Last semester, I posted about the iPhone home screen customization made possible through Widgets and Shortcuts added in iOS 14. The building blocks were there, but the implementation was clunky and lacking in a lot of ways. Among the biggest problems was the lack of availability of widgets for popular apps and the need to open the Shortcuts app every time you want to open up an app using the custom icons. 

Shortly after making that post, I returned my home screen to its original icons and kept the widgets. It was just too clunky to have the Shortcuts app open every single time I opened an app (which of course, is a necessary and frequent action on a phone based on apps.) However, thanks to a small but significant change in Shortcuts, I have now happily returned to a home screen with custom app icons, Shortcuts, and widgets. 

Software Updates

In response to the popularity of custom icon creations, Apple changed the way Shortcuts work to open apps. Instead of opening the Shortcuts app as an intermediary between the icon and the app itself, the app is opened directly and a notification is shown across the top. Aside from making the process less visually busy (now using the same animation as opening an app), the notification style makes opening apps from a Shortcut faster.   

Home Screen Changes 

App Icons

I found and downloaded an icon pack of icons with simple images on dark backgrounds. It had icons already made specifically for most of the apps I want on my home screen, and I could fill in the gaps for other apps like Libby, Due, and PCalc with more generic or similar icons. The process of setting up the icons hasn’t changed (since my blog post)[Blog post link].

The one app on my homescreen that is still in its original form is the Messages app because I want to be able to see if I have any unread or unreplied-to texts. The inability to see badge app icons (the little red number at the corner) is now the biggest limitation to custom app icons, but not a dealbreaker for most apps where I don’t use or want them anyway.

Widgets

In addition to the app icons, I use both a Medium and a Small widget stack. My medium stack has a countdown widget to the end of the semester, a widget for my weather app, and a widget for the calendar app. My smaller widget stack has a widget for battery and the music app.

As with anything not fully baked, there is some weirdness, and there are some side effects to having primarily non-original icons on my home screen. I mentioned before the inability to display badge app notifications. It’s also impossible to access the Haptic Touch (long press) shortcuts available on normal apps. There are also occasional bugs where at random, the notification will not show and the app will not respond to touch until it is quit and reopened with the notification from Shortcuts. Despite the downsides and the abnormal behavior, I really enjoy having a home screen that looks completely different from that of any of my friends or my family. And the ability to tinker and set things up the way I want is absolutely worth the inconveniences.