iPhone users can finally add widgets to their home screens.
But getting the iPhone home screen of your dreams is a little more complicated than that.
Here's all the tricks you'll need.
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If you're a longtime iOS user you may have one day glanced at the ultra customized homescreen of an Android using friend and thought to yourself.
Okay, it would be nice to have a little bit of customization available on your iPhone.
Good news.
iOS 14 has added widgets.
So there are now some Customization options that were not available to you previously, some people have gotten super creative.
One Instagram influencer, showed off a homescreen filled with neutral colours.
Another person made app icons that seamlessly blended into a work of art wallpaper on Reddit.
And one Animal Crossing New Horizons fan even recreated the game's note phone on their home screen.
If you're wondering, here's what mine looks like.
But custom app icons Aren't as easy to make as widgets.
So there's a little bit of a process involved there and I'm gonna show you how to do that.
So let's go to my phone.
Right now I'm looking at my iPhone home screen and I've got the eight most used apps up and available so that I know which ones I.
I want custom icons for I also have the app store up just in case I have to go get something like pool app that I'm interested in.
But first, let's pick a new wallpaper so I'm gonna open up settings and obviously you know you don't really need anything crazy.
I am a fan of simple simple, simple I prefer a solid black wallpaper.
So for me, it's going to be this guy right here.
I'm going to set it I'm gonna set is my home screen.
There's my super all black wallpaper.
We're good there.
But if you want something fancier, you go right ahead because What good is a.
What good is a cell phone if you can't make it feel like you.
Okay, so let's add some widgets.
Let's long press on our home screen and you'll see it go into jiggle or rearrange mode.
We're going to tap on the plus sign in the upper left corner.
And you'll be able to search widgets.
So, Apple has some really nice native, ones that come with iOS 14.
You've got your people, you've got news, you've got maps.
You even have the option to do something like a smart stack, which is.
To put a whole bunch of different widgets in one stack that you can kind of swipe through, but I take a lot of pictures so I'm going to actually pick photos and I get to see my cute little baby.
I'm going to add him You can pick from small, medium or even super large, sorry about that.
There's the medium One, and I'm going to pick the small one because I that's all I need.
I just need a little square.
So let's add that to the home screen.
There we go.
There he is.
Now, I also noticed that a lot of people were using the app widget Smith to customize their home screen.
I really liked their day and date, set up their little widget that they have.
So you can actually get that in the App Store.
If you look up widget Smith It is right there for you.
You can check it out.
There is in fact, I'm going to actually update it.
Wait, maybe you have something new for me.
There is in fact a paid version of this.
But the day and date widget is completely free so that is totally fine with me.
So here's the default screen on widget Smith.
You can see I have already made a small widget.
But if I wanted to customize it, I would just tap on it twice.
And then I could pick the style of the time that's displaying or something else that's displaying like a picture or my battery icon.
I can also choose from different fonts.
Different tint, different background colors.
I mean, really, the possibilities are pretty endless.
You can really make this whatever you want.
I like this black and Aqua.
So I'm going to keep that and I am going to tap on it.
It's saved.
Everything's cool.
There.
And then what I do is, you're gonna go to your home screen and you're gonna do the exact same thing you did before.
You're gonna tap on the plus sign, you're gonna scroll down, you are going to find Widgetsmith, which I am going to type in Wid.
So, there we go, small widget I'm gonna add that and there we go.
So it's the only one that's available that I have already customized and made.
It's right there.
It's done.
As I mentioned previously, I have my top eight most used apps on my home screen and these are the ones that I want to make custom app icons for There are a lot of different ways to do this.
You can make your own if you're so inclined, if you're really good at visuals or if you're really bad at them, I mean, you use ms.
Paint, somebody did that actually.you can use ms.
Paint.
You can do stuff like that.
Honestly, I just went on to Google and I looked up black and white app icon.
And then the name of the app.
That I was looking for, I saved all of those to my photo role, and they're all ready to go.
So now let's customize some app icons.
I'm going to stop here for a second and tell you I wish customizing app icons was as simple as long pressing on the app that you want to customize.
Choosing pick icon from a drop down list and then Grabbing one and your camera roll, dear viewers, it is not, it is not that easy.
It's really hacky.
It's kind of weird.
It's clunky, but it does work.
If you really want that aesthetic, you're cheating Choosing fashion over function.
And to do all of this and get a custom app icon, you're going to have to use Apple's shortcuts app.
If you have previously deleted that app or thought to yourself, I'm never going to use this and removed it from your phone, you can actually pick it up in the App Store.
Once again, you just have to search for shortcuts by Apple.
And you actually have to scroll down a bit.
They don't show up as the first search results of which I think is very interesting.
So there's shortcuts.
You can see Apple is right underneath.
It's, you know, it's from Apple.
And you download that.
And when you open it, you have a whole bunch of different things.
I've already set up a lot of my shortcuts for the app icons I want to use, but I'm going to show you guys how to do it.
Do it.
So you want to make a new shortcut.
So to do that, you're going to tap on the plus sign to make a new shortcut in the upper right corner, and you're going to tap on Add action.
Now the only action we actually need this to do is we needed to open an app.
So we're going to type in open app or just open And that's actually not enough.
So we're going to type an opening.
And if we scroll down, you can see open app is right there on the drop down list.
And we're going to choose the app.
We're going to tap on choose, we're going to say, I want to open Amazon.
So there's Amazon.
It's going to open the Amazon app for me.
And then once we've chosen the app, we want to open We want to tap on the three dots and it will open up some details.
Now there's some things you can do here.
But what we're really looking for is add to home screen.
It's right underneath the shortcut name and the preview.
So add to home screen.
We can see a preview of what the app icon and label looks like.
And we can actually long press On the app icon underneath the preview, and you can either take a photo, choose a photo or choose a file, so that'll open my camera roll and I'm just going to choose the image that I want to pick.
So, there's my Amazon logo, right there.
Looks great.
I'm gonna go ahead and pick choose There it is.
And obviously, I don't want it to say new shortcut.
You can name yours after the app that you want.
I prefer to have no labels.
I know what these app icons do, and I think it looks a lot cleaner.
So I'm gonna hit Add and it's going to add that to my home screen and I'm, [INAUDIBLE].
So let's take a look at what that looks like.
Okay, so there's my app icon.
It's right there.
It is ready to go.
There's no label underneath it.
Let's tap on it and see what it does.
Yeah, you didn't imagine that.
Let's go back again and watch it one more time.
Yes, it opens shortcuts before opening the app.
You want the action to open?
That is very clunky It is very annoying.
I totally get it.
If that is a deal breaker for you on the custom app icons for some people, again, fashion over function, they wanna have a cool looking home screen.
They don't care about the shortcuts thing, not a big deal to them and that is also totally fine.
I'm on the fence.
It hasn't annoyed me to the point of undoing it yet, but it is aggravating and I hope Apple fixes it and makes it more seamless in a future update.
I've got one single icon done, I'm going to put the Amazon.
I'm gonna put the Amazon app into I'm going to remove it and move it to the app library because I don't need it on my home screen anymore.
I already have this shortcut.
And I'm going to do that seven more times with the other apps.
So let's just take a quick coffee break and we'll be right back and show you what that looks like.
So here's my final home screen I'm looking at it you might notice there is something that you don't normally see on an IOS home screen.
And that is negative Space.
And that's actually a little bit of a trick.
I found David Smith's blog and he has this little blank or invisible iOS homescreen icon template.
If you add this page which I'll put a link down in the description to your home screen from the share option, you can actually get these completely blank, little icons that show up.
And if you have an all black wallpaper like I have, it will make your screen completely seamlessly look like it has a negative space which iOS doesn't allow.
so There's a little tip for you if you're looking for negative space.
As I mentioned earlier in the video, somebody actually has done this or lots of people have done this.
Over in the IOS 14 subreddit, you can check that out.
There are some amazing works of art in there in the way of home screens.
I highly recommend doing some digging, doing some research there.
In fact, I learned a lot while I was there.
So thank you big shout out to the Reddit community.
For giving me the opportunity to learn, and see, and be inspired by a whole bunch of their designs.
But yes, that is my completed home screen.
Obviously, there are some real clunky workarounds in here.
I know it's not perfect.
I really hope Apple.
Does something to improve this process and make it a little bit easier to customize our home screens if you're using an iPhone.
But if you're really into ultra customization You're probably using an Android device, right?
So that's how I got my dream iOS 14 home screen.
You can do it too.
I would love to see your work.
Give me your best tips and tricks.
Maybe there's something I missed.
Maybe there's something I want to check out.
Drop that down in the comments and be sure to subscribe for all of the apple coverage that we have coming up.
Be good humans.
