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How do you organize your phone's home screens and apps?
I've noticed that my phone's home screens have become a bit cluttered and figured it's about time to clean it up. So I tried searching online and found tons of recommendations and suggestions, but figured I would ask users here if anyone has any tips for productivity or efficiency, or just something that works for you. Might give me some good ideas to try out, and hopefully can benefit anyone else reading this thread.
Do you have tons of home screens or just one with a ton of folders? Do you use many widgets or not at all? Do you organize apps by how frequently you use them? Or how similar the apps are to each other? By color of the app icon? Or something else entirely?
Seriously, any help/suggestions/ideas would be appreciated.
I just have the apps I use semi-frequently on my home screen. Bank, fitness/health, work-related, social media, smart home, and streaming services are grouped in folders. I only have 1 page on my home screen.
Everything else I search for when I need it.
I do exactly the same thing! Except that I have 2 pages.
I use a similar principle, although I have two more pages each with just one widget on them.
I use Niagara Launcher, been using it for at least 2 years. It prevents me from fiddling around too much with customizing and cluttering the screen.
One home screen, with only one folder. Niagara is a one handed launcher, I scroll using my fingers on one of the edges of the screen to roll through the full apps list.
Only the "widgets" that come out of the box with Niagara (Calendar, Weather, Time, Battery, etc)
Top 5 most useful apps are at my fingertips on the homescreen. (and the 'adulting' folder which has to do with insurance, money, taxes, etc) Everything else is a simple scroll away.
I'll second Niagara, it's one of those "opinionated" tools that can be kind of love-or-hate, but I happen to love this one.
The only annoyance is the "recently-used" sort order within the alphabetic sections doesn't always seem to work the way I'd want, but on the whole I've really liked it.
Looks really cool, thanks for sharing!
I will third Niagara Launcher. I have been using it for years. I always try various other launchers and I always end up back at Niagara. It's just too good. Perfect for one or two hand use. Simple but plenty of customization if you want it.
I use Tick Tick for my reminders/tasks, so I have the widget living at the top. Peak set up.
Another feature of Niagara I like is that you can designate your music/podcast/audiobook/etc apps as media apps, and they will be "promoted" to the home screen when you plug in wired headphones or connect via bluetooth, then get "demoted" back to the normal app list when you disconnect.
I use Niagara on all of my Android devices. I recently had to contact them because they artificially limit the number of devices you can run it on under one Play account to just 3--if you put it on a fourth then it's constantly prompting you on whichever device you used longest ago to "revalidate your membership," which then initiates the prompt on the device you used next-longest-ago. Thankfully they bumped my limit up so I don't get nagged anymore.
Niagara is so good. I used to be a Nova Launcher user until I found Niagara. The new wallpapers, icons, and fonts they added recently really help give you some personality while also staying focused.
I've been using the Nova Launcher for years.
My home screen has four pages, which are, from left to right:
Bottom row has the four usual suspects pinned: Dialer, SMS, browser (Firefox) and OpenCamera.
Sounds very reasonable. I like the hacker and media tabs! I think I might have to copy that media tab thing, I've tried categorizing them into folders like podcasts and music and video and whatever else but an entire page just for media would probably make more sense. Thanks!
Guilty as charged.
My last page is 90% Google calendar widget. It was originally 100% like yours, but it felt like too wasted of a page so I resized it and added calendar-adjacent apps along the bottom. The calendar still takes up most of the space, but I get slightly more functionality.
I have the Blank Spaces App. It lets iOS users create a minimalist home page with no app icons or colors. Combined with grayscale mode and only allowing notifications for texts and calls, it makes using my phone very simple, but also very uninteresting.
I highly recommend it to anyone who is wanting to reduce their screentime on their phone.
That definitely looks different to the normal home screen on iOS. And reducing screen time always sounds appealing. I'll give it a try, thanks!
I have a custom launcher similar to this for Android, and one of the things that I liked was the ability to replace the default launcher with white text on black background for ease of use. Doing that on iOS with a full page widget is pretty smart.
How is it compared to ClearSpace?
I haven't used ClearSpace, but it seems like they have different approaches. Blank Spaces is just a way to get a custom theme for your homepage that removes color and app icons. This stops apps from grabbing your attention with bright colored icons and bringing you in. ClearSpace seems to set a time limit for certain apps and make you reflect on why you open an app to prevent unintentional app usage.
ClearSpace seems to be a bandaid to try to make you mindful of how you use your phone, but Blank Spaces attempts to change the whole interface to make it less addicting.
One thing that works for me that is completely separate from any of these apps is just turning off notifications for everything except for phone calls and text messages. I only use discord for "social media" besides tildes, so with notifications turned off, I open it when I want to. I don't open apps because they ask me to. If there's an emergency, people know that a text or call is the best way to contact someone. There will never be a Twitter, Uber, LinkedIn, Venmo, etc. emergency that requires immediate attention, so why would you allow those apps to send notifications?
Didn't want to bog down the main post with my suggestions, but I'll leave a suggestion here that I found a long time ago and still use to this day. Hopefully it can help someone else, or at least inspire someone to share their setup.
I tried organizing my apps into rows on the home screen, where each row is a single topic. The most used apps from that topic go on the right side (since I'm right handed) and the rest go into a folder on the left.
For example:
[Games Folder] - [Game1] - [Game2] - [Game 3]
or
[Finances Folder] - [Credit Card App 1] - [Credit Card App 2] - [Main Banking App]
The problem that I'm finding with this system is that I have so many more apps that I used to, so organizing them all perfectly becomes tedious. And there are plenty of apps that fit into two categories (or more) so picking and choosing which ones go where becomes a bit tricky.
Mine is super minimal and heavily customized. Much to the dismay of anyone else trying to use my phone.
Home screen (well only screen) just has the 6 apps. Then I can swipe up to access the drawer of apps which has my most common all on screen at once. Then I can swipe to have access to everything.
A custom widget to display Spotify (when it's playing) and/or active NOAA Hurricanes. Otherwise the space is blank.
Almost all my notifications are off and all are silent.
My favorite part is I have it set up so my wallpaper changes through a folder of images every two hours. This currently has 3723 files so it's always something new. I also just got it to auto-download the NASA picture of the day and Bing picture of the day and throw those into the rotation.
Make your phone yours. It can be way more than a list of apps!
Those are all very visually pleasing, thanks for sharing!
I have a very similar philosophy. My home screen just has a clock widget and a basic set of eight apps (calculator, maps, notes, browser, phone, texts, clock, and camera). Most of the screen real estate just shows my wallpaper. Everything else (another 25 apps or so) goes in the drawer.
I use KISS launcher and let it do its job.
Specifically, it can sort apps by Frequently Used/Recently Used at the same time, that way my most used apps are always on my home page, while the rest are only a few key presses away.
And it let's me put my favorite apps at the bottom on the screen.
After many launchers I installed KISS Launcher and it's the best decision ever. It's so minimalistic, straight and clean. And beautiful. On my screen I have just a weather app widget, three favourite apps (calendar, notes and tasks) and rest apps I can call by tapping the screen or bottom prompt.
I just installed it to give it a try, and I turned on the minimalist UI so there's basically NOTHING on the home screen. This is a HUGE change from my folders with about a hundred apps on the homescreen but I'm going to give it a shot.
I used to just keep everything on a single page with folders to organize things roughly like this:
Then about a month ago I was messing with custom ROMs for my phone and ended up doing that whole setup a few times and by the time I was done messing with ROMs I was tired of having to re-organize things after each ROM install. So right now it's just a big mess. But I got used to it enough that I know where everything else even without folders. And it's trivial to search for stuff.
I'm sure some day I'll find myself bored enough to re-organize stuff, but for now I'm embracing the chaos.
I totally feel you. I organize things, then slowly it becomes a hot mess. But I get used to the locations of things in the hot mess state, so it almost feels wrong to organize it again. But eventually it reaches a critical mass of apps strewn about everywhere that feels to me like it requires some cleaning up.
Most launchers have some kind of backup of the layout these days. I use that for each new phone I get with Nova launcher. It never takes more than a minute or two to get back and running with a new app (some widgets need to be put on the home screen again after a fresh install)
Have you looked if your preferred launcher has backup/restore functionality?
As a long time Android user who recently also got an iPhone, the way I organize my home screen really reflects my old habits I don't really even look at what apps are where on my home screen, my finger just knows and will move to the correct spot. I'm also used to a nicely organized drawer for all my apps so my homescreens are pretty minimal.
On my iPhone, I have a single home screen page with a Clock and Weather widget at the top two rows. Then, because the iPhone STILL doesn't allow you to place apps anywhere on the home screen, I have a widget that acts like a spacer and then I have my most recently used apps like messaging, web browsing, phone, and media. Everything else gets shoved into the App Library. I do not care for the automatic categorizing that iOS does for this but the list view is very useful.
On my Pixel/work phone, I've got two homescreen pages, one for personal stuff and another for work stuff. Since I outright own my work phone (my company only pays for the phone plan) and Android lets me have my work apps only active during work hours, I feel fine having my personal stuff on there as well. My homescreen on the Pixel is organized largely the same as on my iPhone, with the same core apps visible and everything else relegated to the app drawer. The big difference is I do not have any widgets outside of the contextually aware Pixel At a Glance "widget". I find this super useful as it syncs with my work calendar and lets me know of any upcoming meetings or events. It also negates the need for a separate weather widget as it also displays the weather rather discretely.
I used to be way more into customizing my phones, my Reddit posts from 6 years ago proves that. I would go really in depth, making custom wallpapers, custom widgets, apply all sorts of icon packs, and way more. Not entirely sure when I stopped doing that but I kind of miss it. I do sort of yearn to get back into that sort of customization but more so with my PC rather than my phone as my PC now runs Linux.
I have just 3 pages. With the second or middle one being "home". Since I'm right handed, my folders/icons are laid out in a reverse "L" shape. Icons on bottom and on the right hand side as far as my thumb can reach. Folders/icons that are most used are in the bottom right hand side. They get fanned out as their usage decreases.
My "dock" has text, Gmail, app drawer, gallery, and camera. My "home" page is everything I use daily. My "left" page is navigation, entertainment, and shopping. My "right page" is 80% calendar widget (the only one), Google Keep, calculator, Google Drive, and Google Translate. I don't believe I have any duplicate icons except for Libby. I have it inside folders for both "Audio" and "Reading".
I used to have more pages that adhered more strictly to certain usage, but I trimmed it down to just 3 now. I realized over time that speed is more important. However, having everything on a single page would feel too cluttered and a bit awkward with just one hand.
I'm not sure how to post pictures on Tildes, but I don't mind sharing what my screens look like.
That's a similar setup to what I use, and I agree that one page would feel a bit too restrictive.
Might sound dumb but it never occurred to me to have two of the same icons/apps in different places like you do for Libby. Sounds so obvious looking back, lol. Thanks!
Glad that it helped someone!
For anyone reading and doesn't know what Libby is. It's an app that let's you check out ebook and audio books from your library. I generally check out audio books, so it made sense to put Libby in the "Audio" folder. But some titles are either only available as ebooks, which now means it makes more sense in my "Reading" folder.
I haven't seen anybody comment on how great the Focus feature is for organising their screens in iOS, so I'll briefly explain my workflow.
I have six different screens for different occasions:
These screens contain specific apps and widgets that I need in the context:
work has an email and calendar widget, MFA Apps and Teams. Notifications for all other apps are silent.
Gym has Spotify, some Timer Shortcuts as well as my workout app and so on.
Home has social apps, Books and Home Assistant Widgets.
Sleep has Spotify, a guided meditation app and notes, that's it.
You get the idea.
What is great about the focus mode, is that you can set it to hide all screens you don't need for the current focus. And you can geofence the activation of focus modes as well as time constrain it. You can also change the wallpaper to something fitting.
This workflow totally changed how I interact with my phone, and I can recommend it to every iPhone user to at least try it.
I did not know that focus mode did those things! I’ll definitely check it out, thanks!
Yeah it is a rather hidden feature, and if it wasn't for me trying out focus mode for work I would have never found it out. It's been really useful for me!
I have an Android phone. I have a few folders for specific apps like native games, emulators, and Google apps. I have a few icons for apps I use all the time like Firefox. There is only one page. I have the paid version of Nova Launcher which handles app search and has tabs for the most used apps, most recently used apps, and recently updated apps. It's accessible via the middle digital button. Newly installed apps are not automatically added to the screen. There are gestures for other stuff Nova Launch does but I never use them. It's clean and practical. I feel anxiety whenever I must handle another phone. They're usually chaotic.
I currently have one main home screen and then a few others with widgets. The widgets are generally things I only need to look at in order to get all the information I need, such as the weather, sports scores, 2fa code generation, etc.
I use maybe 30 apps somewhat regularly and these I have on my home screen. I have single apps that I use the most as their own icons, and the rest in folders. Similarly to you, the more used items are to the side of my dominant hand. Some launchers in Android allow swipe actions on icons, so I set swipes on folders to launch the most used app in that folder. Some of my single apps also have a swipe action to launch a similar app, such as the main two web browsers I use, or camera and gallery.
Some Android OEMs have an edge tool, so there's an area on the edge of the screen you can swipe in on which opens up a small drawer with some apps/shortcuts. I've dabbled in moving some of the main apps into there but I don't think it's clicking for me.
Ohh that sounds pretty cool. I'll have to look to see if there's a similar thing on iOS.
Lawnchair could be so good, but it seems like it's no longer in development. I hate that Nova sold out, but it's just so hard to give up on the customization it offers. Custom launcher combined with Tasker let's you do anything you want really.
As a tangent, is there any way to organize an iPhone home screen from your Mac? It used to be easy in iTunes, but I don’t know if it’s still possible. My phone is outright impossible to organize without keyboard & mouse tooling.
Agreed. I’m still baffled that Apple, which prides itself on smooth, elegant, “just works” functionality for its devices, still relies on the downright awful “jiggle mode” for reorganization on the iPhone. It’s cumbersome and frustrating.
I’d love to have an organized phone, but every time I try I end up stopping because the method for getting there is so bad.
I don't use folders for anything except Google. I have three screens.
My home being the most-left one. I have the most used things here + media things. This includes Photos, Camera, Kodi, Jellyfin, weather, ...
The second one ismore like productivity/entertainment based with a few games, Family Link, Unifi, Mikrotik, Net Analyzer, OpenVPN, ConnectBot...
The third one I would call crap or seldom used. There woul be anthing thet needs the mobile app (actually doesn't, but maker of the thing decided it needs the app), internet banking and Mapfactor's offline maps navigation.
My phone allows me to use only what I want on my screens and I can access everything in the "drawer" (slide up from the bottom of the screen). This means only like 1/3 of apps is listed on my screens.
My overall philosophy is "stuff I need to access in a hurry and often should be as close to my right thumb as possible." And I proceed from there. Everything useful is on one page, and if I notice I'm not accessing something much, it moves left and up until eventually it gets squeezed out. Ideally, anyway. In practice I really only reorganize every few months.
I don't really sort my apps anymore. The most used apps or ones I want quick access to are on the home screen and mostly concentrated on the bottom half of the screen. My other apps are in the alphabetically sorted app drawer where I only have three folders for tech giants to reduce the number of pages. Ideally, I would like to use the AOSP style vertical drawer to profit from an index scroll bar, but my phone doesn't offer it natively unfortunately.
I have a couple apps and shortcuts on my home screen - phone, camera, mail, maps, browser, and toggles for a couple smart devices. 100% of the apps I have go into a one of 15 folders I have, and I usually get to them just by searching. But the nice thing about the folders is when I do an update, and Verizon decides to add garbage gaming apps to my phone, they stick out like sore thumbs and I can quickly delete them.
Unhelpful suggestion: use fewer apps.
I use Android. The four apps in the quickstart are phone, messaging (I use Element and bridge all my messaging media—mostly SMS—through Matrix), browser (Firefox) and camera; in principle these are my most-used apps, though in practice I really don't use the phone often and it's there mostly out of habit, and the camera is there more for quick access than frequent access.
On the front page of my launcher, I have the clock widget (which opens the clock app when tapped), calendar, calculator (Units), photo gallery, Tasks, weather (a web link to the US NWS forecast page for my house), music, and maps (OsmAnd, but please do give them money if you get it through F-Droid; it's the same functionality as the paid Plus version on Google's store, and it's a really fantastic app).
I have a second screen on my launcher with stuff that I might in principle launch intentionally, but I open it very rarely. It has Sudoku and crossword apps (the main ways I waste time with my phone), files app, barcode scanner, and F-droid (which I almost exclusively open from update notifications).
The other stuff in my app drawer is mostly stuff like a PDF reader or CIFS/CALDav providers, which I basically never have reason to open explicitly. I could work entirely out of the drawer with little difficulty if I had to for some reason.
Screen 1. Things I use frequently, usually in folders.
Screen 2. Things I use less frequently, again in folders.
Everything else: Search/widgets.
On apple this works out to
Do nothing: most used stuff
Swipe left: less used but still important stuff
Swipe right: quick access widgets (music, maps, remote, calendar, weather, reminders mostly)
Swipe down: search for anything else.
I'm probably at the point I could eliminate a lot of the second and first screen at this point as well. Oh and i guess technically there's double swipe left which is also search, but just apps.
I think I use some variation of what others have already mentioned. I'm on my android 13. Two screens. Screen 1 my most used apps as single icons each, plus three folders with things I use regularly like Google apps. Screen two. Most of apps not on screen 1 are grouped into folders divided into categories. For me it's faster to access rather than going into drawer and scrolling alphabetically etc
I'm using Nova prime launcher but looking for alternative.
I use Smart Launcher. Keeps the home screen customized but clean, and it automatically categorizes apps in the drawer into a handful of broad groups (internet, finance, games, settings, etc). I've found it to be a nice balance between customization and organization.
Funny enough, I just reorganized my homescreen.
I had everything in group folders on four homescreens organized by frequency of use till now, but noticed a lot of overlaps with widgets and smart stacks.
I’m in the process of getting it down to two homescreens with no group folders and relying on the widget and App Library screens iOS provides. The automatic grouping there is a little annoying (Podcast app is in Health?) but I can get used to it rather than thinking up my own.
I have a very minimalist setup. I use Niagara launcher and pin my most used apps, and the rest are accessed via alphabetical list that pops up when I touch the right side.
https://i.imgur.com/o8fmq3l.png
Edit: The two identical icons are sync for reddit (revanced with my own API key) and sync for Lemmy
On android I noticed that I never really used widgets effectivly and I had a ton of apps I used once and never deleted. For media control and notifications just use the pull-down menu and for time/weather/calander glances I just check the lock screen. I also don't like navigating folders or pages so I want a one screen solution.
So I use something call Lens Launcher. It basically dumps all my apps on the home screen with the most used ones sorted to the bottom. It looks horrible and unintuitive and I get a lot of comments whenever someone sees it. But 90% of the time I'm looking at the bottom 3 lines. I can identify and reach 25 apps without adjusting my grip after after unlocking and I can tell exactly which apps need to go. It's not a solution for everyone but it works for me.
I very much love minimalistic designs, so I use Nova Launcher (paid version) for Android to make everything easier to customize. My favorite thing is that each icon has options for multiple customized gestures when selecting it. For example, I can have an icon for Facebook... click it to open facebook app itself, or slide up on the icon to open Messenger, or swipe down on the icon to open Instagram. This way I can consolidate my icons really easily to the bottom row or two, without compromising functionality since multiple gestures can be applied to each one.
Another Nova Launcher user.
I'm extremely fond of my wallpapers (I cycle through 167 of them at the moment), so I have my home screen set to an empty page with three mostly transparent folders on the bottom for the apps I use. There are 5 pages. The middle is the home page, kept totally blank so I can see my wallpapers. To the left is a page with one large calculator widget, to the right is a page with a calendar and weather. There are more blank pages to the left of the calculator and the right of the calendar, because some of my wallpapers scroll and I like seeing the edges.
At this point using my phone is a nightmare for anyone but me, but my muscle memory lets me use it without even looking.
You able to share those wallpapers? I'm always down to add more to my rotation too
One condition: don't judge me.
Almost all of them are extremely specific to my particular interests. Some of them are low resolution, some of them are funny, some of them are from when I was a teenager. Hopefully you find something interesting in here
I've had to delete a few for privacy reasons, so here's 163 of them
Slightly different take.
I’ve had a lot of success by keeping a completely blank Home Screen. I read most of Digitial Minimalism and it helped me reframe what I should keep. The book’s intense with what one should considers necessary, but I found a good balance and mostly rely on the App Library search bar and widgets (on iOS).
It’s crazy how badly our brains want to get rid of “the shiny red dots”.