With iOS 18, Apple overhauled the Home Screen, introducing design changes that allow for more personalization and customization. You can place icons where you want, resize them and give them new colors, plus you can hide apps and change your lock screen buttons.
This guide highlights everything new coming to the iOS 18 home screen and lock screen.
Rearrangement of icons
With iOS 18, you can rearrange app icons and widgets on the Home screen and app pages with space between them, offering a host of new layout options.
Apple has stuck with a grid system, so you can only move app icons within grid locations, but an icon can be placed anywhere on the grid with empty space around it. This sounds complicated, but with iOS 17, if you added a new app to your home screen, it would automatically go to the next open slot.
In iOS 18, you can choose where to put it. You can have app icon-sized spaces between apps, full empty rows, and full empty columns. You cannot place icons and widgets in unevenly spaced places due to the invisible grid restriction, so keep that in mind.
You can place a single app in the middle of a page, have a row of apps at the top and a row of apps at the bottom, create a column of apps, and more. Apple created this design to let you place apps and widgets around backgrounds and arrange them into more useful layouts.
Here’s how to move your icons:
- Long press on the Home screen or on an app page to launch scroll mode.
- Move the applications to the desired positions.
- Tap “done”.
Increase icon size
You can make your app icons bigger in iOS 18 by removing app names. With app names in place, Apple needs space to display them, but removing them opens up a lot of space for a larger icon and file size. Resizing the app doesn’t change the number of apps that are visible, it just removes the text and uses that empty space.
With larger icons, you still get a maximum of six icon rows of four icons each, the same ones you’re limited to when icon names are enabled. To change the icon size, follow these steps:
- Long press on the Home screen or on an app page.
- Click on “Change”.
- Click on “Customize”.
- Select Small to enable app names or Large to disable them.
Note that this setting is universal, so you can’t have small icons on one app page and large icons on another app page.
Change the size of the widget
You can resize widgets directly from the Home Screen without having to go to the customization options. Widgets now have a rounded white bar in the corner that you can drag to make them bigger or smaller.
- Long press on the home screen or an app page to enter scroll mode.
- Use one finger to resize the widget smaller or larger.
You are limited to the minimum and maximum size available with any given widget. For example, the Battery widget can be the size of four app icons, six horizontal app icons in two rows, or a square shape four icons wide and four icons high. When you resize the battery widget, you’re limited to those size options, but you don’t need to go into the full widget settings to change the size.
Widgets are still added to your home screen and app pages in the same way, although some of the labeling has moved. Long press and tap Edit, then select the Add Widget option. It’s a notch higher than it was before because of the new customization options.
If an app has a widget, you can also long-press its icon to see the widget options right there, turning the app icon into a widget.
New widgets
Apple added a new Health widget in iOS 18 that shows information from the new Vitals feature that’s in both the Health app and Apple Watch. It provides an overview of daily or weekly vitals, plus there’s also a new cycle tracking widget.
Vitals collects information from the Apple Watch to provide a daily reading of how your heart rate, sleep patterns, breathing and blood oxygen vary from day to day and week to week.
There’s also a new Journal widget, with options that offer a writing prompt that you can tap to open the app to answer. You can also choose a Streaks widget that keeps track of how many consecutive days you’ve used the Journal app.
For the new Training Load feature on the Apple Watch, Apple has added a corresponding widget to the Fitness widgets section.
In the Home widgets section, there are new widgets for electricity usage and electricity charges (a feature coming to select users in iOS 18 later this year).
Dark mode icons
Apple’s built-in apps have both light and dark color options in iOS 18, which allows you to change the color of your icons when you have dark mode enabled. The Dark icons have all been redesigned with a black background rather than a white or colored background, which makes them blend better with the dark mode setting.
You can enable dark icons regardless of enabling dark mode, so you can leave light mode enabled while using the dark icon option. You can also set the icons to an automatic mode, which means they will change color depending on whether dark mode or light mode is active.
Right now, it’s only Apple apps that have a Dark option, but third-party developers will apparently be able to include two color options for their icons when iOS 18 launches.
To go along with the dark mode icons, Apple also introduced a switch that makes your background darker. Here’s how to change your icon and background color:
- Long press on the Home screen or on an app page.
- Click on “Change”.
- Click on “Customize”.
- Choose Automatic, Dark, Light, or Tinted, an option described below. This is also the interface used to resize the app icon and darken your background (sun icon).
The wallpaper option makes your selected background slightly darker in color, fading out bright shades when activated. Touch changes Light… Click here to read the rest of the article
Article Link: iOS 18: 10 New Home Screen and Lock Screen Features