For many years, Apple kept strict control over how your home screen looked. You could move apps around, but that was as far as it went. Thankfully, those days are gone. You can now customise your iPhone home screen with shortcuts and widgets to make it look exactly how you want it to.
That doesn’t mean that everything is plain sailing, however. Trying to move apps around your home screen can often be a hugely frustrating task, with other apps moving into places you don’t want them to go or jumping to an entirely new screen. Just when you think you’ve got an app exactly where you want it, it somehow creates a folder with another app.
It doesn’t have to be this way. There are a couple of tricks you can use to help you quickly move apps around your iPhone home screen like a pro. Here’s how.
How to move iPhone apps to different screens
If you want to move an app to a different screen, you can drag it to the edge of the screen, and it will move to the next one along. However, if you want to move it across several screens, this method can quickly become a nightmare. Luckily, there is another way.
- Tap and hold the app icon you want to move.
- Select Edit Home Screen. The app icons will start wobbling indicating that they’re ready to be moved.
- Tap and hold the app icon again and slide it a little out of its current position.
- Keep holding the app icon and with your other hand, swipe the screen to the left or right.
- The screen will change, and the app you’re holding will still be under your finger.
- Keep swiping left or right until you reach the screen where you want the app icon to appear.
- You can now position the app where you want it on the screen.
- Tap Done in the top right-hand corner of the screen when you’re happy with your layout.
How to move multiple iPhone app icons at once
If you want to move multiple apps icons from one screen to another, moving them all one at a time can quickly become tedious. There is a little-known trick that allows you to create a stack of app icons that you move in one go, speeding up the process considerably.
- Tap and hold one of the apps that you want to move.
- Select Edit Home Screen. The app icons will start wobbling.
- Tap and hold the app icon once more and slide it a little out of its current position.
- With your other hand, tap another app icon that you want to move.
- The app that you are still holding with now show a two indicating that it is a stack of two apps.
- Tap more app icons to add them to the stack.
- Once you’ve selected all the apps you want to move, keep your finger down and with your other hand, swipe left or right until you reach the screen where you want the apps to appear.
- Release your finger and each of the apps in the stack will be placed on the screen.
- You can rearrange them by dragging them around the screen.
- When you’re happy with your layout, tap Done in the top-right corner.
Rearranging your app icons can be a frustrating task, but the methods above can make the task a little easier. If you have multiple widgets on your home screen that you want to move from one screen to another, unfortunately the above method won’t work; you’ll need to move each widget one at a time.