How to hide app on iphone home screen

With iOS 14 and later, there are new ways to find and organize the apps on your iPhone. Learn how to use the App Library and organize your Home Screen.

Use the App Library to find your apps

From your Home Screen, swipe left until you see the App Library. Your apps are automatically sorted into categories. For example, you might see your social media apps under a Social category. The apps that you use most frequently will automatically reorder based on your usage. When you install new apps, they'll be added to your App Library, but you can change where new apps get downloaded.

Search for an app in the App Library

1. Go to the App Library. 
2. Tap the search field, then enter the app that you're looking for. 
3. Tap the app to open it.

Delete an app from the App Library

1. Go to the App Library and tap the search field to open the list.
   
2. Touch and hold the app icon, then tap Delete App 
   
   .
3. Tap Delete again to confirm.

If you can't delete an app that's not made by Apple, disable parental controls, then try deleting the app again.

Move apps to the App Library

1. Touch and hold the app.
2. Tap Remove App.
3. Tap Remove from Home Screen.

Find, hide, and remove pages on your Home Screen

With iOS 14 and later, you can hide pages to streamline how your Home Screen looks and add them back whenever you want. Here's how to hide a page:

1. Touch and hold an empty area on your Home Screen.
2. Tap the dots near the bottom of your screen.
3. Tap the circle under the page that you want to hide.
4. Tap Done. 

To unhide a page, repeat the steps above. Then use the App Library to quickly find apps hidden on different pages.

To remove pages from your Home Screen:

1. Touch and hold an empty area on your Home Screen.
2. Tap the dots near the bottom of your screen.
3. Tap the circle under the page that you want to hide.
4. Tap the Remove button 
   
   , then tap Remove. 

When you remove a page from your Home Screen, the apps will still appear in the App Library.

Reorder pages on your Home Screen

With iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 and later, you can move pages on your Home Screen. Here's how:

1. Touch and hold an empty area on your Home Screen.
2. Tap the dots near the bottom of your screen.
3. Drag a page to reorder it.
4. Tap Done.

Change where new apps get downloaded

To change where new apps get downloaded on your iPhone, or to show or hide the notifications that you see in the App Library:

1. Go to Settings > Home Screen.
2. Select an option such as Add to Home Screen or App Library Only.

Learn more

Published Date: September 12, 2022

If you get annoyed with the number of apps that crowd your iPhone’s homescreen, you probably welcomed a feature that originally came with iOS 14: the App Library, which gathers all of your apps into various categories and displays them on a separate page to the right of your homepages.

The App Library not only adds some automatic organization to your iPhone’s homepages but also allows you to clean up your homescreen by hiding as many apps as you want. You can keep your favorites front and center and get the more utilitarian or less used apps out of the way. (In fact, one way to keep a clean screen is to have all your newly installed apps appear in your App Library only. We offer directions on how to do that here.)

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

Here’s how.

Hide a single app

It’s really simple to hide an individual app from your home screen and stash it in the App Library.

• Press on your selected app until a menu appears. The menu will include a number of options depending on the app’s features. (For example, if I press on an app for Microsoft Teams, the menu will let me make a new call or start a chat.) But you will always get an option (in red) to remove the app. Tap on that.
• You will now have the choice of deleting the app from the phone or removing it from the Home Screen. Select the latter. You’ll still find the app in the App Library.
• If the app is not already in the App Library, then after you tap “Remove App,” you will instead be given the choice of either deleting the app or moving it to the App Library.

Hide a page of apps

You can also hide an entire page of apps — and get rid of that page — in one blow if you want. And since it’s really easy to also restore that same page, it’s a great way to hide groups of apps that you only use occasionally.

• Tap and hold on an empty part of your screen until the apps begin to jiggle.
• Tap on the dots at the bottom of the screen.
• You’ll now be able to see small versions of all your screens (except the App Library and Today View). Beneath each visible screen is a checkmark; uncheck any screen you want to hide and tap “Done” in the upper-right corner.
• To “unhide” any of the screens, follow these same directions and replace the checkmark of the screen that you want to see again.

Use folders to organize apps

You can use folders on the homescreen to gather similar apps together and save space. You won’t be completely hiding the apps. They’ll be there, but they’ll be consolidated in a single space.

It’s very simple to create a folder:

• Long-press on an app in the homescreen until the icons jiggle.
• Move the app onto one of the other apps you want to group it with.
• You’ll now have a large space that contains the icons for the apps in the folder, including an automatically generated name (usually created in response to the app you moved). Tap on the space to close it. Now you have an icon that “contains” those apps. Just tap on it to open the folder and access the apps in it.
• iOS will assign a name to the folder depending on what apps you’ve put in it. To change the name, long-press on the folder and select “Rename” from the pop-up menu. Then type in the new name.

• To remove an app from a folder, simply open the folder, long-press the app until it jiggles, and move it out of the folder and to another space on your homescreen. If you remove all the apps from a folder, the folder will disappear.
• If you want to get rid of a folder, you can also long-press on it and select “Remove Folder.” Any apps that were in the folder can then be found in the App Library.

Update October 12th, 2022, 11:20AM ET: This article was originally published on May 6th, 2021, and has been updated to account for slight changes in the OS.

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