A home screen with six things on it
Clear a home screen down to the handful of things you actually use, without deleting a single app.
A new phone arrives with about forty apps on it, most of them put there by the manufacturer, and every one of them is competing for your eye. Finding the telephone among them takes a moment longer than it should, every single time.
The fix is not to delete anything. It is to take things off the front page. An app removed from the home screen is still on the phone, still signed in, still holding everything it held, and still findable by name in the A to Z list behind it.
Six or eight things on one page is about right: the phone, messages, the camera, the photographs, the weather, the one for the bus or the bank. Everything else lives in the list, where it can be searched for by typing three letters of its name.
Key points
- Take an icon off the front page without deleting anything
- Tell Remove from Home Screen and Delete App apart before you press
- Find any app by name in the A to Z list behind the home screen
- Switch a whole phone to a larger, plainer layout where one exists
What to remember
- Remove from Home Screen leaves the app installed and signed in. It only moves the icon out of sight.
- Removing from the home screen moves an icon. Deleting removes an app. The phone uses two different words on purpose.
- Easy mode gives a whole phone a larger, plainer layout in one switch, and turns off again the same way.
Try this
Pick the three apps on your home screen you have never once opened, and remove each one from the home screen. Take nothing off that you use. The front page will look better within a minute, and nothing is gone.
Practice: A home screen with six things on it. Your first lesson is free, with no account or card; the rest are part of a Lantern plan. Interactive lessons require JavaScript.