(upbeat music)
- Hey, it's Chaim with The Verge,
and today we're gonna be customizing our iPhone home screen.
Now for years,
every iPhone looked more or less exactly the same,
but with iOS 14, Apple added widgets
and new workarounds for customizing icons,
causing a huge boom in bespoke iPhone themes.
Now, if you're an Android user, this is old news to you,
like over a decade old,
but with 90% of iPhones running iOS 14 now,
there's no shortage of awesome themes being shown off.
Adding them isn't exactly straightforward though.
In this video, we're gonna show you the basics,
how to fully customize your home screen.
And with iOS 15, so you can make your phone
automatically go from this at home
to this when you're at work.
The first thing you'll want to do is make a plan
for what home screen you'd like.
There are tons of great resources for inspiration,
Pinterest, Reddit, icon packs on Etsy.
Next, make a note of what apps
you'd like to have on your home screen.
Most icon packs should include most of the popular apps,
but if you're using less popular ones
like a specific game or calendar app,
you might have to be a little more creative
when selecting an icon.
Once you have your icons,
you can download them directly from your phone's browser
by clicking save image,
or by importing the images into the Files app
using iCloud Drive.
Finally, you're gonna want to grab a wallpaper,
and if you need some ideas, the Verge has excellent ones.
Let's start with the easiest thing to change,
your wallpaper.
Now, a lot of you probably already know how to do this one.
So feel free to skip ahead.
If you don't though, head over to settings, wallpaper,
and then hit choose a new wallpaper.
From there, just select one from your photo album
or from the Apple defaults, if you're boring,
and then tap on it to set it.
An important thing to note here
is that iOS icons don't allow for image transparency.
So if you want a floating icon effect,
you're gonna need to make sure that your wallpaper color
matches the icon background for whatever icons you have.
Next is widgets, which were introduced back in iOS 14
and add a whole new dimension
to customizing your home screen.
Again, Android users have had this for a while,
but iOS users only got them recently.
To add a widget, you're gonna tap and hold
on your home screen the plus button,
and then you can scroll through all your widgets over here.
Gonna grab a widget.
You can see the different sizes and options
for widgets that you have, yeah?
Hit the add widget button,
it'll place it on your home screen.
Now, widgets can also be put in stacks
if they're the same size.
So I can tap and hold this widget,
drop it into this stack over here,
and then I can easily scroll through all those widgets
without taking up so much space.
All right, let's theme.
Now to start, I suggest adding a second home screen
and hiding your regular layout
just in case you want to switch back when you're done.
I'm going to warn you,
this whole process can be pretty wonky.
So to create a custom icon,
you're gonna want to head to Shortcuts,
which should be pre-installed on your phone.
But if it's not, you can install it on the App Store.
Now, Shortcuts is a pretty complicated app.
So we're gonna try and make this simple.
We're gonna open the Shortcut app,
and we're gonna hit the plus button in this corner
to create a new shortcut.
Now, the thing we want to do here is open an app.
So we're gonna add an action.
We're gonna type in open app, and we're gonna open an app.
We'll find an app on our phone, let's say the Camera app.
And now I've already done the shortcut.
This is the action that we want it to take.
Now, we want icons though.
So we have to do an additional step,
which is we're gonna hit the share button.
We're going to add to home screen.
And now here's where the magic happens.
So here's where I give it the shortcut name,
which will be the label on my phone.
So maybe you don't like camera.
Maybe I want this say photography.
Now I need an icon.
So I'm gonna hit choose file.
And I already have this folder
of these great icons I made earlier
out of the original Windows 98 icons.
So I'll get this great camera icon, add,
and there it is on my home screen.
And when I tap it,
it'll take me right to the camera app.
Now, there are a lot of quirks here.
Using shortcuts means that you have to create a new shortcut
for each individual app icon that you want to change,
which is really time consuming and really boring.
Worse, every time that you open an app
using that custom icon,
you'll see an annoying dropdown banner notification
from shortcuts letting you know
that it's doing exactly what you asked it to do.
And while there used to be a pretty annoying hacky way
to get around that and block them,
it doesn't seem to work in iOS 15 anymore.
So you're more or less stuck with them.
To take things to the next level,
you're gonna want some widgets to match.
Widgetsmith is one of the most popular apps
out there for this
because you can use it to just display images
that work well with your theme, like say a Windows 98 icon,
or you can use it to create themed calendar
and clock widgets that match your color scheme,
font and aesthetic.
So we're gonna open the app
and we're going to select the type of widget we want.
You have small, medium and large,
which are the three iOS widget sizes.
I'm gonna just go with the medium.
That's kind of what I want for here.
I'm gonna go with a default widget,
and now you have lots of different options.
We have date, we have time, we have weather,
we have step counting, health activity, calendar,
reminders, tides, astronomy, lots of choices.
Now, I just kind of want a simple clock and calendar.
So we'll find that and select it.
Now, as you can see, we're gonna keep basic.
I don't really need any hearts or apple colors.
Maybe we'll go with terminal actually.
Got that retro feel.
We're gonna customize it
because I don't really like these colors.
Got this nice blocky, retro font.
Background color, though, doing like a Windows 98.
So let's go with more of a teal.
And then for my font color,
let's just go with a simple white.
So we hit save and apply it to this widget,
and we're ready to go.
Go and hit the plus button again,
go and find Widgetsmith, add a medium widget.
We're gonna choose that medium two
that I just made before, and then it'll show up.
All that's technically old news though.
But iOS 15 adds an additional wrinkle to widgets
and custom map icon called focus modes,
which as a side effect
also allow you to selectively show and hide
whole pages of your home screen, widgets and all,
whenever 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 when you're in the office,
and a regular home screen with social media apps
and music widgets for when you're off the clock.
But since focus modes let you choose home screens,
you can combine them with widgets in short cuts to, say,
create a perfectly themed Windows 98 layout
with your icons and widgets and everything
that you can call up at a moment's notice
to impress your friends without having to go through
and manually hide all your homepages every time.
Once you've got your home screen set up,
here's how to enable focus mode to automatically trigger it.
Now, again, to do this,
you'll need to be either running the iOS 15 public beta,
or if iOS 15 is out by the time you're watching this,
just regular iOS 15.
So you're gonna go to settings,
you're gonna hit focus,
then we're gonna create a new focus mode.
We'll do a custom one here called Windows.
Hit this color.
Hit this icon.
Hit next.
It doesn't really matter for notifications.
So we're just gonna, you can go right through these.
Okay, our focus is ready.
Now, the important thing here
is we're gonna go to home screen.
I'm gonna do custom pages.
We're only gonna let it show our main page
that we have over here,
which is the one that we've laid out
with our custom widgets and our custom icons.
Now, whenever I go and set that Windows notification,
it hides all my other home screens
and just shows me the Windows icons.
Well, let's say we want to take this a little further
because focus will let you get to just showing you
your custom icons, but not the wallpaper.
So what we're gonna do is we're gonna use shortcuts
to actually kind of hack our way through that too.
We'll use shortcuts.
We're gonna create a new shortcut
that'll automatically set a wallpaper.
So you have to set an album
with whatever wallpaper you want, which I've already done.
And you're gonna set up a shortcut that looks like this.
Then you're gonna go over to automation over here
because one of the things you can do with automation
is use focus modes as a trigger to do things.
So what we've done is we've built an automation
that automatically changes our wallpaper
to our Windows 98 theme.
And we've set it up so that whenever we turn Windows 98 on,
it'll run that shortcut.
So now I have all my automations set up.
So now I can hit the focus button, hit my Windows 98 theme,
and you can see it as pretty janky.
You still have to hit the set wallpaper button over.
With just one button,
I've turned my phone into Windows 98.
So that's pretty cool.
Now, again, this is a really janky setup.
And if you're using this to change your wallpaper,
you will either have to set up more automations
to switch back, which is even more hacky,
or just manually reset it every time.
But it is pretty cool.
(upbeat music)
All these hoops you have to jump through
highlight just how difficult it is
to really customize your iPhone.
You have to remember, it took Apple years
before it let you even 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.
The steps that Apple's taken though
are some of the biggest concessions
that it's ever made towards customization,
which means that there's still hopes for future updates
that'll let you truly customize
how your iPhone looks in the future.
Thanks so much for watching.
We've got links in the description
for this cool Windows 98 theme that we've made,
virtual papers and other how-to guides
for customizing your iPhone.
And if you've gone and themed your iPhone,
send me a picture on Twitter.