Unless Apple goes bonkers this weekend and reinvents itself as a tamer of goats, a new iPhone will likely be revealed on Monday. And with it, the official launch of iOS 18. This brings a slew of new options – together with loads of customisation. Given Apple’s traditionally opinionated stance, it permitting even an iota of deviation from What Apple Says Goes™ is information. But maybe the corporate is stress-free in its outdated age, since you’ll quickly have the ability to make the iOS 18 Home Screen your individual in methods by no means earlier than doable on an iPhone. However, the new feature I’m trying ahead to shouldn’t be the one you may count on.
In truth, the iOS 18 Home Screen feature that the majority excites individuals is the one I like least. You can tap-hold a Home Screen, go to Edit > Customise, and use the Tinted choice to offer all of your icons the identical tint. And then surprise why you’ll be able to’t discover something. (Colour is a unbelievable differentiator. Dear Apple design group: please take observe.) Elsewhere, you’ll be able to swap apps between icon and widget views (higher), lock apps behind Face ID proper from the iOS 18 Home Screen (smart), and drag apps to any area moderately than them all the time flowing in from the top-left (how very years-ago Android).
Yeah, I don’t care about any of that.
App it up
My Home Screen wish-list has lengthy been pushed by my have to organise a mountain of apps and video games. I’ve usually had over a dozen Home Screens, peppered with apps and video games I have to evaluation. But my predominant Home Screen for the longest time was arguably against the law in opposition to Home Screens. And humanity. I’d structured it into rows primarily based on themes, with three icons after which a folder housing associated apps. In the Dock: extra folders. A single look was sufficient to make faint-hearted iPhone customers keel over in shock.
I reasoned I wanted to know the place each app was and get at each as rapidly as doable. Sensible individuals pointed at Spotlight. Apple politely coughed at App Library. I grumbled that Apple had stupidly positioned App Library after the final Home Screen, and swiping all the way in which there gave me thumb cramp. Worse: for the iOS 18 Home Screen, Apple prioritised aesthetics over pragmatism. I’d hoped you’d have the ability to rearrange apps by identify or set up date by way of a menu, just like the Mac’s been in a position to do since 1984. Instead, Apple grinned and advised us we might now make each icon shiny purple.
Six of one of the best

Then I found Dumb Phone. More a system for significant app use than a mere app, it urges you to switch your Home Screen with a widget. Said widget incorporates as much as six huge textual content hyperlinks to your most-used apps. I believed I’d evaluation it and transfer on. But it stayed. For days. And then weeks. I disabled different Home Screens and began utilizing App Library to get at these apps not in my Dumb Phone widget. I even cleared out the Dock, leaving simply Google Authenticator, Calendar (for the date) and Photos, as a result of who doesn’t love having quick entry to pictures?
One annoyance stays: an pointless app label beneath my widget. If solely there was a option to be rid of that. Enter Apple, in smug mode. Because in your iOS 18 Home Screen, you’ll be able to set icons to big-o-mode, which makes them bigger and removes the textual content. And such labels are then gone from widgets too.
Honestly, I’d normally gripe about this too. Alongside the tinting factor, it turns typical iOS 18 Home Screens right into a recreation of ‘hunt the icon’, the place you peck at apps till you probability upon the suitable one or surrender. But for my very particular set-up, it’s excellent. So even this curmudgeon has to say it: Apple, you had been proper. Although not essentially deliberately.