How to hide apps from your iPhone’s homescreen

If you get annoyed with the number of apps that crowd your iPhone’s homescreen, you probably welcomed a feature that originally came with iOS 14: the App Library, which gathers all of your apps into various categories and displays them on a separate page to the right of your homepages.

The App Library not only adds some automatic organization to your iPhone’s homepages but also allows you to clean up your homescreen by hiding as many apps as you want. You can keep your favorites front and center and get the more utilitarian or less used apps out of the way. (In fact, one way to keep a clean screen is to have all your newly installed apps appear in your App Library only. We offer directions on how to do that here.)

If you want to organize your current apps by hiding some of them, there are several ways to do it. You can remove individual apps from the homescreen, you can hide an entire screen of apps, or you can organize several apps by putting them into a folder.

It’s really simple to hide an individual app from your home screen and stash it in the App Library.

You can also hide an entire page of apps — and get rid of that page — in one blow if you want. And since it’s really easy to also restore that same page, it’s a great way to hide groups of apps that you only use occasionally.

You can use folders on the homescreen to gather similar apps together and save space. You won’t be completely hiding the apps. They’ll be there, but they’ll be consolidated in a single space.

It’s very simple to create a folder:

Update October 12th, 2022, 11:20AM ET: This article was originally published on May 6th, 2021, and has been updated to account for slight changes in the OS.