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Ask an expert: How do I find a ‘missing’ app?

No time to drop into the Apple Store and ask the Genius Bar for help with your iPhone or iPad? Maybe one of our resident experts can help!

As Apple nerds, we get asked a lot of tech support questions — and some of those questions crop up time and time again. Here’s a recent query that we think will be familiar to many of you.

“I can’t find an app on my Home Screen – only through search. Help!”

There are a couple of possibilities, depending on how the app became ‘hidden’. The first is that you’ve at some point simply dropped it into a Home Screen folder – and if you’ve many of those, rummaging through them all to find an app isn’t much fun. The other is someone might have inadvertently moved it to your App Library.

In the latter case, this is achieved by tap-holding the app, tapping Remove App and then selecting Move to App Library. This removes the app icon from your Home Screens, but leaves the app installed and accessible via search or from within the App Library.

The fix is easy. Swipe left on your Home Screens until you reach the App Library, search for your app and tap-hold its icon. You’ll then switch to the Home Screen view and can place the icon wherever you want to. (You can alternatively tap-hold the app in the main App Library view and select Add to Home Screen, but your iPhone will then decide where to put it — on the first available empty Home Screen spot.)

On iPad, there’s no App Library (yet), but you can perform broadly the same trick by searching for an app, tap-holding it in the search results list, and dragging its icon to a Home Screen.