With iOS 18, Apple has redesigned the home screen and introduced design changes that allow for greater customization and personalization. You can place icons where you want, resize them and give them new colors, plus you can hide apps and replace lock screen buttons.
This guide highlights everything coming to the iOS 18 home screen and lock screen.
Arrangement of icons
With iOS 18, you can rearrange app icons and widgets on the home screen and app pages with space between them, providing a number of new layout options.
Apple is stuck with a grid system, so you can only move app icons around within the grid placement, but an icon can be placed anywhere in the grid with empty space around it. It sounds complicated, but if you added a new app to your home screen in iOS 17, it would automatically go to the next open spot.
In iOS 18, you can choose where to place it. You can have spaces between apps the size of the app icon, completely empty rows, and completely empty columns. You can’t place icons and widgets in unevenly spaced places due to the limitations of the invisible grid, so keep that in mind.
You can place one app in the middle of the page, have a row of apps at the top and a row of apps at the bottom, create a column of apps, and more. Apple created this design to allow you to place apps and widgets around wallpapers and organize them into more useful layouts.
Here’s how to move your icons:
- Long press on the home screen or app page to start the rocking mode.
- Move applications to desired positions.
- Tap done.
Increase icon size
You can make app icons bigger in iOS 18 by removing app names. With app names in place, Apple needs room to display them, but removing them opens up plenty of room for a larger icon and folder size. Resizing the app doesn’t change the number of apps that are visible, it just removes the text and takes up that empty space.
With larger icons, you still get a maximum of six rows of four icons, which is the same as you’re limited to when icon titles are turned on. To change the icon size, follow these steps:
- Long press on the home screen or app page.
- Click on “Edit”.
- Tap “Customize”.
- Choose Small to turn app names on or Big to turn them off.
Note that this setting is universal, so you cannot have small icons on one app page and large icons on another app page.
Resize the widget
You can resize widgets directly from the home screen without going to the customization options. Widgets now have a white rounded bar in the corner that you can drag to make it bigger or smaller.
- Long press on the home screen or app page to enter the rocking mode.
- Use your finger to resize the widget to make it smaller or larger.
You are limited by the minimum and maximum size available for that widget. For example, the Battery widget can be four app icons in size, six horizontal app icons in two rows, or a square shape that has four icons in width and four icons in height. When you resize the Battery widget, you’ll be limited to these size options, but you don’t need to go into the full widget settings to change the size.
Widgets are still added to your home screen and apps pages in the same way, although some of the labels have changed. Long press and tap “Edit” and then select “Add Widget”. It’s one tap more than before, thanks to new customization options.
If an app has a widget, you can also long press its icon to see the widget options right there, turning the app icon into a widget instead.
New widgets
Apple added a new Health widget to iOS 18 that displays information from the new Vitals feature, which is both in the Health app and on the Apple Watch. It provides an overview of daily or weekly vital signs, plus there’s also a new cycle tracker widget.
Vitals collects information from the Apple Watch and provides daily data on how your heart rate, sleep patterns, breathing and blood oxygen change from day to day and week to week.
There’s also a new Journal widget with options that provide a writing prompt that you can tap to open the app and respond. You can also select the Stripes widget, which tracks how many days in a row you’ve used the Diary app.
For the new Training Load feature on the Apple Watch, Apple has added a corresponding widget to the Fitness widget section.
In the Home widget section, there are new widgets for electricity consumption and electricity rates (the feature will be available for selected users in iOS 18 later this year).
Dark mode icons
Apple’s built-in apps have light and dark color options in iOS 18, allowing you to change the color of your icons when you have dark mode on. All dark icons are redesigned with a black background rather than a white or colored background, making it a better match with the dark mode setting.
You can turn on dark icons regardless of whether you have dark mode on, so you can keep light mode on while using the dark icon option. You can also set the icons to auto mode, which means they will change color depending on whether dark mode or light mode is active.
Currently, only Apple apps have the Dark option, but third-party developers will likely also be able to include two color options for their icons when iOS 18 launches.
In line with the dark mode icons, Apple has also introduced a toggle that darkens your wallpaper. Here’s how to change icon and wallpaper color:
- Long press on the home screen or app page.
- Click on “Edit”.
- Tap “Customize”.
- Select Auto, Dark, Light, or Toned, an option described below. This is also the interface used to resize the app icon and darken the wallpaper (sun icon).
The wallpaper option makes the selected wallpaper slightly darker and mutes bright shades when enabled. Click to toggle the light… Click here to read the rest of the article
Article Link: iOS 18: 10 New Home and Lock Screen Features