Also: Can someone tell if I block their number? Luckily, Apple eventually realized that it should let its iPhone owners decide what they wanted on their home screens. Not only can you now hide infrequently-used apps, but you can even remove first-party Apple apps you’ll never use from your precious home screen pages – although you still can’t uninstall them completely. Despite how easy it is to do this, many users remain unaware it’s even an option. Let us show you how to quickly and easily hide apps from your iPhone’s home screen without uninstalling them.
How to hide apps on your iPhone
You need: An iPhone running iOS 14 or newerEstimated time: 1-5 minutes, depending on how many apps you want to hide
Method 1: Hiding one app at a time
Method 2: Hiding Multiple apps at once
Finding hidden apps and returning them to your home screen
Since the whole point of hiding an app, instead of uninstalling it, is to have it around when you need it, it’s important to learn how to find it and bring it back to your home screen. Also: How to make folders on iPhone This will leave the app in question installed on your iPhone but will remove its icon from your home screen or any folders located on your home screens. We’ll show you how to find the app and add it back to your home screen below. This will set your apps to jiggling in an animation that’s been around since the olden days of iOS. It will also add a circular - icon to the top left corner of each. Find the first app you want to hide and tap the - on it. When you’re done, you can exit this app editing mode by either clicking your home button (for iPhone models with a physical home button) or swiping up from the bottom of your display (for iPhone models without a physical home button).
1. Open your App Library
The App Library can be found by swiping all the way to the right, through and past all of your home screen pages. You’ll know you’ve found it when you see a list of apps, without names, organized into squares with a search bar at the top that helpfully read “App Library.”
2. Find your app
There are multiple ways to do this. You can browse the categories you’re immediately presented with. But, it is usually faster to just tap the App Library search bar at the top. Doing this will show you an alphabetized list (seen above) of all of your installed apps, including any hidden ones. You can either begin typing in the name of the app you’re looking for until iOS surfaces it, or you can simply scroll through the list to find it. If you just need to use it once, you can tap it to open it from the App Library. If, however, you’d like to re-add it to a home screen for recurring use, proceed to step 3.
3. Re-add the hidden app to your home screen
If you’d like to return a hidden app to your home screen, press and hold on the app icon itself, not the grey bar to its right. Doing this will create another pop-out menu with an Add to Home Screen option. Tapping this will drop the app back into the first open slot on your earliest home screen page. Alternatively, you can also tap, hold, and drag the app icon, which will let you place it in a specific spot of your choosing.
Is it a large app? - If so, you may want to take that into consideration. Large apps take time to re-install if you need to get them back. Conversely, they also take up a lot of storage space. This means if you’re running low on local storage, it may be worth considering whether or not you really need that app around, or if you can just uninstall it and save some megabytes.Is it an app you use more than once a week? - If you use an app on a regular basis, but not regularly enough that you need instant access, it’s best to just hide it. That way you can still open it with an extra few seconds of effort, but won’t need to re-install it. Is it a first-party Apple app? - If it is, you can’t uninstall it anyway. But, hiding apps you never think you’ll use is still a great method to get them out of your way and reduce clutter.
Hiding apps really doesn’t affect much aside from where you’ll find the icon to access them. The apps themselves stay entirely unchanged.
