With iOS 18, Apple has revamped the Home Screen, introducing design changes that allow for more customization and personalization. You can move icons wherever you want, change their size, and give them new colors, plus you can hide apps and swap out your Lock Screen buttons.
This guide highlights all the new features of iOS 18’s Home screen and Lock screen.
Reorder icons
With iOS 18, you can rearrange app icons and widgets on your home screen and app pages with space between them, giving you access to a wealth of new layout options.
Apple stuck with a grid system, so you can only move app icons within grid locations, but an icon can be placed anywhere in the grid with empty space around it. That sounds complicated, but with iOS 17, when you added a new app to your Home screen, it automatically moved to the next open spot.
In iOS 18, you can choose where to place it. You can have app icon-sized spaces between apps, completely empty rows, and completely empty columns. You can’t place icons and widgets in spots with uneven spaces because of the invisible grid constraint, so keep that in mind.
You can place a single app in the center of a page, have a row of apps across the top and 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 any app page to launch wiggle mode.
- Move apps to the desired positions.
- Tap Done.
Increase icon size
You can make your app icons larger in iOS 18 by removing the app names. With app names in place, Apple needs space to display them, but removing them frees up a lot of room for a larger icon and folder size. Changing the app size doesn’t change the number of visible apps, it just removes text and uses that empty space.
With larger icons, you still get a maximum of six icon rows with four icons each, the same as you’re limited to when icon names are enabled. Follow these steps to change the icon size:
- Long press on the home screen or any app page.
- Tap ‘Edit’.
- Tap ‘Customize’.
- Select Small to enable app names, or Large to disable them.
Please note that this setting is universal, so you cannot have small icons on one app page and large icons on another app page.
Change Widget Size
You can resize widgets right from the home screen without having to go into the customization options. Widgets now have a white circular bar in the corner, which you can drag to make them larger or smaller.
- Press and hold the home screen or an app page to activate wiggle mode.
- Use your finger to make the widget smaller or larger.
You’re limited to the minimum and maximum size available for a 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 that’s four icons wide and four icons tall. When you change the size of the Battery widget, you’re limited to those size options, but you don’t have to go into the full widget settings to change the size.
Widgets still add to your home screen and app pages the same way, though some of the labels have shifted around. Long-press and tap “Edit,” then choose the “Add Widget” option. It’s one more tap than 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 directly. This turns 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 found in both the Health app and on Apple Watch. It offers a look at daily vitals or weekly vitals, plus there’s also a new widget for cycle tracking.
Vitals collects information from Apple Watch to provide daily insights into how your heart rate, sleep patterns, breathing, and blood oxygen levels change from day to day and week to week.
There’s also a new Journal widget, with options that offer a writing prompt you can tap to open the app and respond to. You can also select a Streaks widget, which tracks how many days in a row you’ve used the Journal app.
For the new Training Load feature on Apple Watch, Apple has added a dedicated widget in the Fitness widget section.
New widgets for electricity usage and electricity rates are available in the Home widget section (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, allowing 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 instead of a white or colored background, allowing them to blend in better with the Dark Mode setting.
You can enable Dark Icons independently of turning on Dark Mode, so you can leave Light Mode enabled while using the Dark Icon option. You can also set icons to an automatic mode, meaning they will change color depending on whether Dark Mode or Light Mode is active.
Currently, only Apple apps have a dark option, but third-party developers are expected to be able to offer two color options for their icons when iOS 18 launches.
To go along with the Dark Mode icons, Apple also introduced a toggle that darkens your wallpaper. Here’s how to change your icon and wallpaper color:
- Long press on the home screen or any app page.
- Tap ‘Edit’.
- Tap ‘Customize’.
- Select Auto, Dark, Light, or Tinted, an option described below. This is also the interface used to change the size of the app icon and make your background (the sun icon) darker.
The wallpaper option makes your chosen wallpaper slightly darker in color, and dims bright hues when enabled. Tapping toggles Light… Click here to read the rest of the article
Article Link: iOS 18: 10 New Features for the Home Screen and Lock Screen