If your iPad home screen is just a neat grid of app icons, you’ve been missing out on the many ways you can now customize and change things up. Widgets and, finally, a way to change colors and even leave gaps in your app icons. Here’s the scoop…
The tradeoff between iPadOS tablets and Android tablets has always been that of flexibility versus an imposed order and organization. For many people, the simplicity of an app grid works great, and they have no desire to push the envelope or do “weird” things with their home screen. Lots of others, however, love the flexibility to really customize things to the max. Well, you can’t go wild on either platform, but Android’s always been more easily customized.
Until the most recent iPadOS update: iPadOS 18.0.
The newest version of the iPad operating system not only incorporates widgets (which have been around for a little while) but lets you change the size of your icons (sort of, as we’ll see), their color, and how they’re spaced on the screen. Finally, a way to make things a bit more unique.
ADDING WIDGETS TO THE IPAD HOME SCREEN
The first step on this user customization adventure is to update your iPad or iPad Mini to the latest version of iPadOS. I’m running 18.0.1 on my iPad Mini as I write this tutorial, but I expect 18.0.2 will come out any day now.
You can see that I’ve already organized my app icons by function: It’s easy, just tap and hold, then move the icon to where you’d like it to live: You can now have gaps and spaces. But there’s a lot more you can do to customize things! Tap and hold on an app icon or on the background itself and you’ll soon see it switch to this view:
If you tap on the “-” associated with an app, you’ll get a lot of interesting new options, including the old standby of removing the app, or removing it from the home screen, but you can now also have it require touch ID to launch the program, or even tap on resize shortcuts (if available) to turn the app icon into a widget!
For this task, however, I’m going to tap on the “Edit” button on the top left. That brings up these three choices:
We’ll come back to Customize, so for now let’s just “Add Widget“. Turns out that there are now quite a few widgets…
The most common widgets are highlighted on this initial screen, but it’s all neatly categorized by app on the left side, with a few bonus widgets. In particular, I really like the Smart Stack.
Notice the “••••” above “Add Widget”: This, as usual, denotes the number of options so make sure you swipe left and right to see all your options. If you pick the wrong one, you can always resize it. In fact, this two-icon-wide Smart Stack widget is exactly what I want. A tap on “Add Widget” and it appears. I also like to keep an eye on battery life for my various accessories, so that’s the 2-wide battery widget. I’ll place both along the top of the screen:
This pushes down all the app icons so everything shuffles into different places (tho the two empty spots are retained). It looks good.
CUSTOMIZE IPAD APP ICONS
The pop-up window on the lower portion is revealed because I tapped on “Customize” in the Edit menu. It’s fun to play with but there’s a glaring bug in iPadOS 18.0.1 that causes the “Small / Large” icon control to actually turn on / off icon names instead! It’s a bit startling that such an obvious bug made it into the release, but I expect that will be fixed pronto (18.0.2, anyone?).
Your icons can now be permanently set into Light or Dark mode or you can track the rise and setting of the sun with Automatic. Tap on “Tinted” instead, however; it will leech out all of the color from the app icons, replacing them with a uniform “tint”. Check it out:
THis can be a fun and striking visual effect, and as you can see from the dual sliders, you can really dial in the exact hue that you prefer. Me? I love blue, so it’s no surprise I’ve set them all to a light blue. I’ll change that background wallpaper to something appropriately blue too, but that’s beyond the scope of this tutorial.
A tap on “Large” in that top control has also removed the app names:
I really like the color changes when you go into Dark mode too, so that’s what I’m going to settle on for my new and much improved iPad Mini home screen:
I might fiddle with app icon layout a bit more, but overall, a big improvement. Now it’s your turn to try making some changes to your own iPad home screen!
Pro Tip: I’ve been writing tutorials for the Apple iPad since it was first released all those years ago. Please check out my extensive Apple iPad help area for lots and lots of useful content.