Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “How to customize your iPhone – iOS 15, App Icons, and More!”.
Hey it’s climb with the verge and today we’re going to be customizing our iphone home screen now for years, every iphone looked more or less exactly the same, but with ios 14 apple added widgets and new workarounds for customizing icons, causing a huge boom and bespoke iphone Themes now, if you’re an android user, this is old news to you like over a decade old, but with 90 of iphones running ios 14. Now, there’s no shortage of awesome themes being shown off. Adding them isn’t exactly straightforward, though, in this article we’re going to show you the basics: how to fully customize your home screen and with ios 15, how you can make your phone automatically go from this at home to this when you’re at work. The first thing you’ll want to do is make a plan for what home screen you’d like there are tons of great resources for inspiration, pinterest, reddit, icon packs on etsy.
Next make a note of what apps you’d like to have on your home screen. Most icon packs. Should include most of the popular apps, but if you’re using less popular ones like a specific game or calendar app, you manage to be a little more creative when selecting an icon. Once you have your icons, you can download them directly from your phone’s browser by clicking save image or by importing the images into the files app using icloud drive. Finally, you’re going to want to grab a wallpaper, and if you need some ideas, the verge has excellent ones.
Let’S start with the easiest thing to change your wallpaper. Now, a lot of you probably already know how to do this one so feel free to skip ahead. If you don’t, though, head over to settings wallpaper and then hit choose a new wallpaper from there, just select one from your photo album or from the apple defaults, if you’re, boring and then tap on it to set it. An important thing to note here is that ios icons don’t allow for image transparency.
So if you want a floating icon effect, you’re gon na need to make sure that your wallpaper color matches the icon background, for whatever icons you have next is widgets, which were introduced back in ios 14 and add a whole new dimension to customizing your home screen. Again, android users have had this for a while, but ios users only got them recently to add a widget you’re going to tap and hold on your home screen the plus button, and then you can scroll through all your widgets over here, i’m going to grab a Widget, you can see the different sizes and options for widgets. You have yeah hit the add widget button we’ll place it on your home screen now.
Widgets can also be put into stacks they’re the same size. So i can tap and hold this widget drop it into the stack over here and then i can easily scroll through all those widgets without taking up so much space. All right.
Let’S theme now to start, i suggest adding a second home screen and hiding your regular layout. Just in case you want to switch back when you’re done, i’m going to warn you. This whole process can be pretty wonky so to create a custom icon, you’re going to want to head to shortcuts, which should be pre-installed on your phone. But if it’s not, you can install it on the app store now. Shortcuts is a pretty complicated app. So we’re going to try and make this simple we’re going to open the shortcut app and we’re going to hit the plus button in this corner to create a new shortcut now. The thing we want to do here is open an app so we’re going to add an action, we’re going to type in open app and we’re going to open an app we’ll find an app on our phone.
Let’S say the camera app, and now i’ve already done the shortcut. This is the action that we want to take. Now we want icons, though, so we have to do an additional step. Just gon na hit the share button, we’re going to add to home screen and now here’s where the magic happens. So here’s where i give it the shortcut name, which will be the label on my phone.
So maybe i don’t like camera. Maybe i want this to say photography now i need an icon, so i’m gon na hit choose file. I already have this folder of these great icons i made earlier out of the original windows – 98 icon. So i’ll get this great camera icon hit, add and there it is on my home screen when i tap it. It’Ll take me right to the camera app now. There are a lot of quirks here.
Using shortcuts means that you have to create a new shortcut for each individual, app icon, that you want to change, which is really time consuming and really boring worse. Every time that you open an app using that custom icon you’ll see an annoying drop down banner notification from shortcuts, letting you know that it’s doing exactly what you asked it to do. And while there used to be a pretty annoying hacky way to get around that and block them, it doesn’t seem to work in ios, 15 anymore, so you’re, more or less stuck with them to take things to the next level. You’Re gon na want some widgets to match.
Widget smith is one of the most popular apps out there for this, because you can use it to just display images that work. Well, with your theme like say a windows, 98 icon, or you can use it to create themed calendar and clock widgets that match your color scheme, font and aesthetic. So we’re going to open the app and we’re going to select the type of widget we want. You have small, medium and large, which are the three ios widget sizes.
Let’S go with medium, that’s kind of what i want for here and go with a default widget, and now you have lots of different options. We have date. We have time we have weather. We have step counting health activity, calendar reminders, tides astronomy, lots choices.
Now i just kind of want a simple clock in calendar, so we’ll find that and select it now, our so you can see we’re going to keep basic. I don’t really need you know, hearts or you know, apple colors, maybe both terminal actually uh got that retro feel we’re gon na customize it because i really like these colors about this nice blocky retro font uh background color, though doing like a windows 98. So let’s go with morbid teal and then for my font, color. Let’S just go with the simple white, so we hit save applied to this widget and we’re ready to go, go plus button.
Again, we go and find we’ll do smith, add a medium widget, we’re going to choose that medium 2 that i just made before and then we’ll show up all that’s technically old news though, but ios 15 adds an additional wrinkle to widgets and custom map. Icons called focus modes which, as a side effect, also allow you to selectively, show and hide whole pages of your home screen widgets and all whenever you want. The original idea is that you could have a home screen for work with your calendar and email widgets that automatically pop up when you’re in the office and a regular home screen with social media, apps and music widgets for when you’re off the clock. But since focus modes, let you choose home screens, you can combine them with widgets and shortcuts to say, create a perfectly themed windows, 98 layout with your icons and widgets, and everything that you can call up at a moment’s notice. To impress your friends without having to go through and manually hide all your home pages.
Every time once you’ve got your home screen, set up here’s how to enable focus mode to automatically trigger it now again, to do this, you’ll need to be either running the ios 15 public beta or if ios 15 is out by the time you’re watching this just Regular ios 15. so you’re going to go to settings. I’M going to hit focus then we’re going to create a new focus mode.
I’Ll do a custom. One here called windows. Get this color this icon hit. Next, it doesn’t really matter for uh notifications, so we’re just gon na go right through these okay, our focus is ready.
Now. The important thing here is we’re gon na go to home screen we’re gon na do custom pages, we’re only going to let it show our main page that we have over here, which is the one that we’ve laid out with our custom widgets and our custom icons. Now, whenever i go and set that windows notification, it hides all my other home screens and just shows me the windows icons. But let’s say we want to take this a little further, because focus will let you get to just showing you your custom icons, but not the wallpaper, so we’re going to do is we’re going to use shortcuts to actually kind of hack our way through that too, We’Ll use shortcuts we’re going to create a new shortcut, that’ll automatically set a wallpaper, so you have to set an album with whatever wallpaper you want, which i’ve already done, you’re going to set up a shortcut that looks like this, then you’re going to go over to Automation over here, because one of the things you can do with automation is use focus modes as a trigger to do things. So what we’ve done is we’ve built an automation that automatically changes our wallpaper to our windows, 98 theme and we’ve set it up so that whenever we turn windows 98 on it’ll run that shortcut. So now i have all my automation set up so now i can hit focus button hit my windows 98 theme and you can see it is pretty janky.
You still have to hit the set wallpaper button over here with just one button. I’Ve turned my phone into windows 98, so that’s pretty cool. Now again, this is a really janky setup and if you’re using this to change your wallpaper, you will either have to set up more automations to switch back, which is even more hacky or just manually reset. It every time, but it is pretty cool all these hoops.
You have to jump through, highlight just how difficult it is to really customize your iphone. You have to remember it took apple years before it. Let you even customize your home screen background. Even now, all these customization tools look more like hacked together, workarounds, not useful methods to let you easily change the way your phone looks. The steps that apple has taken, though, are some of the biggest concessions that it’s ever made towards customization, which means that there’s still hopes for future updates that’ll. Let you truly customize how your iphone looks in the future thanks so much for watching.
We’Ve got links in the description for this cool windows: 98 theme that we’ve made virtual papers and other how-to guides for customizing your iphone and if you’ve gone and themed your iphone, send me a picture on twitter show us how it looks. .