The grid is a comfortable place to live.
The app grid, I mean: the rows and rows of app icons on your iPhone’s home screen. It’s familiar. On. This is how I have lived with my various phones over the past decade. But at some point it started to become oppressive.
All these icons staring me in the face, vying for my attention. The disorder! Distracting little notification badges! The grid was a reasonable way to organize apps when I had about ten of them. There are about 60 on the iPhone I’m currently using, and I set it up from scratch a few months ago.
Naturally, living off-grid or in a non-traditional home screen has been possible on Android for much longer. Google’s operating system allows you to keep your screen clear and simply find your apps in the app drawer, which is always within reach. You can even replace the launcher entirely. But iOS — where every new app you download defaults to your home screen — hasn’t exactly made it easy to ditch the grid.
That started to change when iOS 14 added widgets, an App Library, and the ability to hide apps from your Home screen — although I haven’t developed the muscle memory to use it much. Now, iOS 18 adds even more flexibility. You can place apps and widgets anywhere on your home screen, change their colors, and integrate more functions into the Control Center. But even though apps and customization options have multiplied, most of us still use our home screens the same way we did with our first smartphones.
With the new options of iOS 18 – and get a look at other people’s well-organized home screens — I decided it was time to do a little cleaning. Why should an app that I only open once a month when I park downtown take up space on my home screen all year round? Better yet, is any Is the app worth taking up this valuable real estate?
I spent about an hour removing icons, arranging widgets, and adding controls to create my new home screen. The iPhone 16’s camera control button makes this icon useless; the action button launches the oft-used daycare app, so that might work too. When I was done, my haphazardly maintained folder system with cute emoji labels was reduced to just four apps in the dock and a handful of widgets spread across two pages, which I affectionately call “Windows Phone 2.0.”
Was it scary? A 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 appear when I open search. Otherwise, I type the first letters of the application name and that’s it. You can go to the App Library I suppose, but I almost never do that.
The biggest downside is that I see a notification, dismiss it, then forget about it for days since the app icon and its little red notification badge are no longer visible to me. But I missed things here and there, even when I lived on the network, and these badges are a real problem for me: I’m the kind of person who needs to get to badge zero, so I’m constantly opening apps just to clear delete notifications and remove the red dot from my face. Living off the app grid removes that distraction, and it’s the number one thing I appreciate about my new lifestyle.
I’m happy with my new home screen, but some of my colleagues are taking the off-grid philosophy to the next level. Weekend News Editor Wes Davis could give a masterclass in working iOS home screens. It keeps a few apps in the dock and Wordle gets a spot on its grid, but other than that it’s just widgets and shortcuts.
“I hate looking up things on my phone,” he told me. “This all started when I jumped on the ‘I want to use my phone less and have it be less distracting’ bandwagon. The grayscale shortcut icons on his home screen reduce visual clutter, and he doesn’t feel as drawn to opening time-consuming apps like TikTok when the icon isn’t right in front of him. Many shortcuts also contain drop-down menus, so he can jump straight into the task he’s looking for.
Better yet, this method allows him to organize his phone by action he tries to take. An icon labeled “Podcasts” launches the podcast app he’s currently using. If he starts using another app, it will keep the same shortcut icon and ask him to launch a new app. “I don’t need to install a new app and get used to looking for that icon.”
“I try to stick to these seven apps.”
Editor Jay Peters takes a more direct approach. Like me, he finds the constant presence of app icons distracting. “If I can’t see the app directly on my home screen, I’m much less likely to use it and just scroll through it.” He has a total of seven apps on his home screen – including three in the dock – and will occasionally allow an app icon to return to the grid if he plans to use it a lot in a short period of time. “If I’m going on a big road trip or something, maybe I’ll move the Maps app (to the top of the home screen),” he says, “But otherwise, I try to limit to these seven applications.”
Both of my colleagues have achieved a level of balance in their digital lives that I admire. I’ve also heard from many others that they always maintain a home screen full of app icons, but almost always skip the grid and go to Spotlight search when they need to. open an application. And none of us know exactly when it happened, but more than one person I spoke to agreed that the apps Siri suggested at the top of the search pane had gotten really good at some point in the pass. More often than not, the app I’m looking for is there before I even type a letter into the search bar.
You don’t have to wait for AI, Metaverse, or anything else to make your digital life less boring
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 on my part. But if I learned anything from this exercise, it’s that you don’t have to wait for AI, the metaverse, ambient computing, or anything else to make your digital life less boring. We already have tools in our hands; it just takes a little courage to step out of your comfort zone.
