One of the big new features in iOS 18 is the ability to apply Dark Mode to your home screen. This means your icons and wallpaper, which of course reduces glare when you’re using your phone at night, but also, it looks really, really cool in my opinion.

To turn on Dark Mode for our icons, I’m simply going to tap and hold my home screen and then press Edit in the top left corner. From here, we’ll press Customise to bring up the new icon customiser. I’m going to tap on Dark at the bottom, and you’ll see my whole home screen has now changed. The wallpaper’s got a little bit dimmer, and all of my icons have gone very, very dark.

Now, don’t worry if your favourite app hasn’t had its icon changed yet. The system will work very hard to find icons that developers have made to change, or if it can’t find a dark icon, it will try and create one for you based on the AI built into your phone.

You’ll also notice that my actual wallpaper has gone slightly dim and slightly dark here as well. That’s a setting you can change if you want to, simply by pressing this icon here. That means you can have dark icons with a light wallpaper, or you can have light icons with a dark wallpaper.

Now that we’ve seen what Dark Mode looks like, I’m going to jump onto the Automatic tab, which means that my phone will automatically switch between light and dark mode whenever I set it to do that. Now, the icons and home screen will change as well. I can quickly check this out by simply activating Siri and asking it to turn on Dark Mode. Just like that, my icons and home screen have all changed to match the new Dark Mode on my system.

And of course, if I go into Control Centre, I can enable Light Mode, and everything will change back again just as you’d expect.

Now that iOS 18 has been released, there are so many more things your phone can do that it simply couldn’t do before. I’ve spent my summer playing with iOS 18, and I’ve made a ton of QuickTip videos on my channel down below. But excitingly, I’ve also written my first eBook! I’ve called it 100 QuickTips for iOS 18, and if you follow the link below, I promise you’ll find things you never knew your phone could do now that you’ve updated to iOS 18. I’ll see you next time!