The fastest and least destructive way to clean the home screen is by disabling entire pages at once. Press and hold an app icon, press the “Edit Home Screen” button, and tap the series of dots at the bottom of the screen. Your full list of home screen pages will appear, and if you already know you don’t really use some of them, unchecking a box hides the page entirely and shows all your apps in the Library. This may sound like the nuclear option, but it offers a great advantage: checking the box again revives the page as it was, with everything (including those folders) in the right place. And once you’ve set up your apps the way you like, you can preserve that order by telling iOS to show new apps only in the Library.
I imagine that people will take very different approaches with the more flexible design of iOS 14. Some, who a) don’t care or b) prefer the old way of doing things, don’t have to change their behavior at all. Others will certainly run in the opposite direction, removing their app icon home screens entirely and taking up all the time in widgets, as the Library properly stores all the software they need. I really haven’t figured out where I sit along that spectrum yet, but if there ever was a time to experiment, it’s now.
Clearing the clutter
The way widgets and App Library work together is a great example of what appears to be a great underlying theme for iOS 14 – giving you just what you need, when you need it. Nevertheless, they are not the only ones. Consider how this update handles phone calls and Siri. They both used to take over the entire screen, interrupting whatever you were doing. Now, they have been legitimately relegated to small notifications that appear around the edges of the screen. They are enough to give you the proper context without taking you away from the task at hand.
The same applies even to video, of all things. Once an exclusive iPad feature, iOS 14 brings picture-in-picture to iPhone, ensuring you can see Italian-style divorce on HBO Max while shooting some work emails. Many of the major streaming services already work well with the feature, but since we are a long way from the official release of iOS 14, there are still some notable remnants. (Here we are looking at you, VRV and YouTube).
