Apple didn’t invent the app icon grid – desktops and older phones got there first. But the iPhone made it – ahem – iconic. This setup made sense in 2007, when you had just 15 apps to juggle. Then the App Store arrived – and chaos ensued. I quickly hit the original Home Screens limit and resorted to trickery to squeeze in more. And then gave up and started launching apps using Spotlight instead.
Today, Apple devices are still stuck with icon grids, but I think we can do better. I’ve mostly ditched them and am here to tell you how and why – and perhaps give you a few ideas to rethink your own setups.
iPhone: one screen to rule them all (sort of)
I have loads of apps on my iPhone, but I use a mere handful regularly. And there are some – games and social media – I’d rather not see at all. So I decided to start from scratch.
At the top of the first screen, I added a Photos widget that alternates through personal photos during the day. Below that, Dumb Phone acts as a no-nonsense launcher for accessing six key apps. A trio of icons sit in the Dock: Calendar (for the date), Google Authenticator (for two-factor authentication), and Photos (for symmetry and fast access). I then turned off all my other Home Screens (long press > Edit > Edit Pages), just in case I wanted to return to them later. I never have.
That’s because the result of these changes is a single Home Screen that’s more calming, more personal, and less tempting in terms of time wasting. If I swipe right, I can view a few extra widgets I placed in Today View for things like the weather forecast and my schedule. If I swipe left, that gets me to App Library, and I can use that or Spotlight to reach any app that’s not in Dumb Phone or the dock. It’s clean, simple, and efficient.
iPad: a dashboard, not a dumping ground
I always have my iPhone on me, but my iPad is used more deliberately – mostly for reading, gaming, music composition, and light travel work. Its larger display and Dock give me scope to best align my setup to how I use the device.
My Dock functions much like Dumb Phone, providing instant access to apps I’m most likely to use. But because App Library is built into the iPad Dock, you don’t need to swipe past every Home Screen to reach it. So on iPad, I do have a few icon-filled Home Screens, but purely for games. Why? Because it’s a collection, and browsing it visually to find something to play is the modern equivalent of flicking through a shelf of tapes or cartridges.
Which leaves the rest of the main Home Screen, which I use for widgets. These are more geared towards the iPad being a leisure-oriented device and so include a photo, my Duolingo streak, and big widgets for upcoming weather (Carrot Weather) and music releases (MusicHarbor).
Apple Watch: complications over complexity
The Apple Watch does things differently by showing your watch face first, rather than a grid of app icons. Which is just as well. If Apple Watch had defaulted to an icon grid and forced you to tap an icon just to see the time, it wouldn’t have reached its first birthday, let alone its tenth.
Doubly so, given that the Apple Watch app grid is so weird. The honeycomb design is fiddly to use and almost impossible to arrange with precision. So I don’t bother. For any app I use very regularly on Apple Watch, I add its complication to my preferred face, Infograph. For everything else, I press-hold the Digital Crown and use Siri. And during moments where I’d feel awkward talking to a watch, my last resort is List View (Settings > App View > List View) instead of the app grid.
Apple TV: a faster route to hitting play
Apple CEO Tim Cook once said the future of TV was apps. It wasn’t. People mostly just want to watch stuff. And although the Apple TV icon grid is easier to navigate than the Apple Watch one, it’s still a chore to manage, and not enough apps make use of the Dock-style row’s previews for that feature to be truly useful.
Increasingly, then, I use Siri or dive straight into Apple’s TV app, which does a good job of helping me pick up where I left off. If your remote isn’t set up to get to that app quickly, head to Settings > Remote > TV Button > Apple TV App.
Honestly, this is the device that feels most ripe for reinvention – where Apple could finally fully break from the app grid and give us a fresh start. Although with how little love tvOS gets, I’m not going to hold my breath.