iOS 14 Home Screen – Inspiration

The article doesn't immediately explain how people are changing the design of their icons, from kid-style doodles to flat black.

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I had to dig around to see how it was happening. So for anyone curious about it, here is the general process.

1. Take the app you want to change the icon for, long press it and "Move to App Library". This will keep it installed, but hide it from the main screens.

2. Launch the "Shortcuts" app (pre-installed on iOS) and create a new shortcut.

3. While creating a new shortcut, select the "Add Action" button, then select "scripting", and then select "Open App"

4. Now the shortcut will read "Open [Choose]". Select the "Choose" link and find the app that you previously moved to the App Library.

5. That is all that your shortcut will do, is simply open an app when invoked.

6. Before saving, click the Ellipses icon (the circle with 3 horizontal dots in it) that is located near the top-right of the card, across from "New Shortcut"

7. Click "Add to Home Screen"

8. This will open another card that allows you to customize the home screen presence. Give the icon the name that matches the app

9. Tap the app icon, and select "Choose Photo". Find the photo of the app icon you want to use (you will need to previously have saved this to your phone)

10. Finally select "Add" on the top right of the screen. This will put an app icon of your custom design on your home screen that you can move around as you wish, like a normal app. When pressed, it simply opens the app you tied it to. Essentially acting as an alias for the app.

Now you will need to repeat these steps for every app that you want to customize the icon for.

Here are some visual instructions I found if you are having trouble following along: https://icons.tr.af/how

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Of course all the items that are bigger than the size of an app icon are iOS 14's new widget features. These are mostly supplied by your favorite apps. However the highly customized ones are created in an app called "Widgetsmith" (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/widgetsmith/id1523682319).

This app appears to let you create widgets through a WYSIWYG editor on your phone. Although I have not fully used it, so I am not sure how creative you can get with it, but based on the screenshots it looks like you can definitely customize colors of standard functions like weather and clock widgets to decorate your homescreen.

So there you go. That is how this all seems to work. I am curious now to customize my homescreen more, now that I have seen how creative you can get. I probably won't worry about every screen, but it would be fun to customize the first page with something that suits my personality.