and that's actually a feature that's enabled by default so if you go to settings and then you go down to home screen you're going to find a switch under the notification badges heading to show in app Library so if you enable that now when you go back to the app Library you're going to see those notification badges for the various apps with pending notifications when you download an app from the App Store you can make those newly downloaded apps skip the home screen completely and just go straight to the app Library so right now by default when I download an application you can see it goes to one of the available home screen pages just like this but what if we didn't want that to happen well we can go back to settings home screen and you'll see an option under newly downloaded apps you can just set that to app Library only so now when we go back to the App Store we download an app you're going to notice you don't see it displayed on the home screen but you go over to the app Library you're going to see it's installing right there under recently added so it outrights skips adding to the home screen now did you know that you could pause prioritize and cancel app store downloads mid download well let me show you how to do that so I'm going to download several apps at the same time you can see them add it to the home screen now watch what happens when I long press on an app that hasn't started its download you can see a quick action shortcut to prioritize that download so this app will now download with priority but watch what happens when I long press on an in-progress download you get quick action shortcuts to pause the download and to cancel the download so these three options can come in handy if you have a whole lot of apps downloading simultaneously for instance with a restore so you can prioritize the most important apps for instance a password manager to download First and there are many other quick action shortcuts that you'll find for instance long press on the settings app icon you'll find direct links to specific sections of the settings app for instance you can jump directly to the battery section and in one Fell Swoop you don't actually have to lift your finger off the screen you can jump directly to a specific section of other apps such as the app store or the clock app and third-party apps can take advantage of quick action shortcuts as well but here you can see using the clock app icon I quickly started a timer and you can also use quick action shortcuts with apps in the app Library so you can directly jump to a section of the settings app directly from the settings app icon within the app Library same thing goes for other apps as well so now I'll show you how to remove apps from the home screen but keep them in the app Library so if you long press on an app icon you're going to see the option to remove that app just tap that and now you'll see three options delete app remove from home screen or cancel so removing from the home screen will keep the app in your app Library if you select that option so now when we go to the app library and search for scanner pro we see it right there so you can see scanner pro is still installed on your device even though you've removed it from the home screen it still resides in app library but what if you wish to delete an app completely well long press on the app icon select remove app then choose delete app this will remove the app and its data from your phone it'll keep anything that's stored in iCloud but if you tap delete it will remove the app from both the home screen and app library now you can also delete and restore stock applications you can't do this for every app for instance the messages app you can only remove it from the home screen because it is a prerequisite for iOS but for an app like the music app you can actually delete that app so let me show you how this works I'm going to use it with the news app I'm going to go in remove the app and select delete app and just like it was a third-party app this will completely remove the news app from my device now if I go back out to the App Store and search for the news app there we go so just open that up and I can reinstall Apple news just like it was any other app that I wanted to install now I don't know if you noticed but I have a lot of notification badges on things like mail and phone and messages and honestly while that can be a good thing it can also be a distraction and kind of weigh you down so I'm going to show you if you go to settings notifications you can disable those badges for specific applications so for instance mail go in the mail turn off the badges switch and now when I go back to the home screen no more badge will mail obviously you want to use that carefully but for me I definitely prefer it this way okay so now let's talk about entering edit AKA wiggle mode so one way to do so is to long press on an app icon and select edit home screen there you go you have your icons wiggling hence wiggle mode and your home screens ready to be edited now another way to get into edit mode or wiggle mode is to Simply continue to long press on the app icon like that and another way to enter wiggle mode is to long press on a blank area of the screen like this and you will see it enter wiggle mode now another way is to Simply tap and drag your app icon you'll feel a little haptic feedback and that way you can enter wiggle mode now you can also exit edit mode in a variety of different ways so one way is to Simply tap the done button in the upper right hand corner another way is to Simply swipe up from the bottom of the screen like that and another way is to Simply tap on a blank area of the screen like this now when in edit mode you'll see a little minus sign in the upper left hand corner of the app icons on your home screen if you tap that it will ask if you want to remove that application and you can go through with that if you wish to hence a minus sign remove now one of the benefits of going into edit mode it allows you to move an app icon so let me show you how to do that right now we're just going to long press and select edit home screen it doesn't matter which icon you long press on to do so but then after that you can simply tap and drag any of the app icons you wish to move so I got the app store app icon and as you can see as you move this application the other apps move out of the way it's sort of like having two magnets with the same poles pointed at each other they're going to repel each other the home screen sort of works in the same way so we're going to exit wiggle mode there let's go ahead and enter wiggle mode again and try it again and what you'll notice is that each home screen is made up of an invisible four by six grid and each app icon fits within one of those spaces now what about moving to a separate home screen page well you simply drag to the edge of the screen like that and that allows me to move the App Store icon to a whole new page and no matter the page you're on it still sticks to the same grid based principle so you have that invisible grid where each app icon fits neatly within that grid now another way the app icons are like magnets is that each app icon has to be next to another app icon on the same page so that means that I can't move the App Store icon down to this bottom area here because there's no other app icons to stick to so it's automatically going to reposition itself right next to tips now this is where things get in my opinion really fun moving multiple app icons so we're going to go back into edit mode we're going to tap and hold on one of these app icons you can see here I have the app store just moving it around now watch what happens when I tap on the news app watch this I tap it and it automatically attaches itself to the first app that I was holding and I see a number two badge in the upper right hand corner now if I tap the TV app now I see a number three badge tap another app number four badge so I can move all four of those apps to this position right here let go and then all four of them are placed right within that area of the home screen so let's do this again I'm going to grab the App Store App I'm going to tap on news tap on TV tap on podcast four apps I'm holding right there and I can move those to a desired position on the home screen I can even move it to a whole new home screen page in a position within that page but I'm just going to let it go right here you can see all four apps are available right there on that second page but let's go ahead and grab all four of those apps again I'm going to move back over to the first page and just release right there you can even grab apps from one page like this and then move to another page and grab additional apps if you wish to so I'm going to grab these two apps here tips in free form so I have six apps now what happens when I move over to this page there's only four blank spots in this invisible grid I release it you get four apps and then the other two apps are placed automatically at the top of the adjacent home screen page now this is a super handy tip say I want to move the podcast app to a different page well I grab the app I drag it to the edge like this to move pages but there's a more efficient way to do this use your off hand while still holding the app to switch pages like this so this allows you to quickly switch to the desired page without having to drag the app icon to the edge of the screen in order to find the destination page and this looks like a good location and it should come as no surprise that you can also do so When selecting multiple applications like this so I can just move to the desired page and release like that now let's quickly move back over to the first page like that but what if you want to create a new home screen page so what you want to do is go to the last available page and that's denoted by that last page Dot and now I'm going to go into edit mode and once you do you're going to see another dot to the right of that page signifying that yes there's a blank page there and now it's just a matter of dragging an app icon over to that blank page so let me show you how to do it again long press drag an app icon over to that new page and now that new page is the last page have you ever wondered what the maximum number of home screen pages are in iOS well here you can see I have quite a few pages created but I'm going to create some more and we're going to get to the maximum limit and I'm going to show you what that's like so speed things up a little bit basically just dragging all these icons over to new pages creating as many new pages as I can and this one right here is going to be the last one folks and you can tell us the last available page because I'm in edit mode yet there is no little page dot to the right of the final dot so that indicates it's the last page now the question is how many pages are there well you have this first one so you have one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen so iOS limits you to 15 pages if you swipe on the page dots like this you can quickly jump between the first and last pages in a flash back to the first page you can quickly jump back to the first home screen page from any page simply by swiping up like that now this is similar to my quick switch Pages tip so I'm going to grab the tip sap here but I'm going to use the home screen page dots to move over to the home screen I want to move the app to just like that so you can quickly use this to navigate directly to the page you want to get to and then release like that now this is probably one of my favorite tips you can easily rearrange the order of your app so say I want to put this row of apps into alphabetical order so I have App Store News podcast TV right not hard to do that manually but there's an easier way to reorder your apps to do so you simply grab the apps in the order that you wish them to appear so you want to grab app store first you want that to appear first then you grab the news app you want that to be second then you grab podcast third and then TV fourth you release like this and look it places it in the exact order that you specified so let's reverse that order now just like that now here's another Super handy tip you can interrupt an app icon move what do I mean well I'm going to drag the app store app and say I'm moving it around and I change my mind and say hey I don't want to move it anymore tap done in the upper right hand corner it places that app back to its original position like you never moved it I'm going to do so again but this time I'm going to grab multiple apps from various locations and even move over to a different home screen page but I'm going to exit edit mode to cancel and interrupt this move by swiping up like that and now the apps are in their original position so now let's talk about folders and these are containers that house one or more apps and they can be like apps they could be random apps it doesn't really matter but as you can see you can easily enter or exit a folder simply by tapping on it or tapping outside of the folder and then you can launch the apps within the folder and then exit those apps simply by swiping up it'll go back to the folder View and then you can tap to exit there are multiple ways to create folders the first way you simply drag an app icon place it on top of another can continue to hold the folder will open and create and then you simply release inside the folder like that it'll automatically give it its own name you can customize that later we'll talk about that but once you create your folder you can simply exit edit mode and there you go now another way to create a folder and this way is quicker in my preferred method is to drag your app icon on top of another in release like that now there are several ways to add an app to an existing folder you can drag and release just like that so that's very familiar so you can see shortcuts inside the utilities or you can drag the icon on top of the folder and continue to hold on top it'll open up and then release and then finally you can drag the icon tap the folder move the icon into the folder and release and you can create Pages within folders so each page within a folder contains nine icons and in the utilities folder that I have here I have eight icons I add the ninth and then when I tap on it yes it automatically creates that second page for me and when I exit out of edit mode it just shows the the first nine icons but as soon as I go into edit mode you can see it automatically goes over and shows that blank page for the second page because there's not enough room on the first page and it automatically shows that first page by default so you don't really know how many pages are within a folder until you open it and like the home screen pages you can quickly scroll through folder Pages using yes indeed the pH dots you only have two pages here so not really a great example but you get the point photo are automatically assigned a name based on the apps inside but you can rename that folder simply by long pressing on the folder itself and selecting the rename option it'll put you into edit mode and it will highlight the name of the folder at the top so you can just start typing and edit that name but you don't have to use that method you can edit the name of a folder at any time whenever you're in edit mode you open the folder tap ex and have edit now whenever you remove all the apps from a folder it will remove that folder let me show you so I created utilities right here if I open up utilities there's two apps there of course if I drag shortcuts out it will automatically remove that folder and put translate back on the home screen page as well now I'm going to create a folder with more than two apps so you can see I have three apps here and when I try to do the same thing it doesn't work quite that way so I move tips out I move shortcuts out but utilities is still a folder with translate inside so I actually have to move that out of the folder to get rid of it all together you can move multiple apps to an existing folder simply by selecting multiple apps like this we showed you that earlier and simply drag and drop that stack of apps directly into that folder you can also move multiple apps to a new folder so you select multiple apps to create a stack like this and then place that stack on top of an app icon that you also wish to appear in that folder and no surprise you can also move multiple apps out of a folder so you just drag that first app and tap tap tap and move out of that folder just like that now one of the great things about the dock is it's always present no matter which home screen page you swipe to so with that in mind we can use a folder in that dock to have access to a whole lot more apps from any home screen page like that so now you have access to all those apps in that folder no matter which home screen page you swipe to so if those four available positions on the dock aren't enough then definitely use a folder you can remove a folder and all the apps it contains from the home screen but keep those apps within the app Library let me show you how this works so I'm going to drag the AmEx app here select multiple app icons to create a stack and then we're going to drag on this last app icon to create a folder containing nine apps like that but I'm not doing this because I like these apps in particular I'm doing this because I actually want to remove these apps from the home screen so you can see all nine of those apps I can easily get rid of them long press select remove folder but it's not going to get rid of the apps it's just going to get rid of them from the home screen so you remove those from the home screen like that the apps are still installed on your device but they're no longer on the home screen they're over in the app Library so if I scroll around or if I search I'm going to see apps like Amex Apple Store and any other app in that folder okay so this can be a very annoying issue the jumping icon issue so say you want to create a folder including settings but you want to create it along with an icon in this case tips only adjacent impeach what happens when you move over tips because there's no room left well settings gets moved over to the next page uh so what to do there it's kind of annoying because settings is just gone right well to get this back all you do is you tap and hold like this on a blink spot that brings settings back and now you can create your folder simply by releasing like that super handy trick now let's talk about moving an app from the app Library this time back to the home screen so I'm going to tap and hold on ferrite here continue to hold and then you'll see it jump back to the last home screen page and you'll also see in the upper right hand corner that little green plus indicating it can be added to the home screen now you can also just simply drag from the app Library directly to that home screen page like that now you can move multiple apps from the app Library so you want to just drag your first app like that swipe back over to the app library and then tap the apps to add to that stack so here in this category for entertainment I'm just going to Simply tap on all the apps I want to add to this stack so I have six apps now tap to get out of the category swipe back over go back to the home screen and you simply release to add those apps to the home screen now within edit mode in the app Library you'll notice some differences first of all the minus sign in the upper left hand corner as you can see here on the home screen is an X within the app library now why is that well if you delete an app from the app Library it's gone as you can see here when you tap that ax you get one option that is delete and that uninstalls that app completely from your phone now you can see peacock here on my home screen watch what happens when I delete peacock from the Apple Library it's gone so when I swipe back over to the home screen peacock is no more now you can also move an app from the home screen to the app Library so I'm just going to drag podcast and swipe over to the app library in release like that now what does that do well it simply removes the app from the home screen screen while keeping it installed on your device in accessible via the app library and no surprise here you can move multiple apps from the home screen to the app Library so we're going to create a stack simply tap tap tap tap tap and then we'll swipe over to the app library and release those six app icons into the app Library they're no longer on the home screen but they're still available here now let's talk about how to add multiple app icons for the same app to the home screen now notice I'm on the very last home screen page page 15 I'm going to move YouTube directly to that home screen page now watch what happens when I go back to the app library and try to drag YouTube over again it basically cancels that out because iOS won't let you add a duplicate app icon to the same page if it's the first page that that app icon lands on and because it's the last home screen page page 15 it's always going to be that way because edit mode doesn't create that next page over because I'm already on the maximum amount of pages so to work around this what we can do drag over to page 14 drag YouTube now page 15 you have YouTube and simply drag over like that now this works because each YouTube app icon landed on its own independent page first so I got rid of the last home screen page now and I've left that last page blank so when I go into edit mode it'll create that last page so now when I drag an app over like YouTube it hits that page first and that somehow gives it its own independent identity I guess according to iOS and that allows me to drag it over to any subsequent page like that so yes you can have multiple app icons for the same app on one or more pages and I'll show you why this is extremely useful a bit later now you can also add apps directly from Spotlight search so like Siri suggestions directly to the home screen like that so let's try it again swipe down for a spotlight and then in series suggestions just drag the find my app down to the home screen page now you can also of course search for a particular app so in this case test there's test flight my top hit just tap drag down to the home screen page as well okay so now let's talk about adding widgets to the home screen so if you go into edit mode like that you'll see a plus button in the upper left hand corner you want to tap that plus button and that will reveal all of the available widgets for both first party and third-party applications you'll see different size widgets small medium and large you'll also see different previews for various apps you tap on that preview it opens up the full view for that particular app and this showcases all the available widgets for that app so in this case the clock app I can swipe down or hit the X to get rid of it and there's a handy search at the top you tap that and you can search directly for a widget so in that case I search for a clock but any app that has a widget you can search for of course now the clock app only has two sizes of widgets so let's find an app that has the larger widget as well so reminders as you can see has all three small medium and large now if you scroll down here at the bottom you see a list of all the various apps with widgets that includes third-party apps like timer e and of course first party apps as well so one such first party app is the podcast app so you can see that here so let's go ahead and add a widget to the home screen so I'm just going to grab this preview for the clock so when I tap and hold that widget view will disappear and reveal the home screen and I can drag it to the desired location if I want to remove it I just tap the minus sign and then tap remove like that so now let me show you another way to add that widget to the home screen instead of tapping and dragging you can just tap where it says add widget just like that and it'll place it at the top of the current home screen page so that adds a medium widget to the home screen go ahead and remove that and open up the widget interface again and now I'm just going to tap and drag and I want to show you guys how these widgets work so basically the small widget occupies the same area as four app icons and you can see as I move that Widget the app icons dance out of the way now when I remove this widget you'll notice four app icons return to the home screen these were the original app icons that were displaced by that widget which occupies the area of yes you guessed it for app icons so let's illustrate this again when I add this widget to the home screen those four app icons that were originally on that page are still linked to this home screen page how do we know that well if I tap done and then I go in and remove this widget you're going to see those app icons re-establish their original position on that page so let me demonstrate this again but in a different way so I added that widget you see the four original app icons that were displaced by that widget so one of them being cash app Ivory lumafusion and net newswire watch what happens when I move this app icon over to the other page you see cash app go back to its original page now when I move cache app you'll see Ivory go back to its original page all four of those app icons will go back once that space is available so lumafusion you got one more net news wire now when I move this one you'll notice you'll have a blank space because there are no more linked app icons that were originally associated with that page and when I remove that widget those bling spaces remain when using multiple widgets on your home screen you'll notice that it takes up a lot of space so I'm going to add one widget here I'm going to add another I'm going to add a third and a fourth and you can see you only have a third of that home screen page now available for app icons but you can use widget Stacks to optimize space so go into edit mode and drag one of the widgets on top of another just like that now the widgets have to be the same size to create a stack but you can see that stack has been created you see the little page dots indicating that there are two widgets in that stack now you get three and now you get four widgets in that stack so you can scroll through just by swiping down like that and now we'll exit edit mode just by tapping done you can see that widget stack takes up a whole lot less space than having four widgets on your screen at the same time a great way to optimize space alright so we have our widget stack here I'm going to show you how to change the order of the widgets listed in that stack and also how to remove a widget from that stack so we're going to go back into edit mode just tap on the widget once in edit mode and there you have the edit widget view so you can scroll through like that and then you want to change the order you simply tap and hold and drag to rearrange the widgets as you desire you can also of course tap the minus sign in the upper left hand corner and remove a widget from that stack outright and once you're finished just swipe up in exit edit mode Now widget Stacks have a feature called smart rotate which will rotate the widget's B Stone context and that's great but sometimes you really just want the same widget to always display unless you move it manually so you can go into edit mode disable smart rotate like that you can also turn off widget suggestions and turning off that smart rotate will ensure that the widget that you select is the widget that will always be displayed unless you purposefully scroll to a different widget so I like it like that now I showed you how you could have up to 15 home screen pages but how many widgets can you have in a stack well let's go ahead and start adding as many as we can to this stack here and find the answer to it so I'm going to go into podcast I'm just going to tap hold and drag directly to the stack just like that and we're going to do all this real quick so let's go ahead and continue to add as many widgets to this stack as we can and rest assured iOS will let you know once you've reached the limit and we'll add this last one and you can see it looks like we have reached that limit because the plus sign in the upper left hand corner is now grayed out and you can see we now have 10 widgets within that stack one two three four five six seven eight nine ten so it's a great way to add additional content to your home screen in a very small footprint now you can edit a widget stack or edit a widget individually so here if you long press on the widget you can select edit stack that'll open up stack editor you can also long press and select remove stack if you want to do that of course but some widgets can be added individually you'll see this here when we scroll to an eligible widget you want to long press and now you'll see along with edit stack you'll see edit in the name of the widget in this case clock and this allows us to change the location that that clock is using so we have an accurate time for that location now let me show you how to move widgets out of a stack so we're going to long press and we're going to select edit stack and now we're just going to tap and drag one of those widgets out of the stack and now you can place it on its own just like that but the clock widget looks a little lonely so we'll go back to the stack we'll drag another widget out and we'll use it to create a new stack now here's another tip utilize the series suggestions widget so you'll see that here in the widget browser this provides app suggestions we're just going to add that one to the home screen now what's really cool about this is these are Dynamic app icons here so they will change as you can see right there based on context based on what iOS thinks you're going to want to use and it's fairly smart it'll eliminate the duplicate apps on the same page and you can long press and select don't suggest if you want specific apps not suggested to the left of the first home screen page if you swipe over you'll notice a dedicated page just for the widget so you can use this customize it and place all of your favorite widgets here for quick and easy access that way you're not cluttering your home screen and you have that dedicated spot for your favorites now here's a cool tip you can use third-party apps one app I'm using here is called Gidget I believe that's how you pronounce it but you can use this to create quote unquote blank widgets to further customize your home screen now let me show you how this works so basically you select a photo and then you export that wallpaper to your photos just like this but what this app also does is it creates widgets small medium and large versions based on that wallpaper as well so what I'm going to do is I'm going to add a new wallpaper and I'm going to select that photo that was exported to my photo library from egit so now I have a wallpaper that specifically matches the widgets that Gidget makes I know that may sound a little confusing but really is very simple and let me just show you what I mean here so I'm going to unblur that wallpaper so now we have the background wallpaper so when I add a widget it's basically going to mirror the background so it's going to make it seem as if there's a blank spot there so I go in and you can see already the small the medium and large widgets use the same image as the wallpaper so when I place the medium widget on my home screen guess what it looks like a blink spot when I exit edit mode because that widget it mirrors that exact wallpaper in that exact location now the question I know you're thinking well what if I move that Medium widget down well now that doesn't match but if you tap it you can edit the widget and change the position so now I moved it to the middle I changed the position to the middle and Bam it matches perfectly just like that so you have this Gap it looks like there's a blank there when really there isn't it's just a widget so I can place the large widget there as well do the same thing and for the small widget of course you have many more options because you can place that widget in many more spaces but you can alter that to match perfectly wherever you place it just like that pretty cool little trick right but one of the issues you'll encounter is that when you're scrolling through like that then it is really obvious that you are just using a widget as a so-called blank space and then not only that but when you launch apps you get this Parallax effect that makes it obvious as well you can see that Parallax effect right there on that widget so one thing we can do to help address this is to go to our settings and accessibility and go to motion and enable reduce motion when you do that when your launch apps or close apps that Parallax effect is gone so it isn't as obvious that you're using a widget now I've also downsized to just one home screen page which eliminates the issue when scrolling between Pages now the reduced motion setting is system wide but if you scroll down to per app settings and tap add app you can select home screen yes home screen counts as an app and this allows you to go in not only enable reduced motion for just the home screen but also enable all sorts of other little features regarding accessibility for the home screen let me just show you here so go back into settings you have things like bold text you have larger text you have things like reduce contrast there's all sorts of little tweaks that you can apply on a per app basis in this case just for the home screen so if you don't want some of these changes to be system-wide well as you can see there this will only affect the home screen and the app Library which counts as the home screen but all other apps are unaffected by these changes because you're using per app settings and of course you can remove that just like that okay so now I'm going to show you how to add a bookmark to the home screen from Safari so we're going to open up a safari page tap the share button and then choose add to home screen and then you can see nine to five Max there just tap add in the upper right hand corner so now it adds a shortcut to nine to five Mac directly to the home screen and that can be pretty convenient I'm also going to add another for cellular all right so I have the two shortcuts I tap nine to five Mac it actually works as sort of a standalone Safari application dedicated to nine to five Mac and here's something interesting about bookmarks if I place them in a folder and I remove that folder they are not sent to the app Library only applications are sent to the app Library so all the bookmarks will simply be moved out of the folder and placed on the home screen just like that so just something to keep in mind because if you try to drag this bookmark over to the app Library it's not going to go in that Library it's basically just going to go back to the home screen if you want to remove a bookmark from the home screen you have to choose the delete option so now I'm going to show you how to add shortcut to actions to the home screen so open up shortcuts tap add action and we'll use switching wallpapers as an example so search for switch between wallpapers tap on that as your action tap the wallpaper variable and choose one of your configured lock screens and of course that lock screen has a home screen paired with it as well so tap the inspector button at the bottom and then choose add to home screen and you can give it its own app icon if you want to do that and then also give the shortcut a name so I'll simply call it wallpaper switch and then I'll tap the add button in the upper right hand corner and there we go wallpaper switch on the home screen now watch what happens when I tap this it switches wallpaper just like that so of course this was just a proof of concept but there are all sorts of different actions that you can add directly to the home screen via the shortcuts app now you can also use shortcuts to theme your home screen icons so we're going to open up shortcuts we're going to tap the plus button and we're going to select open app choose the app you want to theme in this case the music app and now we're going to select add to home screen and here's where you can add your custom icon I'm just going to go into the files app I have iris from my friend surenix so I'm going to use the music app icon from his Iris theme rename it to music add to the home screen and there you go so now you have a custom music app icon and this is technically just a bookmark so it doesn't work exactly like an app icon you can't use quick action shortcuts for instance but if you're just looking to theme a specific app icon or maybe multiple app icons this is a way to do so okay so now let's talk about how to access the home screen page editor and you can see I have tons of different home screen pages here but we're going to zoom out using the home screen page editor so just go into edit mode and tap the page dots to open the page editor view so you can see all the different pages and what this will allow you to do is quickly jump directly to a page and you know the exact page you're going to because you can see the preview of the app icons on that page so you can use the page editor as sort of a shortcut to quickly jump to a specific page if you want to so now I'll show you how to hide or show home screen pages with the page editor so to hide a page you simply uncheck that page and now you can access it so this page is now the first page but we can bring back that hidden page simply go back into the editor re-enable it like that and now this page is once again the first page now let's go into the page editor again and you have to have at least one page enabled at all times but watch this I'm going to uncheck every page except that first one and now I just have this one page now let's go back into the editor and let's enable the very last page so now that page acts as page number two you can also use the page Editor to quickly rearrange home screen pages so all you do is simply tap and drag like this just like an app icon to rearrange those pages just like that so now this one is the first page and this one is the second but we can go back in and rearrange it even further so what was formerly the last page is now the first page so let's go back into the page editor we'll disable that first page here's what it looks like now but let's go back to the editor and drag the original first page back to its rightful position so now let's talk deleting a page via the page editor so I'm going to identify a page this one right here I want to get rid of it so I'm going to enter edit mode open the page editor identify that page uncheck it first and then and only then will you see the minus sign in the upper left hand corner of that page when you tap that minus sign you're going to see the option to remove that page so once you tap remove that page goes away and all the apps on that page remain in the app Library so when I exit edit mode you can see that page no longer there here's something I don't think a lot of people know about so what happens when I try to drag an app icon from the home screen directly to the page editor well unfortunately you can't do that because when you try to drag that app the app disappears once the page editor opens but notice what you can do with Spotlight search so open spotlight I'm going to drag the TV app just like that I'm going to tap the page editor and now you see the plus button next to that particular app icon so I can actually drag that app from Spotlight directly to a page that I designate just like that but oh it gets cooler so I'm going to do that again open the page editor but notice as you move the app you'll see those home screen app icons dancing so not only can you specify the page but also the location on the page and now I'm going to show you how to customize home screen pages using Focus modes so if I go to settings and I go to focus you're going to see the various Focus modes but you can tap the plus to create a new one you can create one of the canned Focus modes such as the work Focus so just tap customize Focus so now you can customize your screen so you can choose the lock screen or home screen in this case we're going to choose home it's going to give you suggested new pages so these Pages as you can see are populated with various work related apps and widgets it makes sense because this is the work Focus so you can tap one of the suggested pages and further customize that page if you choose to do so so you can edit that suggested page simply by tapping the edit apps button like that you have your suggested apps you can enable those or disable those but I don't want to get too deep into weed's own Focus because I have a dedicated Focus video coming up that goes really in depth on that but let's now talk about choosing your own custom pages dedicated to this work Focus so I'm going to choose this one right here and I'll just tap the done button in the upper right hand corner so whenever I enter the work Focus the only home screen page that you will see is the one that I chose so let's go ahead and test it out so we're going to invoke our control center tap Focus enable the work focus in its own so now you see that home screen is the one that we configured just a second ago this is a very powerful tool and when we disable that Focus your home screen will go back to the way it was before awesome feature now I'll show you how to access your current Focus settings directly from the page editor while in a focus so I'm in the work Focus going to open up the page editor and now you're only going to see that one page because that's the way that focus is configured but you'll also see an options button below so you can tap options that'll jump you directly to the focus settings within the settings app so now I'll show you how to customize your home screen wallpaper with Focus mode so you can do this by going into focus and customizing your lock screen because the lock screen is linked directly to the way your home screen is configured as well so we saw what I just chose for the lock screen so if we go to settings and we go to wallpaper you can customize the corresponding home screen wallpaper as well and in this case I'm just going to blur that wallpaper like that so that's how I want it to look when I I invoke that work Focus so let's open control center tap focus and then tap work and you can see in the background automatically it changes that wallpaper because it's linked to the lock screen that we chose when we customize the screens within Focus so now we're back to normal now another awesome thing that Focus does is allow you to reveal hidden home screens when entering a specific Focus mode so say this home screen page I wanted to hide that so I'm going to go into the page editor and uncheck that page and hide it from the home screen so the home screen as you can see no longer contains the page that we hid via that page editor so now let's go back into Focus settings and edit that work focus and notice what I have checked there that's the page right here that I hid earlier via the page editor so that is what's going to be enabled when I have the work Focus turned on so you can see that page is hidden but as soon as I access the work Focus it reveals just that one page brought back and now I can go in disable that work Focus and now that hidden page is hidden again so now I'm going to show you how you can strategically use multiple app instances with pages so I'm going to re-enable that page right here and say I wanted the Instagram app to be available whether I use the work Focus or not so that would mean I would need a second copy of the Instagram app icon placed Elsewhere on the home screen so I'll just put it right here on the first page of the home screen so I have the Instagram app here on page one and I also have the Instagram app here on page three right both places now I'm going to go back into the page editor and once I'm there I'm going to again disable that page so now Instagram is available here on the first page with that page disabled and now when I enable my work Focus it's also available on this page now I'm going to disable the work Focus and you'll see that I still have access to Instagram now I'm going to show you how to invoke custom home screen layouts with lock screen Focus links so I'm going to long press on the lock screen to invoke the lock screen editor and then here if I tap the link Focus button you can see that I can link a focus to this particular lock screen so when I switch to this lock screen the work focus is automatically enabled and thus you see this home screen page that I configured just for this Focus pretty awesome so now I'm going to switch to another lock screen with no Focus linked and you can see things are back to normal so let's switch to another lock screen and we'll swipe over and then I'm going to tap the link Focus button and Link the work Focus to this lock screen all right just tap it swipe up and now you can see our single home screen page courtesy of that work Focus so if I open up the settings app go to focus and select my work Focus should update here you'll see both of those lock screens under customized screens just like that so I can alter these lock screen Focus links from this page as well now you can also create a home screen shortcut to switch focuses so I have the shortcuts app open I'm going to add an action called set focus and then I can change up the variables so I'm going to turn on the work Focus until it's turned off whenever this action is invoked so we're going to go ahead and go to our inspector add to home screen and I'll just give it a name we'll call it work focus and then we'll go ahead and add that in that will add the work Focus to the home screen and now when I tap that guess what happens it switches to the work focus and you get your custom home screen page so we're going to turn off that work focus and we're back to normal so now let's go ahead and tap the work Focus shortcut again and again switches over to the work focus with the corresponding home screen and lock screen you can see that linked Focus there so now let's unlink the focus from this lock screen slash home screen combination and now when I use the shortcut it'll switch to the other linked lock screen slash home screen so here's something everyone should know how to reset the home screen to its default layout so you want to open up the settings app you want to tap on General scroll down and select transfer or reset iPhone tap reset and then choose where it says reset home screen layout so you tap that and then tap reset home screen now beware when you do this it will reset the location of all the app icons and all the widgets to their defaults so if you added any Widgets or you change the location of any Widgets or change the location of any of the app icons those will be reset as well and this also affects any custom home screens you set up for the focus modes those two will be reset so you have a completely default icon and widget layout and then one last tip you can create a stock Focus to quickly make your home screen appear stock so what I'm going to do is just going to set this up to look completely stock here it's going to move these extra icons from that second home screen page over here to the app library to get rid of them so now this looks like completely default setup outside of the wallpaper right so what I'm going to do is I'm going to hide the first two pages because these are the quote unquote stock pages that you get when you first install iOS and then I'm going to create a custom focus called stock and Link those two hidden pages so this can be great if you're using or you want to take screenshots of your iPhone or you take photos of your iPhone and you want that stock look this will allow you to get that really quickly so I'm going to choose a stock lock screen and I'm going to go in here and choose those two hidden Pages the two stock home screen pages and tap done so there we go we're set up with a stock look that we can enable we can get back at any time just by enabling that stock Focus just like this so now we have the stock icon layout with the two widgets at the top on the first page in the various icons in their exact locations that you would find on a fresh iOS 16 install now you could take this even further and change the wallpaper to more of a stock wallpaper if you wanted to do that but you get the point and then when you're ready to go back to your normal layout you just disable the stock Focus so ladies and gents that has been my in-depth walkthrough of the iOS 16 home screen and my remaining question is this did you learn something new well either way let me know Down Below in the comment section and be sure to hit that subscribe button for similar upcoming videos this is Jeff with nine to five Mac\n"