With the launch of iOS 18, Apple is taking iPhone customization to a brand new stage. Earlier than, you can simply add widgets to your House Display or rearrange its pages, apply your individual wallpaper, and, extra lately, customise your Lock Display. In the meantime, energy customers downloaded apps that allowed them to customise their icons by means of iOS Shortcuts and even created their very own icons utilizing icon designer instruments or photographs they discovered on Pinterest, Google, or elsewhere.
With iOS 18, nevertheless, the capacity to alter all of your icons to a brand new coloration scheme is a built-in instrument.
It’s also possible to prepare your icons and widgets in any means you like, as they not need to be proper subsequent to one another in a grid. That means, you can select to border your wallpaper or place icons solely on the backside of the display, as an illustration.
Although the system for personalisation has gotten considerably unwieldy as Apple has continued to roll out new choices, iOS 18 affords essentially the most management over the appear and feel of your iPhone’s consumer interface than some other model of Apple’s cell working system so far.
Now, with a press-and-hold in your iPhone’s House Display, you possibly can faucet the upper-left “Edit” button to enter the brand new customization mode. From right here, you’ll have the ability to add widgets, edit House Display pages, or choose a brand new choice, “Customise,” to configure the colour and shading of the icons and widgets in your House Display.
iOS 18 presents 4 choices in your icons: the usual gentle and darkish modes, in addition to an Computerized mode that shifts from gentle to darkish as nighttime falls, and the brand new “Tinted” choice. When chosen, Tinted allows you to use the eyedropper instrument (upper-right) to select a coloration out of your House Display’s background that then tints the fill for the lighter a part of your icons.
As an illustration, in case your wallpaper includes a photograph from nature, you can choose the blue sky’s coloration to function your icons’ tint. You’ll be able to additional modify the colour choices utilizing two backside sliders, one for the shade itself and one other for the saturation. (Sliding all of it the best way over to white makes the tint much less obvious.)
This course of is usually a bit tough, and there’s been fairly some criticism, significantly from designers, about how the ensuing House Display seems to be. It doesn’t really feel like Apple’s elevated design sense, however that’s the purpose: It’s your individual.
The function particularly caters to youthful customers who shortly took benefit of latest performance within the 2020 launch of iOS 14 to personalize their House Screens with customized icons launched through Shortcuts and widgets. Pinterest adoption soared on the time, as younger folks turned to it for photographs they might use as customized icons and themes. Apple shortly responded to customers’ curiosity on this development by altering how these customized icons would reply when tapped. That’s, as an alternative of annoying folks by briefly opening the iOS Shortcuts app, as earlier than, it launched solely a small pop-up that might show when the app opened by means of a customized icon.
However till now, Apple hasn’t made it potential for customers to customise their apps’ present icons with shades and colours of their selecting.
When you nonetheless can’t customise the design of the icon’s picture itself (with out the usage of your individual shortcuts), builders can select to ship different icons as part of their app obtain. These icons are typically provided as a part of a paid improve or subscription, relying on the developer’s choice. Not all apps provide different icons, although.
After selecting the icon you like from the apps that provide alternate options, you possibly can then proceed to pick out the way you need them to look: gentle, darkish, or tinted.
Darkish icons give the House Display a distinct look (see photograph above on the left), as they preserve some colours however sit on black backgrounds, permitting extra of your focus to shift to the telephone’s wallpaper. Tinted icons are related, however as an alternative of a number of colours, their lighter elements are shaded with a coloration of your selecting.
Uniform, darker icons whereas nonetheless in “gentle” mode
Like many others, I didn’t discover the darkish icons with their odd splashes of coloration agreeable and the tinted icons don’t fairly match my tastes — although that’s extra of a private choice. Nonetheless, I discovered a option to create a House Display with extra muted shades.
To perform this, I toggled the choice from “Small” over to “Giant” within the customization mode, which makes the icons barely bigger and removes their textual content label. Widgets’ labels are additionally eliminated whenever you shift to the Giant icons.
I then choose the choice for tinted icons, slide the underside slider over to the suitable for much less saturation, and faucet the sunshine choice within the top-left of the customization window to change the general telephone display from darkish mode to gentle. This creates a brighter, extra uniform look the place the icons seem in shades of black, white, and grey, as an alternative of the garish colours they often are. (Particularly these horrible Google icons, which many memes have mocked).
A extra minimal House Display
If you’re in search of an much more minimalist House Display, an alternative choice now obtainable via iOS 18 allows you to forgo icons altogether.
One of many high customization apps, Widgetsmith, has been up to date for iOS 18 to benefit from the brand new performance round giant, label-less widgets to supply quite a lot of methods to customise your House Display with Actions. These Actions may also be used through the Management Heart (accessed by swiping down from the highest of the telephone display) and might provide shortcuts to issues like taking part in a favourite album or calling your greatest good friend, amongst different issues.
Management Heart apart, Widgetsmith contains varied House Display widgets that includes rows of custom-made icons, every linked to a selected motion. With out widget labels, these can mix extra seamlessly into your House Display, permitting for a extra minimal — or at the least extra uniform — look, the place each icon is in the identical type.
The app ships with quite a lot of icon packs to customise their actions, or folks can select their very own or use any SF image, that are the built-in symbols designed to combine with the system font for Apple’s platforms.
“The aesthetics … now potential in iOS 18 are actually transformative to how your property display feels,” says Widgetsmith’s developer David Smith. “Since Apple drops the requirement for widgets to have their subtitles you possibly can fully take over your iPhone and make all of it your individual.”
Nonetheless, the extra attention-grabbing concept Widgetsmith introduces is considered one of a House Display that doesn’t embrace any icons.
As an alternative, you possibly can select to put in widgets that spell out in textual content the varied apps chances are you’ll wish to entry, like Climate, Mail, Maps, Music, and Calendar. You could possibly use these alone on the display or alongside different widgets. You could possibly even choose to take away all of the icons out of your backside dock for a much less cluttered look.
Widgetsmith isn’t the one app that gives this form of performance, however it’s among the many best-known.
One other one centered particularly on minimalist House Screens is Dumb Telephone, an app whose identify refers back to the easy consumer interface from the times earlier than the smartphone arrived. With Dumb Telephone, you can even create an identical minimalist House Display and modify the theme to Gentle or Darkish.
The app’s developer, Michael Tigas, claims that the modifications helped him lower down on display time.
Utilizing icon placement to enhance your wallpaper
One other attention-grabbing concept that comes from the newly added capacity to position icons anyplace in iOS 18 is that the icons themselves can develop into part of your theme and wallpaper, mixing into the illustration in methods they couldn’t earlier than.
One app profiting from this performance is Themify, a customization utility that now features a part of themes “impressed by iOS 18” on the high of its Uncover web page.
Right here, you’ll discover themes (collections of wallpapers, widgets, and icons) the place icons develop into part of the background, like one the place icons set to Giant mode develop into planets within the photo voltaic system, or one other the place small icons develop into wall decor.
Themify additionally helps different iOS options like Lock Display widgets and themes, contact posters, standby screens, and extra.
Different personalization apps I’ve used up to now embrace Brass, Aesthetic, Aesthetic Package, Greatest Widgets, Coloration Themes, Reskin, ThemeKit, ThemePack, Widgy, and Wallaroo for wallpapers.
Customizing your House Display is just one of many new personalization choices that ship with iOS 18. Now you can swap out the shortcuts to apps, just like the Digicam and Flashlight, in your Lock Display, and you may arrange your Management Heart and add your individual actions from third-party apps, offered builders help the choice. It’s also possible to customise how the controls are laid out, grouped, and their dimension, Apple notes.
Need to share your iOS 18 customizations with me? Be a part of me on Threads or Bluesky and let me see your creations!