Customizing iPhone Breaking Apple’s Customization Prison
So sometimes you reach a point where you find yourself peeking over that Apple customization prison wall. Do you want to explore the underground ways to get around these restrictions? Maybe make your phone feel a little fresh, a little new.
Because let’s be honest, it’s taken a considerable amount of time for iOS to become a truly customizable experience. This is because Apple has this death grip over their products regarding how they allow you to customize them, which can be a good thing and a bad thing.
So, they built these walls up. Expect you to stay inside them. And then we always have to smuggle in these hacks to create a little bit more of a personalized experience. So, while every one of us is happy with all the new updates we’ve gotten, we aren’t quite there yet.
Customization Of The iPhone Display
We finally got widgets with iOS 14; kind of a step closer to Android-level customization. But we feel like anywhere we place our phone, five different people are checking their phones and all those phones happen to look the same, maybe besides the wallpaper.
So, we want to show you how you can customize your iPhone and go from this basic iOS Apple setup to a clean and smart display. For this, you need to be currently running iOS 16 and above but if you’re running any iOS 16 version, you should be good.
The Groundwork
Before we get started, make sure to download an app called Widget Widget, the Apple Shortcuts app, Flow, and Fluffle. Just go to the App Store, search for the given apps download them, and search for the top given apps and download them as well.
You’ll need them for later these apps are used for Apple customization on the iPhone and play a huge role in the process of making a good Apple display. So just open them and explore the wonders of these apps.
Flow is a pack of 6. Minimal Wallpapers. Each wallpaper has nine different color variants, making the pack a total of 54 wallpaper.
Fluffle is a soft 3D style, modern, and minimal eye compact. You get three styles, colorful, white, and black. 120 icons for each color variant. Once you download both, we recommend that you save the specific wallpaper and icons that you want to use for your setup. Most people tried to make this as simple and easy as possible for convenience and style.
1. Changing The Wallpaper
Now the next step is choosing wallpaper for, you know, whatever you’re into. Now once you pick a wallpaper, set it as your background, and boom, that’s step one. let’s First thing you are going to want to do is change the wallpaper.
We feel like everyone knows how to do this. From the lock screen, you are going to add another wallpaper. This wallpaper is saved and can be whatever you want. You can get them from the browser or an app that depends on your liking. Now add it to the lock screen, and adjust the font to something that will match the widget.
You can add widgets if you’d like, but if you don’t, do want to change this to show the weather. And then all you’re going to do is tap Add, then you’ll tap the Customize home screen turn off the blur effect unless you want to keep it, and then tap Done.
2. Removing All Apps From The Display Screen
Removing apps Now you want to Move all the apps and widgets without removing them individually press the screen and tap on one of the apps. While holding the app, tap on the other apps group them all, and move, them to a blank home screen. Then we’ll tap on the three dots at the bottom and uncheck the second home screen, so it doesn’t show.
Before we open Wiggy one last time, press the screen, and go to a blank home screen. You just swipe to the right and take a screenshot of your screen. Now, in our experience with trying out a lot of these widget apps, we found that the widget widget is the least problematic.
All right, so within this app, there are a ton of options to choose from. The main one that most people have been running lately is called Clean Info. But there’s also a lot of other stuff people have made on here, so you should be able to find something that you want that minimal style, or you want something a little bit more adventurous.
Some are going to be more functional than others. They may look like an Apple keynote summary, either way, if you can’t find exactly what you want, you can also just make one yourself. There are tons of options and there are lots of good ones.
3. Adding Widgets
We’re going to add our wiggy widget. Long press your home screen, and hit the plus icon at the top left. Scroll or search for wiggy scroll over and add the large number one widget and choose from there the widget that best suits your mobile cover and turn dark mode off.
Now let’s open up Wiggy. The name of the widget is 30 by Adele. You can make slight adjustments to it as you like. You can change the color to black text. We think it looks better and we just like the simple clock design and the day of the week and date just look cool.
Now that we have the widget, go to Manage, scroll down look for the large widget slot, and choose the widget. We do need to add a transparent background, so add the screenshot we took before getting into the widget to this place. Tap the check mark, and select—the place you want your widget to be. And now go back to the home screen and we’re almost done.
How To Create a Transparent Widget Using Widget Widget?
So, number one, the first thing you need to do is open Wiggy. Here’s where we’re going to be able to create a transparent widget, and that’s under set transparent Background (Screenshot of the clear home screen). Since you already have a blank page, just hit the check mark and it’ll generate the widget backdrop. It essentially appears transparent because it just matches your wallpaper layer.
From there you then go to the Explore tab and then this is pretty much the marketplace for all the widgets you can find. You’re going to find small, medium, and large widgets that vary from weather reports, calendars, date, and time information. We like that clean info widget, which happens to be a medium slot, so it doesn’t take up half your screen when you place it and all you must do is hit import and it adds the widget to your library.
1. Adding App icons
Now this part is selective and doesn’t need to be done but this is for those people who want to add widgets to the screen of their choice. In this process, you first need to find the images of the widgets that you require, and you need to download them to your gallery to make the account. The image should be of good quality and can be adjusted but it is recommended that it covers the whole screen.
Now, probably the most tedious part of all of this is what we’re going to go through now, and that is creating the shortcuts for our app icon. To continue you already need to have saved icons, so the Photos app. You can save your icon pack in the Files app that Apple has as well. It’s saved as a favorite so you can select the icon that you are going to use easily. Or you can just save it as a photo.
You can predetermine what apps you need to be here just to make it simpler for you. For the top, you would like to have Messages, Safari, Phone, and Music to be there. On the top row, you may want Mail, Maps, Notes, and Photos. And just below that you can have TV, YouTube, Podcast, and Wallet.
2. Using The Shortcut App
Now let’s open the Shortcuts app. Making this type of shortcut is very simple. You’ll need to make 12 or as many apps as you want to display on your home screen.
- So, to start, tab the plus icon, then select Open App.
- Choose the app you want to customize the icon off.
For example, you are going to choose the podcast app of Apple.
You can also rename it, it could be the podcast app or POD for short or no name at all. Just so you have a clear way of identifying which app you’re looking at you can name it whatever you want.
Now you can make the icon the Apple podcast image like the stock photo image. Just so you don’t get confused, you don’t have to do this.
- Tab the drop-down button and you’re going to select Add to home screen.
- If you don’t want to have the app name on your home screen.
- All you must do is click on the option to remove the name.
Then you’re going to tap on the option that allows you to assign it an icon.
Go to photo or Gallery or however way you want to find the icon that you are going to use.
Select the correct image and add it.
Now, if you open podcasts, through your designed Icon you can easily access them without any sort of problem and your icon will have changed to your liking, the dynamic island populates with the shortcuts, so it’s seamless.
Conclusion
We recommend keeping your home screen nice and simple, nothing overcomplicated. So, we have checked out a lot of the widget apps out there, a lot of which are complicated and make it feel like you’re diffusing a bomb. But this one offers you a level of customization without all those ridiculous ads as a widget.
So right from the start, any device you have has a home screen, just take everything, wipe the screen fresh from apps, also try to offload extra junk that you may have, like photos in your gallery. It’s not something that everyone needs to do, but we find that anytime people jump to a new device, sometimes you pull over junk from an old one that you haven’t seen in a while.
Why is it not recommended to use 3rd party Widgets?
Now there’s a bunch of widgets in here that advertise button functionality like dials and knobs to adjust your phone settings. But we found that most of them don’t work well, especially when you compare them to first-party widgets, so we would recommend not relying on them too much. So, whatever you decide on choosing, once you’ve imported it, you can head back over to the Manage tab and then select them.
Do I have to Customize my Widgets?
There’s a ton of customization but if you just keep it to none, we still think it looks pretty good. But yeah, once everything’s all set, all you must do is add the widget to your home screen, which is just a long press. You must go back into the mode and hit the plus find widget and the widget options at the bottom. Then you must scroll to the slot you use, so this is the slot that you assign the widget to.
What Size Widget is best recommended?
Find it in most cases again, medium or small. Throw your essential apps back on screen and then keep the rest in the App Store then you’ve got yourself something a bit different, more personalized, and simple to implement that doesn’t rely on your entire phone being controlled by shortcuts or an oversized widget.