Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Ultimate iOS 14 Homescreen Setup Guide!”.
Hey what’s up mkbhd here and i’m sure you started to notice now a lot of people customizing iphone home screens now that it’s possible now that ios 14 is public and look. First of all. Welcome to the party we’ve been: we’ve been customizing home screens on phones for what 10 years now 10 plus years, but it is kind of fun that it does feel a little bit new again now that apple’s finally doing it on their phone. So, let’s get into that, so i’ve already done a whole video all about ios. 14’S new features everything that’s new.
So if you want to check that out, that’s linked right below the like button, but i noticed a lot of people going back to that. Video and asking home screen questions just as people figure out that they can pretty much go ham on their home screen. So for this video just for home screens, i’m going to do three different levels of home screen, customization right so level, one beginner, someone who’d, never really thought much about this before or you know, people who just got an iphone level. Two enthusiast, maybe a little more willing to get your hands dirty, a little more willing to get complex and then level three former android user, full tilt customization all of the above, so let’s get into it. So here is a level one setup to start this one’s for you, mom and dad so you’ve, probably gotten used to your iphone home screen. Basically, just looking like this just a bunch of apps, a list of them just rows and rows of apps and folders some stuff, you don’t need right, but it’s finally time to mess with widgets now that we’ve derived with ios 14., so beautiful glanceable information. That’S the point of them and what better widget to start with than the stock default apple ones. So, like i’ve shown you just go into jiggle mode, i just go into jiggle mode and then hit the plus in the corner and there’s some good ones. Apple’S built in a popular one right now might be the photos or notes, but i think maybe the all-time. Most popular app is just going to be their weather, app just glanceable weather, so you pick the size of the widget.
You want, then add it place it where you want boom, that’s the first level right, another good one that obviously works best. If you have several apple devices is the battery one, so you can monitor the watch battery the phone battery and if you have air, pods or really any other wireless headphones via bluetooth, they’ll all show up here, which is cool. It’S not clickable or anything. But it’s just literally showing you glanceable information, the most basic purpose of a widget.
So that’s it that’s already an improvement and then, of course, the other thing to take advantage of now that there’s the app library over here is getting rid of the icons or folders or stuff. You don’t need to be on your home screen so again, instead of having pages and pages of apps and folders of apps, you don’t need much on your home screen. You’Ve probably seen this before. But yes, you can now hit the dots at the bottom and go ahead and uncheck a home screen, so it doesn’t show up anymore and boom. Now you don’t have to have unnecessary. Crap, like you always have here, basically lets you hide apps, but the best part of that that i actually haven’t seen any android launchers do, at least in my experience yet is it it saves those hidden pages, so you can bring them back whenever you want.
So you can have like a weekend home screen page that you only bring back up on the weekends with – i don’t know: yelp and strava – maybe some games whatever you do on the weekends. So that’s pretty cool. Also pro tip you can actually make your only home screen now have no apps on it at all, just your dock. So if you’re under the minimalism thing that is available to you but again, that’s it. There’S not many pro tips for level, one all right so level two! This is a little more adventurous now, so this one you might start to get into third-party widgets, so apple makes some pretty sweet, widgets sure, but now that ios 14 is out, developers are now starting to get into making their own best dedicated widgets, the most beautiful. The most functional the most awesome, glanceable information they possibly can in a widget and so there’s a lot of good ones.
Here i’m going to share some of my favorites, so there’s this one called time page that just makes a straight up better, looking more minimal widget than apple’s weather widget, it’s not a weather app, it’s actually for something totally different for productivity, but i happen to find Their weather widget, pretty sweet, so hey i’ll, take it there’s also hayweather widget, which offers a few other sizes and a little more customization. The google widget on ios is actually pretty nice here. So the bigger one gives you not just the bar to do. Quick, google search, but you can also quickly start a voice search. You can start an incognito google text, search or open google lens to basically google search for the image or object that whatever’s in front of you, which is pretty sweet when it works. Color widgets and widgery do and widget smith are also some some really good widget customization apps, and it’s really just the beginning of apps like this, that are made just to do sweet widgets on the iphone.
So i keep saying sometimes jokingly, but that stuff has been available on android for years that you’re just getting on the iphone. This is a real one, where there’s like this entire ecosystem now of apps that are just for the widget and you download it and there’s really no functional app behind it other than widget customization, so they each have their own ui and their way for customizing widgets. To show information at a glance whether it’s health information from your apple watch or news, tickers or stocks or weather, or the date and time or battery or calendar events, or really whatever you want. But now you can really go crazy, customizing exactly what you want in a widget, how you want it to look what colors and gradients you want it to use.
It’S it’s a whole new horizon and i’ll leave all these that i’m talking about linked below and, of course, if you guys find good ones and leave them in the comments. There’S a lot of new ones, popping up so i’ll i’ll update that and leave those below. As well, but also something to keep in mind, a lot of these are like free at their very basic level of customization. But then, as soon as you want to like change a certain color or add a certain function in the widget, then it becomes paid. Sometimes a subscription sometimes like a one time, four dollar charge or something definitely something to keep in mind. So, if you’re getting into level two you’re really starting to customize stuff, there’s gon na be a lot of apps like that. That’S the way iphone apps have been for a while, but just something to note, but there you have level two. It gets a little more personalized and a little more complex but way more functional way, more worth it. So then, last but not least, the level three home screen the crazy ones you’ve seen with customized icons and color themes the whole deal. So here’s the thing you can’t really actually do custom icons yet on the ios home screen. I know it looks like you. Can. We’Ve seen a lot of cool things that look like that, but these are actually siri shortcuts. So to make one of these, you need the siri shortcuts app.
So if you open up shortcuts, you hit that plus you go to add a new action and you make it an open, app action. Then you choose the app. You want to open i’ll make this one open the camera app for example, and then you hit the three dots up here in the top and hit add to home screen so now you’re making what appears on the home screen you’re making your icon. So you can change the name of your icon, name it whatever you want, and then you can pick an icon from your photos or your files pro tip. You can actually leave this name field. Blank for a cleaner look on your home screen again something i’ve been doing with android launchers for years.
Any chance i can get looks super clean, but yeah once everything’s all set, add it and you should find your new shortcut on the home screen. Now. Here’S the downside, because these are still a workaround – these are still siri shortcuts. Every time you open one of these, it has to open the siri shortcuts app and then use that to shortcut into the app you want to open and it it does that every single time and that’s kind of annoying it takes maybe a quarter of a second. Maybe half a second but it never gets faster over time.
Like every time you open one of these apps with a custom icon. You’Ll always have to wait for that little shortcut to run, and you also don’t get any of those little red badges for apps. With notifications, so if you change the messaging one to a series shortcut no badge there, so it’s probably not ideal to have a whole home screen full of these, but nevertheless that’s what people are doing.
I’Ve seen a lot of color-coded home screens on twitter, which are really impressive looking, but we obviously now know there’s a lot going on with shortcuts happening there, but at least now there are some pretty sweet, icon packs floating around that have a bunch of icons of The same style or theme i’ll link this one, so at least you don’t have to go googling every single icon. You want to change. You can also use a photo you’ve taken for an icon. If you want to just do one or two, so that’s pretty sweet i’ll link, this icon pack and some other cool ones below for some stylized themed home screens full of siri shortcuts.
But there you have it: ios 14 customization on the home screen in three different levels possible right now, it’s not much if you’ve seen more than this before you’ll realize, but it’s much more than you’ve ever had in the last 13 versions of ios. So i’m counting that as a win, if you want a full video of all the other best features of ios 14, including the double tap on the back to open google assistant, all that other fun stuff. Of course, i’ll link that video again below.
And if you haven’t subscribed already, you probably should there’s a lot of good stuff coming up, including, of course, the new iphones when they come up, which is like right around the corner, so definitely stay tuned. For that either way, that’s been it thanks for watching catch. You guys in the next one peace .