Within iOS 14 (and the upcoming iOS 15), there are many elegant and refined ways to customize your iPhone, whether you want to make it more convenient to use or just better serve your needs. One of those useful features is the ability to hide your home screen from prying eyes. You may want to prevent friends, family members, colleagues, or kids from viewing or launching your apps, or you may want to keep your home screen app collection private for other personal reasons.
You have the flexibility of rearranging app icons on the home screen or setting up widgets to make the home screen more useful and inviting. You can move entire pages to reorder them, hide them, or get rid of them altogether.
With iOS 14 you can hide or reorder your home screen page. With iOS 15, you can go a step further by completely deleting home screens instead of hiding them. Here’s how to accomplish this easy task.
Hide your home screen
- Go to the home screen and tap and hold on an icon or the page background to enter the wiggle mode — or tap on Edit Home Screen from the Quick Action pop-up menu — to set the icons wiggling. Alternately, you can long-press a widget or widget stack until it jiggles.
- Tap the page dots at the bottom of the screen, below the home screen icons, to enter the Edit Pages mode. This indicates how many app screens are available.
- On the page editing screen, identify the page you want to hide.
- Tap on the checkmark underneath the page preview to disable and hide that page, and then tap Done.
- You can also delete a home screen page to remove it permanently by tapping on the minus sign on the upper left corner of the page preview. When you do this, the apps appearing on this page automatically get stored in the App Library.
Reorder home screen pages
The ability to reorder elements on your iOS home screen always made it easier to move icons, and you can easily rearrange which apps you see first when you switch on your phone. Here’s how to change the page order of your home screens.
- Unlock your iPhone to access the home screen.
- Tap and hold on any icon or the page background to enter the wiggle mode — or tap on Edit Home Screen to set the icons wiggling.
- Tap on the page dots located below the home screen icons.
- On the page editing screen tap and hold on the page you want to move.
- While pressing on the page icon, drag it to the position where you want it.
This handy functionality for both iOS and iPadOS makes it a lot easier for you to personalize the home screen as needed and on the fly.