An Entirely New Home Screen Experience

iOS 14 brings what is quite likely the biggest home screen redesign that Apple has ever added to iOS. Not since Apple introduced home screen folders over a decade ago have we seen such a significant change, and this year’s update is going to be a serious game-changer.

Right off the bat, you’ll no longer need to keep every single app floating around on your home screens or worry about squirrelling them away into folders. Instead, you’ll be able to pull up a zoomed-out view of all of your home screens and hide the ones you no longer want to see just by unchecking them.

This will clear the way for the new App Library a new space that appears at the very end of your active home screen pages, offering automatic organization of your apps into what are effectively smart folders. At the top you’ll see Suggestions and Recently Added, followed by the usual categories for things like games, productivity, entertainment, travel, and more. Apple Arcade games also get their own virtual folder.

Each category will present the most-used app as a larger icon that can be opened simply by tapping on it directly, without having to expand the folder, and this will be selected through the usual on-device intelligence, which will also be used to populate the Suggestions App Library folder, and bring up other apps that are most likely to be needed next.

A new app-specific search has also been added, showing you a full alphabetical list of every app on your device, similar to the Apple Watch app layout, except that you can also search through the list to quickly find a specific app you’re looking for.