How to use the App Library

 

A year after its launch on iPhone, the App Library is now on iPadOS.

Here’s a quick guide to how it works.

As you can see, this is what the App Library looks like on the iPad.

If I tap on an empty space to go back to my Home Screen you’ll also see a new button on the right hand side of the Dock.

Tapping on here brings up the App Library at any time.

However, just like on the iPhone, you can also swipe your Home Screens all the way to the right hand side and the very far right page will bring up that App Library for you as well.

For those unfamiliar with how App Library works, all of the Apps on the iPad are grouped automatically into categories such as Entertainment or Education or Productivity.

Some of the App Icons are full size and if you tap on them that will open the App straight away for you.

But other App Icons down in the bottom right hand corner of each folder are slightly smaller.

For example if I look at the Education category and then tap the four small Apps in the bottom corner I’ll get all of the Apps in the Education section.

Then I can tap onto one like Swift Playgrounds and it’ll open it normally for me.

The great thing about this is that it means you can free up a lot of space on your Home Screen and you haven’t got to have every single icon visible all the time.

Tap and hold on any App to enter Jiggle Mode and then at the bottom where you’ve got the little dots indicating the number of pages – tap onto there.

You now get this brand new screen where you can view and adjust your pages of your Home Screen really, really quickly.

At the moment you can see clearly I’ve got four pages of Apps on my Home Screen but if I untick the bottom two pages and then come out of Jiggle Mode, I’ve now only got two pages of Apps visible.

I’ve basically hidden those other two pages.

They’re still there and if I go back into Jiggle Mode I could re-enable them if I wanted to, or I could press Delete in the top left corner.

Don’t panic! We’re not actually going to delete all of those Apps from the iPad – instead we’re going to remove that page and then all of those Apps will still be accessible in the App Library.

When I come out of Jiggle Mode I’ve still got the two pages I’ve chosen to keep, but if I go into my App Library I can pull up any of those Apps really quickly and really easily.

My last piece of advice about using the App Library to tidy up your Home Screen is that you can do this on individual Apps.

You haven’t got to get rid of a whole page in one go, so choose an App you want to get rid of and tap and hold it and then press the Delete button in the top.

Now you’ve got a new option.

You can Delete the App (which will uninstall it and remove it completely) or you can remove it from your Home Screen.

This will delete the icon but keep it in the App Library.

And that’s it, you can now organise your Apps like you’ve never been able to before on the iPad and in my opinion it makes it so much more efficient to use.

You’re not scrolling through eight pages of Apps to find the one you want – you can jump straight into App Library and navigate to just a few taps.

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