There is an app for everything. With so many to choose from, it won’t take long before you feel a bit overwhelmed and can’t really find anything without meticulous organization.
The good news is that you don’t have to keep every app you have on your home screen. There is a way to remove those apps from your home screen without having to delete them from the device entirely. Follow along with this guide.
Hide Individual Apps
Everyone has their own preferences so learning how to hide apps on iPhone might be necessary for just an app or two. If it’s something you use often, like a podcast app or banking app, then you probably don’t want to remove it from your home screen.
Find the app that you want to hide. Press and hold it until you get the prompt with things like “remove app, share app, edit home screen” etc. Click “Remove app” and you will be asked if you want to remove it from the home screen or delete it from the phone. Choose the former and you’ll still be able to access the app by searching through your apps.
This is the most common method for hiding iPhone apps. Another suggestion would be to keep things as organized as possible. Even if you don’t use certain apps all that often, keeping them organized within a folder means that you likely won’t have to mess with them all that often. It’s ideal for those who don’t really like to constantly mess around with their organization or delete/hide apps regularly.
Hiding Multiple Apps
If you need to remove a few different apps, there is a slightly different methodology to follow. There’s a faster way to do it than one at a time, saving you a lot of time and frustration. The quickest way is to hold down on a blank part of the home screen to get your apps jiggling, telling you they are ready to be removed.
Find the first app you want to remove – you’ll follow the same method as laid out above. Follow the same process to quickly go through multiple apps in short order, helping you to rearrange your home screen in no time. When you’re done removing apps or adjusting your folders, you can swipe up to set your display back to normal.
It isn’t as easy as it sounds but there is currently no way to move, hide, or delete multiple apps at one time. Maybe it’s something that will come down the pike in the near future.
How to Find Apps You’ve Hidden
Now that you know how to remove apps from your home screen, you need to know how to get to them again. After all, if you wanted to delete them altogether, you would have done so. The good news is that finding those apps you removed is easier than you might have imagined.
Go into your app library (swipe all the way right and the app library will pop up. You’ll see different sections like “recently added,” “suggestions,” and more. You can either swipe through the various apps to find what you want or start typing the name of the app into your search bar.
You can either tap to access the app directly – fine for single use — or hold it down to add it back to your home screen. If it’s something that you come back to more than once, you may be better off just putting it back on the home screen rather than searching every time you want to use it.
Re-adding Hidden Apps
If you decide that you need to have that app back on your home screen, you can get it back within a few minutes. All you need to do is press down on the app icon (not the grey bar to the right). You’ll get a popup menu similar to the removal method. You will see “add to home screen” and can click to drop it into the first available open slot on your home screen.
From there, you can hold down on the app to move it around. People who use a lot of apps tend to organize them by placing them into folders. Having several pages of apps can be a bit overwhelming and make it a lot tougher to find what you need. Apps you don’t use often are probably best hidden in the app library to access once in a while. Then again, it all comes down to personal preference but you can organize things how you like.
In the end, it is easy to move apps, hide them, and organize your screen in the best way possible. You can know where each app is at all times no matter how often you use them.