The grid is a comfortable place to live.
By app grid, I mean: rows of app icons on your iPhone's homescreen. This is familiar. Safe. I've been this way with my various phones over the past decade. But at some point, it started feeling oppressive.
All those symbols staring back at me, competing for my attention. chaos! Distracting little notification badges! When I had ten apps the grid was a perfect way to organize them. The iPhone I'm using now has sixty, and I set it up from scratch a few months ago.
Naturally, it's possible to stay off-grid or in non-traditional homescreen arrangements for long periods of time on Android. Google's OS lets you keep your screen clear and find your apps in the app drawer, always a swipe away. you can even completely replace launcherBut iOS — where every new app you download lands on your homescreen by default — hasn't made it easy to leave the grid at all.
He started changing When iOS 14 added widgets, an app library, and the ability to hide apps from your homescreen — though I haven't developed the muscle memory to use it much. Now, iOS 18 has been added even more flexibilityYou can place apps and widgets anywhere on your homescreen, change their colors, and add more functions to Control Center. But even though the apps and customization options have grown by leaps and bounds, most of us are still using our homescreens in basically the same way as we did with our first smartphones.
Getting more done with the new options in iOS 18 A look at other people's well-curated homescreens – I decided it was time to do a little cleaning. Why does an app I only open once a month take up space on my homescreen all year long when I'm parked downtown? Even better, it does Any Is the app worth taking up that precious real estate?
I spent about an hour removing icons, arranging widgets, and adding controls to create my new homescreen. The camera control button on the iPhone 16 makes that icon redundant; The action button launches a frequently used daycare app, so that's on the go, too. When I was done, my haphazardly maintained system of folders with cute emoji labels was reduced to just four apps in the dock and a handful of widgets spread across two pages that I lovingly labeled ” “Windows Phone 2.0”.
was it scary? Little. But you know what? I don't miss those rows of icons at all. Nine times out of ten the app I'm looking for is in the Siri suggested apps that pop up when I open Search. If not, I type the first few characters of the app name and there it is. I suppose you could swipe up on the App Library, but I rarely do that.
The biggest drawback is that I'll see a notification, dismiss it, and then forget about it for days because the app icon and its little red notification badge are no longer in my face. But I still missed things here and there when I was living on the grid, and those badges are a real problem for me: I'm the kind of person who needs to get to badge zero, so I'm trying to clarify. I will constantly open apps to remove notifications and remove red dots from my face. Being off the app grid takes away this distraction, and it's the number one thing I appreciate about my new lifestyle.
I'm happy with my new homescreen, but some of my coworkers take the off-the-grid philosophy to the next level. Weekend news editor Wes Davis can teach a masterclass in functional iOS homescreens. That puts some apps in the Dock, and Wordle gets space on its grid, but outside of that are just widgets and shortcuts.
“I hate looking for things on my phone,” he told me. “This kind of thing all started with me jumping on the bandwagon of 'I want to use my phone less, and I want it to be less distracting.'” Grayscale shortcut icons on his homescreen reduce visual clutter, and he doesn't feel tempted to open time-wasting apps like TikTok when the icon isn't right in front of him. Many shortcuts also have drop-down menus so one can launch directly into the task one is looking for.
The best part is that this method allows him to organize his phone action He is trying to take. An icon labeled “Podcasts” launches the Podcast app you're currently using. If he ever starts using a different app, it will keep the same shortcut icon and make him launch a new app. “I don't have to get used to putting a new app in there and finding that icon.”
“I try to limit it to just these seven apps.”
News editor Jay Peters takes a more direct approach. Like me, she finds the constant presence of app icons distracting. “If I don't see the app directly on my homescreen I'm less likely to use it and just scroll through it.” He has a total of seven apps on his homescreen – three of which are in the Dock – and he'll occasionally allow an app icon to return to the grid if he's going to be using a lot in a short period of time. “If I'm going on a big road trip or something, I'll probably move to the Maps app [at the top of the homescreen],” he says, “but otherwise I try and limit it to just these seven apps.”
Both of my coworkers have achieved a level of balance in their digital lives that I admire. I've also heard from several others who have said they still maintain a homescreen full of app icons, but when they need to open an app they almost always leave the grid and go to Spotlight Search. And none of us know when this happened, but more than one person I talked to agreed that the apps suggested by Siri at the top of the search pane were really good at some point in the past. Often, the app I'm looking for is already there before I type a letter in the search bar.
You don't need to wait for AI or the metaverse or anything to make your digital life less annoying
This kind of thing gives me hope for a future where personalized AI can help me find what I'm looking for on my phone with less input. But if I've learned anything from this exercise, it's that you don't have to wait for AI or the metaverse or ambient computing or anything to make your digital life less annoying. We already have the tools at hand; You just need a little courage to leave your comfort zone behind.