One of the new features in iOS 18 to help customise your home screen is the ability to hide apps so they don’t show up anymore. That means they won’t show up on the home screen or in search. You won’t even get notifications from them. So, all we need to do is tap and hold the icon—I’ll use YouTube in this case—and then, on that new menu that comes up, we’re going to press ‘Require Face ID’ or ‘Require Touch ID’ if your phone supports that.

From here, I don’t want to just lock the app; I want to completely hide it. So, I’m going to choose ‘Hide and Require Face ID.’ When you do that, you get this confirmation screen just letting you know what’s about to happen. Your app icon is going to disappear from across the entirety of iOS, and you won’t get notifications or alerts, and it won’t show up in the search results either. I’m going to go ahead and enable this, and you’ll see, just like that, YouTube has gone from my home screen.

But you might be thinking, “Well, that’s great to hide the app, but what if I want to use it myself?” Now it’s gone; I obviously can’t tap it on the home screen. If I pull down to go into Spotlight and search for YouTube, it’s not going to show up there. So, how do I open that app? Well, the trick is to go all the way across your home screen to the App Library at the end. You won’t find it by searching in here, but if you go down to the very bottom, there’s a hidden section simply called ‘Hidden,’ and all the icons are grey.

To view this hidden section, you have to use Face or Touch ID. When I tap onto it, it will authenticate me, just like this. From here, I can then see that YouTube app icon, and when I tap onto it, it will do another Face ID check to make sure it’s me that’s using the device. Then, I can use the app as normal. If I come out of here and go back to that hidden folder, the clever thing here is you don’t know how many apps are in that hidden folder—there may be none, there may be 20—and the only person that can access it is you using your Face ID or your Touch ID authentication.

Of course, I can turn this feature off simply by long pressing the app icon from that hidden folder and then selecting ‘Don’t Require Face ID.’ At that point, it will leave the hidden folder and go back to your iPhone as normal. It will appear in search results, in settings, you’ll get notifications, and you can drag that icon back onto the home screen if you want to.

There are loads and loads of different ways that you can actually customise your home screen on iOS 18. In fact, there are tons of things that you can do right across your phone that I bet you didn’t know about. If you want to learn more about what iOS 18 now enables you to do, then I’ll just quickly point out that I’ve written an ebook this year for the first time with “100 Quick Tips for iOS 18.” These are things that are guaranteed to make your phone more useful than ever before. If you’re not interested in that, please do check out my YouTube channel anyway, because there are hundreds and hundreds of iPhone quick tips there to help you make the most of your device. And that’s it. I’ll see you next time.