For years, every phone looked more or less exactly the same, but new technology brings new widgets and workarounds for customizing icons, causing a massive boom in Android and iOS themes, and we are here to find the home screen customization tweaks. For Android users, this is old news for them, but with 90% of iPhones running iOS 14 now, there is no shortage of awesome themes being shown off.
In this article, we will show you one of the home screen customization tweaks that you can have on Samsung and Xiaomi phones. We are going to customize iPhone and Samsung screens. Also, we will explain step by step how you can get the best setup on your phone. We will explain the functionality of all of the widgets as we customize the phone.
Home Screen Customization Tweaks
We will show you the basics of how to customize your home screen fully. The first thing you may want to do is plan what home screen you would like to have.
Planning
There are tons of great resources for inspiration on YouTube, Reddit, and Pinterest. Next, note what apps you would like to have on your home screen. Most icon packs should include the most popular apps, but if you are using less popular ones like a specific game or calendar app, you might have to be a little creative when selecting an icon.
The Basics
If you do not know how to change your wallpaper, head over to settings, wallpaper and hit choose a new wallpaper. iOS icons do not allow for image transparency. So, if you want a floating icon effect, you have to make sure that your wallpaper color matches the icon background for whatever icons you have. For Android users, this is not a problem.
Next are widgets, which were introduced back in iOS 14, adding a whole new dimension to customizing your home screen. Android users have had this for a while, but iOS users got them recently.
Themes
We suggest adding a second home screen and hiding your regular layout if you want to switch back when you are done.
Custom Icons
To create a custom icon, you need to hit Shortcuts which should be pre-installed on your phone for iOS. For Android users, this process is much easier. Just press the shortcut you wish to change, tap edit and tap the icon box to edit the icon.
Custom Widgets
To take things to the next level, you can make some widgets to match your theme and icons. Widgetsmith and MagicWidgets are one of the most popular applications out there for this because you can use them just to display images that work well with your theme. You can use it to create a themed calendar and clock widgets that match your color scheme, font, and aesthetic.
Focus Mode
Focus mode allows you to selectively show and hide whole pages of your home screen, widgets, and whatever you want. The original idea is that you could have a home screen for work with your calendar and email widgets that automatically pop up. Since focus modes let you choose home screens, you can combine them with widgets in shortcuts to create a perfectly themed layout with your icons and widgets.
Conclusion
All these hoops you have to jump through highlight just how difficult it is to really customize your iPhone, but Android users have known all of these features for a long time. You have to remember that it took Apple years before it let you customize your home screen background. Even now, all these customization tools look more like hacked-together workarounds, not useful methods to let you easily change the way your phone looks, but these are the Best Home Screen Ideas that we can recommend to you.
