Amazing ways to personalise your iOS 16 Home & Lock screens to make your iPhone unmistakably yours
As long as there have been iPhones, there have been ways to customise and make them your own – from changing the wallpaper to arranging your app icons. But as the handsets have evolved and iOS undergoes multiple updates every year, the possibilities to personalise your device even further have increased. Customisation options have steadily been expanded to allow you to add helpful widgets, design your own app icons and – since the release of iOS 16 last year – even create your own Lock Screen with personalised, at-a-glance info. Over the following pages we’ll leave no option un-tapped in our quest to provide the ultimate iPhone customisation guide.
Master your App Library
The App Library can be accessed by swiping left from your Home Screen and it provides easy access to all of the apps currently installed on your iPhone. But there is a little more to it than meets the eye…
Confine your apps to the library
A good way to start the customisation process is to clean up your Home Screen(s) and rid them of unruly app icons. Here’s how you go about doing that…
In Settings>Home Screen, set the Newly Downloaded Apps option to ‘App Library Only’. This will mean that all downloaded apps will go straight to your App Library.
For existing app icons, long-press on them and choose Remove App>Remove from Home Screen. You can also drag app icons to a new, blank Home Screen…
You can then hide these Home Screens. Press and hold on a blank part of the screen (until the app icons shake), tap the dotted icon just above the Dock, and untick them.
Personalise your wallpaper
The interface through which you can edit your iPhone wallpaper has changed recently to incorporate Lock Screen-editing options too. We’ll come to those later, but here’s how you change the Home Screen look.
Go to Settings>Wallpaper and tap ‘Customise’ under the image of your Home Screen. You can now personalise your existing wallpaper in cool new ways.
Wallpaper Legibility Blur was added with iOS 16 and tapping the option will blur your Home Screen wallpaper subtly so that the icons and widgets stand out more.
If your wallpaper looks drab and not pleasing on the eye when you tap ‘Blur’, go to Settings>Accessibility>Display & Text Size and turn off the ‘Reduce Transparency’ option.
Back on the main Settings>Wallpaper screen, tap ‘Add New Wallpaper’ and you will be presented with a variety of sections and themes. The Live Wallpapers of old are gone.
To pick an image of your own, tap on ‘Photos’. This will be applied to your Lock Screen by default. Tap Add>Set as Wallpaper Pair. But what if you w
