How to Customize Your iPhone Home Screen

At long last, iPhone owners can finally customize their home screens with widgets. (Android users, feel free to skip—y’all have had this feature for years.) After you install iOS 14, you can deck out your iPhone with fresh icons, wallpaper, and widgets for a fully personalized look. Here’s how to get started.

First, you’ll need some new app icons. You can find some online by searching for iPhone icon packs, or by visiting a site like icons8.com. Save the icons to your camera roll.

Then head on over to the App Store and download Widgetsmith, which lets you change your iPhone’s fonts and colors, and Apple’s Shortcuts app (if you don’t already have it), which is where things start to get a little…. complicated.

You have to create shortcuts from your new app icons to the apps themselves. Within the Shortcuts app, hit the plus sign in the top right corner. Then tap Add Action and select Scripting. From there, choose the Open App command, then pick the app you want to open. Hit the three dots and select Add to Home Screen. From here, write the name of the app and hit the icon picture to the left. Select the Choose Photo option to open up your Camera Roll and select that icon you chose for this particular app in step one. Unfortunately, you have to repeat this process for every new app icon. To get rid of the old app icons, long-press your home screen to send them to the App Library.

Creating shortcuts from new icons to apps will slow down app loading times and also prevent you from viewing notification badges. And, as you can see from the video above, this process is time-consuming, to say the least. But if you want your iPhone to reflect your true spirit, it might be worth the hours it takes to fully trick out your home screen. Don’t say we didn’t warn you!