The network is a comfortable place to live.
The app grid, I mean: the rows and rows of app icons on your iPhone's home screen. It's familiar. Sure. This is how I've lived with my various phones for the last decade. But at some point it started to feel oppressive.
All those icons staring me in the face, competing for my attention. The mess! The distracting little notification badges! The grid was a reasonable way to organize apps when I had ten of them. There are sixty on the iPhone I'm using now and I set it up from scratch a few months ago.
Naturally, living off the grid or in a non-traditional home screen setup has been possible for much longer on Android. Google's operating system allows you to keep your screen clear and simply find your apps in the app drawer, which is always at your fingertips. You can even replace the launcher entirely. But iOS, where every new app you download ends up on your home screen by default, hasn't exactly made it easy to ditch the network.
That started to change when iOS 14 added widgets, an app library, and the ability to hide apps from the home screen, although I haven't developed the muscle memory to use it much. Now, iOS 18 adds even more flexibility. You can place apps and widgets anywhere you want on your home screen, change their colors, and add more features to Control Center. But even though apps and customization options have multiplied, most of us still use our home screens in basically the same way we did with our first smartphones.
With the new options in iOS 18 and getting A look at other people's well-curated home screens — I decided it was time to do a little cleaning. Why should an app that I only open once a month when I park downtown take up space on my home screen all year long? Better yet, right? any Does the application deserve to occupy that precious property?
I spent about an hour removing icons, arranging widgets, and adding controls to create my new home screen. The iPhone 16's camera control button makes that icon unnecessary; the action button launches the frequently used daycare app, so that could work too. When I was done, my folder system with cute emoji labels, kept haphazardly, was reduced to just four apps in the Dock and a handful of widgets spread across two pages, which I affectionately call “Windows Phone 2.0.”
Was it scary? A bit. But you know what? I don't miss those rows of icons at all. Nine times out of ten the app I'm looking for is among the Siri-suggested apps that appear when I open search. If not, I type the first letters of the application name and there it is. I suppose you could swipe to the app library, but I almost never do that.
The biggest drawback is that I see a notification, dismiss it, and then forget about it for days since the app icon and its little red notification badge are no longer in my face. But I missed things here and there even when I was living online, and those badges are a real problem for me: I'm the kind of person who needs to get to badge zero, so I constantly open apps just to delete them. Delete notifications and remove the red dot from my face. Living off the grid eliminates this distraction and is the first thing I appreciate about my new lifestyle.
I'm happy with my new home screen, but some of my colleagues take the off-grid philosophy to the next level. Weekend news editor Wes Davis could teach a master class on functional iOS home screens. You keep some apps in the Dock and Wordle gets a place in your grid, but outside of that it's just widgets and shortcuts.
“I hate searching for things on my phone,” he told me. “This all started when I jumped on the 'I want to use my phone less and be less distracted' bandwagon.” Grayscale shortcut icons on your home screen reduce visual clutter, and you're not as attracted to opening time-consuming apps like TikTok when the icon isn't right in front of you. Many of the shortcuts also contain drop-down menus, so you can directly launch the task you're looking for.
Best of all, this method allows you to organize your phone by action he's trying to take. An icon labeled “Podcasts” launches whatever podcast app you're currently using. If you ever start using a different app, it will keep the same shortcut icon and cause you to launch a new app. “I don't have to install a new app and get used to looking for that icon.”
“I try to limit myself to these seven applications.”
News editor Jay Peters takes a more direct approach. Like me, you are distracted by the constant presence of app icons. “If I don't see the app directly on my home screen, I'm much less likely to use it and just scroll through it.” You have a total of seven apps on your home screen, including three in the Dock, and will occasionally let an app's icon return to the grid if you're going to be using it a lot in a short period of time. “If I'm going on a big road trip or something, maybe move the maps app (to the top of the home screen),” he says, “but otherwise I try to keep it to just these seven apps.” .
Both of my colleagues have achieved a level of balance in their digital lives that I admire. I also heard from many more who said they still keep a home screen full of app icons, but they almost always skip the grid and go to Spotlight search when they need to open an app. And none of us know exactly when it happened, but more than one person I spoke to agreed that Siri's suggested apps at the top of the search panel got really good at some point in the past. Most of the time, the app I'm looking for is there before I even type a letter into the search bar.
You don't have to wait for ai or the metaverse or whatever to make your digital life less annoying
That kind of thing gives me hope for a future where personalized ai can help me find what I'm looking for on my phone, with less input on my part. But if I've learned anything from this exercise, it's that you don't have to wait for ai, the metaverse, ambient computing, or whatever, to make your digital life less annoying. There are already tools in our hands; You just need a little courage to leave your comfort zone behind.
