An iPhone owner’s guide to living off the app grid

The grill is a comfortable place to live.

By the app grid, I mean: the rows and rows of app icons on your iPhone’s home screen. It is familiar. Sure. That’s how I’ve lived with my various phones over the last decade. But at some point, it started to feel oppressive.

All those icons staring me in the face, fighting for my attention. The mess! Distracting little notification badges! The grid was a reasonable way to organize the applications when I had, ten of them. There are sixty on the iPhone I’m using now, and I installed it from scratch a few months ago.

Naturally, life off the grid or in a non-traditional homescreen arrangement has been possible for much longer on Android. Google’s OS allows you to keep your screen clear and only find your apps in the app drawer, which is always a swipe away. You can too replace the entire launcher. But iOS — where every new app you download sits on your home screen by default — hasn’t made it easy to go off the grid.

What you do started to change when iOS 14 added widgets, an app library, and the ability to hide apps from your home screen — though I haven’t developed the muscle memory to use them much. Now, iOS 18 adds it even more flexibility. You can place apps and widgets anywhere you want on your home screen, change their colors, and add more features to the Control Center. But even as applications and customization options have multiplied, most of us still use our home screens in the same way we did with our first smartphones.

With the new options in iOS 18 – and get a look at other people’s well-curated home screens – I decided it was time to do a little cleaning. Why should an app that I open only once a month when I park in the city center take up space on my homescreen all year? Better yet, it does any Does the app deserve to take up that valuable real estate?

I spent about an hour removing icons, arranging widgets and adding controls to create my new home screen. The camera control button on the iPhone 16 makes the icon useless; the action button launches the frequently used daycare app, so it might as well go. By the time I was done, my haphazardly maintained folder system with cute emoji labels was reduced to just four apps in the dock and a handful of widgets spread across two pages, which I affectionately call “Windows Phone 2.0.”

Was it scary? A bit. But you know what? I don’t miss those rows of icons. Nine times out of ten the app I’m looking for is in the apps suggested by Siri that pop up when I open the search. If not, write the first letters of the name of the app and there you go. You could scroll to the app library, I suppose, but I almost never do.

The biggest downside is that I’ll see a notification, dismiss it, and then forget about it for days since the app icon and its little red notification badge are no longer in my face. But I missed things here and there even when I lived on the grid, and those badges are a real problem for me: I’m the kind of person who needs to get to badge zero, so I’ll constantly open apps just to delete them. remove the notifications and remove the red dot from my face. Living off the app grid eliminates this distraction, and it’s the first thing I appreciate about my new lifestyle.

I’m happy with my new homescreen, but some of my colleagues are taking the off-the-grid philosophy to the next level. Weekend news editor Wes Davis could teach a masterclass in functional iOS home screens. Keep a few apps in the dock, and Wordle will get a place on its grid, but other than that it’s just widgets and shortcuts.

“I hate looking things up on my phone,” she told me. “This all kind of started with me jumping on the bandwagon of ‘I want to use my phone less, and let it be less of a distraction.'” Grayscale shortcut icons on their home screen reduce visual clutter , and he doesn’t feel drawn to opening time applications like TikTok when the icon is not right in front of him. Many of the shortcuts also contain less curtain, so he can launch right into the task seeking.

Best of all, this method allows you to organize your phone from the action try to take it. An icon labeled “Podcasts” launches whatever podcast app you’re currently using. If you ever start using a different app, keep the same shortcut icon and it will launch a new app. “I don’t need to install a new app and I get used to looking for that icon.”

News editor Jay Peters takes a more direct approach. Like me, you find the constant presence of app icons distracting. “If I don’t see the right app on my homescreen, I’m much less likely to use it and just scroll with it.” It has a total of seven apps on its home screen – including three in the dock – and will occasionally allow an app icon to return to the grid if it’s going to be used a lot in a short period of time . “If I’m going on a big road trip or something, maybe I’ll move the maps app [at the top of the homescreen]”, he says, “But otherwise I try to stick to just these seven apps.”

Both of my colleagues have achieved a level of balance in their digital lives that I admire. I’ve also heard from many others that they still keep a home screen full of app icons, but they almost always skip the grid and go to Spotlight search when they need to open an app. And none of us know quite when it happened, but more than one person I talked to agreed that the applications suggested by Siri at the top of the search panel were really good at some point in the past. More often than not, the app I’m looking for is right before I type a letter in the search bar.

This kind of thing gives me hope for a future where personalized AI can help me find what I’m looking for on my phone, with less input from me. But if I’ve learned anything from this exercise, it’s that you don’t have to wait for AI or metaverse or environmental computing or anything to make your digital life less annoying. There are already tools in our hands; it just takes a little courage to leave your comfort zone.