Quickly Clean up Your Home Screen

The biggest change to come to iOS 14 is a whole new home screen experience, and it really is a game-changer. Of course, if you like the home screen the way it is, you don’t need to learn anything new — it will keep working pretty much like it always has — but if you’re installing an iOS 14 public beta, you’re not likely doing it just to have the same old experience as before.

Perhaps the coolest part of the new home screen is the widgets, which we’ll get to in a minute, but the new App Library also means that you’re no longer stuck having to uninstall apps completely to declutter your home screen. Apps can live solely in the App Library, which you’ll be able to find by swiping past the very last home screen, which means that you won’t be distracted by those apps that you rarely open but still want to keep around.

If you have a lot of these sort of apps, this probably means you’re going to want to get them off your home screen and living solely in the App Library, and while you can do this on an individual app basis — just “delete” the app like you would in iOS 13 and you’ll be given the choice to simply remove it from the home screen instead of actually deleting it — but there’s an even faster way if you want to do this with a whole bunch of apps.

Moving Multiple Apps

It’s not a well-known feature, but you can already move multiple app icons around as a group or “stack” in iOS 13, which has always been handy for sorting several apps into folders or simply moving them to another home screen, saving you the trouble of doing it one at a time.

The trick behind this is to take advantage of multi-touch gestures: simply tap and hold to enter edit mode as you normally would and then begin moving a single app icon to start the process. Once you’ve “picked up” that app icon and begun moving it, you can then tap on other app icons to add them to the “stack,” and you’ll be able to move them all together. This can even be done across multiple home screens — just swipe left or right to move to another screen, and continue tapping more apps to add them to the pile.

You can then move the stack of apps you’ve selected to another home screen, or drop them into a folder all at once. However, in iOS 14, you can also swipe over the App Library at the very right-hand side of your home screens, and just drop them right there. They’ll be removed from your home screen entirely, but you’ll still be able to find them in the App Library.

Note that you don’t need to worry about where you drop them in the App Library either — iOS 14 automatically categorizes apps, so they’ll go into the appropriate places automatically, even if you’ve picked up a bunch of apps from different categories. So you just need to scroll to that screen and release your finger.

Sadly, it’s not (yet) possible to do this with entire app folders, so you’ll have to open the folder and add each of the apps to your pile individually, although again you can still swipe left and right within the folder to keep on collecting apps, and then drop them en masse into the App Library. If you clean out a folder, it will automatically disappear as well once you’ve done this.