How to hide apps from your iPhone’s home screen using iOS 14?

If you’re bothered by the number of apps filling your iPhone’s home screen, you’ve probably welcomed a feature that comes with iOS 14: From your App Library homepages, which collects all your apps in various categories and displays them on a separate page on the right.

The App Library not only adds some automatic edits to your iPhone’s homepages, it also lets you hide as many apps as you want, allowing you to clean up your home screen. You can keep your favorites front and center and ditch the more utilitarian or less-used apps. (Actually, one way to keep the screen clean is to have all your newly installed apps appear only in your App Library – here we provide instructions on how to do that.)

If you want to organize your existing apps by hiding some of them, there are several ways to do it. You can remove individual apps from the home screen, hide the entire app screen, or organize several apps by putting them in a folder.

Here’s how.

Hide a single app

To hide individual apps:

• Press the app of your choice until a menu appears. The menu will contain a number of options depending on the features of the application (for example, if I press an application for Microsoft Teams, the menu will allow me to make a new call or start a chat). But you always get an option (red) to uninstall the app. Tap on it.
• You will now have the option to delete the app from the phone or remove it from the home screen. Choose the second one. You will still find the application in the Application Library.
• If the app is not already in the App Library, after tapping “Uninstall App” you will be given the option to delete the app or move it to the App Library.

Hide an app page

You can also hide an entire app page and get rid of it if you want. Restoring the same page is also really easy, so it’s a great way to hide groups of apps that you only use occasionally.

• Touch and hold an empty part of your screen until the apps start to vibrate
• Tap the dots at the bottom of the screen
• You will now be able to see thumbnails of all your screens (except the App Library and Today View). There is a check mark at the bottom of each screen that appears; Uncheck any screen you want to hide and tap “Done” in the top right corner.
• To “show” any of the screens, follow the same instructions and change the checkmark for the screen you want to see again.

Use folders to organize apps

You can use folders on the home screen to group similar apps together and save space. You will not completely hide apps – they will be there. But they will be consolidated in a single area.

Creating a folder is very simple:

• Long press an app on the home screen until the icons flicker
• Move the app to one of the other apps you want to group.
• You will now have a gray icon with icons for the apps in the folder. Tap the icon to open the folder and access the apps inside.
• iOS assigns a name to the folder depending on the apps you put in it. To change the name, long-press the folder and select “Rename” from the drop-down menu. Then type the new name.

• To remove an app from a folder, open the folder, long press the app until it shakes and move it out of the folder and to another area on your home screen. If you remove all apps in a folder, the folder will disappear.
• If you want to get rid of a folder, you can also long press on it and choose “Remove Folder”. All applications found in the folder can then be found in the Application Library.