iOS 18: 10 new home screen and lock screen features

With iOS 18, Apple has revamped the Home screen, introducing design changes that allow for more customization and personalization. You can place icons anywhere you want, resize them, and give them new colors. You can also hide apps and swap out your lock screen buttons. This guide highlights all the new features coming to the Home screen and Lock screen in ‌iOS 18‌.

Rearrange icons

‌iOS 18‌ lets you rearrange app icons and widgets on your Home screen and app pages with space between them, offering a wealth of new layout options.

Apple has stuck with a grid system in iOS 18 as well. As such, you can only move app icons within the grid positions, but you can place an icon anywhere on the grid with empty space in between. In iOS 17, a new app will automatically move to the next free spot.

In ‌iOS 18‌, you can choose where you want to place it. You can have app icon-sized spaces between apps, entire empty rows, and entire empty columns. But because of the invisible grid constraint, icons and widgets aren’t possible in unevenly spaced places.

You can put a single app in the middle of a page, have a row of apps at the top and a row of apps at the bottom, create a column of apps, and more. Apple created this design so you can place apps and widgets around wallpapers and arrange them in more useful layouts.

To move your icons:

• Long-press the ‌Home screen‌ or an app page to enable jiggle mode.
• Move apps to the positions you want.
• Tap Done. Increase icon size

Change icon size

You can make your app icons bigger in ‌iOS 18‌ by removing the app names. When app names are present, Apple needs space to display them, but removing them frees up a lot of room for a larger icon and folder size. Changing the app size doesn’t change the number of visible apps, it just removes text and uses the empty space.

With larger icons, you still get a maximum of six icon rows with four icons each, the same number as you have when icon names are enabled. To change the icon size, follow these steps:

• Long-press the ‌Home screen‌ or an app page.
• Tap “Edit.”
• Tap “Customize.”
• Select “Small” to enable app names, or “Large” to disable them.

Note that this setting is universal, meaning you can’t have small icons on one app page and large icons on another app page.

Change widget size

You can resize widgets right from the ‌Home screen‌ without having to go into the customization options. Widgets now have a white rounded bar in the corner that you can drag to make them larger or smaller.

• Long-press on the ‌Home screen‌ or an app page to enter wiggle mode.
• Use a finger to shrink or enlarge the widget’s size.

You’re limited to the minimum and maximum sizes available for a given widget. For example, the Battery widget can be the size of four app icons, six horizontal app icons in two rows, or a square shape that’s four icons wide and four icons tall. When you resize the Battery widget, you’re limited to those size options, but you don’t have to go into the full widget settings to resize it.

‌Widgets‌ are still added to your ‌Home screen‌ and app pages the same way, although some of the labels have changed. Long-press and tap on “Edit,” then select the “Add Widget” option. This is one more tap than before because of the new customization options.

If an app has a widget, you can also long-press on the icon to see the widget options right there, turning the app’s icon into a widget instead.

New widgets in iOS 18

Apple added a new Health widget in ‌iOS 18‌ that displays information from the new Vitals feature available in both the Health app and Apple Watch. It provides an overview of daily or weekly vitals, plus there’s a new cycle tracking widget.

Vitals aggregates information from Apple Watch to provide a daily assessment of how your heart rate, sleep patterns, breathing, and blood oxygen are changing from day to day and week to week.

There’s also a new Journal widget with options that provide a writing prompt that you can tap to launch the app. You can also select a Streaks widget, which tracks how many days in a row you’ve used the Journal app.

For the new training load feature on Apple Watch, Apple has added a corresponding widget in the Fitness widget section.

In the Home widget section, there are new widgets for power usage and electricity plans (a feature coming to select users in ‌iOS 18‌ later this year).

Dark Mode Icons

Apple’s built-in apps have light and dark color options in ‌iOS 18‌. This lets you change the color of your icons when Dark Mode is enabled. The dark icons have all been redesigned with a black background instead of a white or colored background, making them blend in better with Dark Mode.

You can enable the dark icons regardless of whether the ‌actual Dark Mode is also enabled. You can also set icons to an automatic mode, meaning they change color depending on whether ‌Dark Mode‌ or Light Mode is active.

For now, only Apple’s apps have a dark option in iOS 18. But third-party developers will presumably be able to build two color options for their icons in iOS 18 as well. To go along with the ‌Dark Mode‌ icons, Apple has also introduced a toggle that makes your wallpaper darker. To change the color of your icon and wallpaper:

• Long-press the ‌Home‌ screen or an app page.
• Tap “Edit.”
• Tap “Customize.”
• Choose Auto, Dark, Light, or Tinted, an option described below. This is also the interface used to resize the app icon and darken your wallpaper (the sun icon).

The Wallpaper option makes your chosen wallpaper slightly darker and dims light hues when enabled. Tapping toggles between light and dark modes, with light being your default background color.

Tinted Icons

In addition to dark mode for your app icons, you can choose to tint all icons. This is useful if you want to match the icons to your wallpaper, for example.

You can’t change icon colors individually, and tint changes the hue of all icons en masse. You can use an eyedropper to select a color from your wallpaper. Or you can use the two bars to adjust both hue and saturation. Tint works with all icons because it reduces the saturation and then puts a color over the desaturated icon. It’s a very monochromatic look.

Like icon size, this is a universal setting, so you can’t have different hues for different app pages. Tint affects not only your app pages and home screen, but also the app library. To change an icon’s tint:

• Long-press the Home screen or an app page.
• Tap Edit.
• Tap Customize.
• Select Tint and use the sliders to adjust the tint to your desired color.

To turn a tint off, follow the same steps, then select Light or Dark to return to the default app icon colors.

Hiding and locking apps

‌iOS 18‌ includes a security feature to lock apps or even completely hide them from your Home screen and app pages. Opening a locked app requires a Face ID or Touch ID scan, so if someone uses your unlocked iPhone, they still won’t be able to open apps you’ve disabled.

Hiding an app has the same effect as locking it, but it goes a step further and removes it from view entirely. You’ll only see it in a hidden folder in the App Library, which also requires authentication to access. Locked and hidden apps won’t show up in searches on the iPhone. They won’t be accessible through Siri without authentication. Notifications and alerts like calls from the app are disabled, making them completely private without authentication.

The option to lock and hide apps is useful when you need to hand your phone over to someone to view photos, play games, or similar situations.

With a locked app, there’s no indication that it’s locked until someone tries to open it, at which point an authentication prompt will be made via “Face ID” or “Touch ID.” Hidden apps simply won’t show up anywhere except in the App Library.

Apps will show up in your Purchases/Downloads list in the App Store, but not in the Settings app. You can access the Hidden Apps settings in a separate “Hidden Apps” folder that requires authentication to open.

To lock or hide an app:

• Long press the icon of the app you want to lock or hide.
• Tap “Face ID required”.
• If you want to simply lock an app, tap “Face ID required” again. If you want to hide it, select “Hide and Face ID required”.
• Authenticate with a Face ID or Touch ID scan.
• For a locked app, that’s all. For a hidden app, a screen will appear informing you that you won’t receive notifications or calls from the app.
• Tap “Hide App”.

To unlock an app, long press the icon on the home screen or app page again. There, select “Face ID not required”. You will need to authenticate to disable the feature.

To unhide an app, go to the App Library, select the Hidden section, authenticate with ‌Face ID‌ or ‌Touch ID‌, long-press the app icon, and select “Face ID not required” or “Unhide app.” The first option disables the lock and keeps the app off the ‌Home screen‌. The second disables the authentication requirement and adds it back to the first time you launch the app.

If you disable the lock and don’t add it back to the ‌Home screen‌, you’ll have to find it in the App Library to put it back on the ‌Home screen‌ later.

iOS 18 Lock Screen Updates

Apple hasn’t made any major changes to the Lock screen, as it just got a revamp with ‌iOS 17‌, but there are a few updates worth mentioning. An option has been added to customize the font and color of the time on the lock screen, and in ‌iOS 18‌ there is a new rainbow color option that adds a colorful rainbow shade to the time. There are no other changes to font or color options.

Above the time, you can add a new Journal widget that displays a journal prompt and opens the app when tapped. For widget options, there are new Vitals widgets for the Health app and new entries for power usage and tariffs. These correspond to the new ‌Homescreen‌ widgets.

Change flashlight and camera icons on iOS 18’s lock screen

For the first time, you can also change the flashlight and camera icons on the lock screen. Either change the apps you set or turn off the shortcuts altogether in iOS 18.

You can choose any Control Center option for the lock screen buttons, including Shortcuts, ‌Dark Mode‌, Airplane Mode, Remote Control, Alarm Calculator, Translate, and more. This change comes with a redesign of Control Center in iOS 18, and it gives you a lot more options for what you can launch from the lock screen.

Apple allows third-party apps to add Control Center icons, so you can choose from those as well. Depending on what you choose, you may need to use ‌Face ID‌ or ‌Touch ID‌ to authenticate. Otherwise, one could access an app and potentially sensitive data from the lock screen.

To change your lock screen buttons, follow these steps:

• After authenticating, long-press the lock screen.
• Tap Customize.
• Tap Lock Screen.
• In this interface, tap the “-” icon to remove any apps already assigned to those buttons. However, if this is your first time doing this, the Flashlight and Camera apps will still be set to their default settings.
• From there, tap the + button and select a new control to add.
• Tap Done in the top right corner.

There are four new iOS 18 wallpaper options in pink, yellow, azure, and purple with a matching darker gradient. They all have a light mode and a dark mode customized by Apple, with dark mode providing a background glow for the darker part of the design.

You can find the new wallpapers by going to Lock Screen / Customize to change an existing wallpaper, or tap + to add a completely new one.

For more on all the new features added in iOS 18, check out our iOS 18 roundup.