My 2022 iPhone Home Screen

To start 2022 off fresh, I took a few hours of my Christmas/New Years break to reorganize and clean up the home screens across my iOS devices. As I'm trying out random apps & widgets my pages usually get out of control. Taking the time every so often to clean stuff up just feels good. It used to be a bit of a pain to move all of your apps around making reorganizing quite an undertaking, but with iOS 14 this process became significantly easier with the addition of the App Library. And with it came the ability to completely remove everything from all of your home screens allowing you to start again with a clean slate.

When you long press an app icon, the "Delete App" option was replaced with a "Remove App" button that then prompts if you'd like to actually delete the app from your device or just remove it from your home screen and add it to the App Library. I usually just start completely from nothing and remove everything from every page, but if you would like to keep a copy of your current setup you can  hide individual pages by tapping on the page indicator dots and then enabling/disabling each one from there.

Once everything's gone, I'll go through and start re-adding the apps and widgets that I think I'll use most often. I like to plan out what widgets I want to have first, because they'll take up the most space then from there I'll know how many icons I have room for. And if I've got a widget from Carrot Weather for example, I will not add it's app icon because I can just tap the widget to open the app. I split up my widgets into a few stacks that have similar types on info or uses.

In the dock (the bottom row that follows you across each page) I have Messages, Spark, Safari and a folder of audio apps (Marvis Pro, Apple Music, Spotify, Overcast, Broadcast, Audible, Poolsuite FM and Last.fm).

On the first page, I have three widget stacks (one medium and two small) and eight actual app icons.

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Then on the second page I just have 4 widgets: a small Tweetbot timeline widget, a small Reeder 5 Recent Articles widget, a medium Overcast recent podcasts widget and a medium Things 3 Upcoming list widget.

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I have a third page that is activated when I am in my office using a Work Focus state. This third page has a large Fantastical calendar widget that displays the date, a heat-mapped calendar of the month and upcoming events for the day from my work calendar. Below the large widget is a medium Spark email widget which displays my work email's inbox.