How to Restore Home Screen on iOS
I've been doing a lot of technical spring cleaning this year. My dotfiles have been getting a lot of love, and I've been breaking up with quite a few services.
As part of this little journey, I've decided that I want less apps on my phone. I started by going through the App Library list to identify anything I had forgotten about. This worked well enough, but took a lot of scrolling and I felt like I wasn't making much progress.
I, like many, had fallen into the trap of removing apps from my home screen, rather than deleting them outright. I've come to realize that I've missed the simplicity of having every app occupy a space on the home screen.
Having everything on the home screen means the app has to fight for its position. Whether that's a position on the coveted dock, or the first home screen, or whatever. Hiding the apps away, rather than having to scroll by them, makes it way too easy to hoard apps I no longer need or use.
So my first thought was to drag every app from the App Library back to the home screen. At over 100 apps, most of which weren't on the home screen already, I didn't want to invest the time.
Fortunately, as it turns out, you can reset the home screen! Not without a small caveat though. Resetting the home screen also resets the Today View's widgets back to defaults. It sucked, but it was a small price to pay to get all of my apps back.
To reset, you just need to:
- Open the
Settingsapp - Go to
General - Scroll down to
Transfer or Reset iPhone - Tap
Reset - Then tap
Reset Home Screen Layout
Nothing to it! I don't remember if it prompts you to confirm or not, and I wasn't going to reset a second time now that I've gotten apps sorted and most of them purged.