What’s the first thing you notice about the app icons in the home screen images shown below? iOS 18 adds several advancements to customizing your iPhone and iPad home screens, including changing the style and color of app icons.
Stepping beyond the basics I presented in Reorganize Your Apps, you can now also remove app names, have icons that blend better in Dark Mode, and highlight them with any color of the rainbow.
Assuming you’ve upgraded to iOS 18, to make any of the adjustments described here, begin with a long-press on your home screen wallpaper and tap Edit > Customize.
Remove App Names
Do you recognize your apps by icon or by name? If the former, the simplest change you might make to your home screen is to make icons a little bigger and eliminate displaying their names.
Simply toggle between Small and Large to see what style you like best.
Light or Dark App Icons
Another element of the Customize panel is to change the appearance of app icons. Many developers have already designed alternative dark versions of their icons.
If you prefer, you can choose Light to always show the light variant of icons or Dark to always show the dark variant. Or, you can choose Automatic to automatically change the appearance of app icons when your device switches between Light and Dark modes.
The toggle between Light and Dark appearance has been present in since iOS 13. Currently, there are three ways to toggle this:
- Manually in Settings > Display & Brightness
- Manually in Control Center after a long-press on Brightness
- Automatically in Settings > Display & Brightness > Options, either with sunrise and sunset or on your own custom schedule
Tinted App Icons
For another approach to customization of app icons, you can change their highlight tint. iOS will change the primary color elements of all icons, even for icons whose developers haven’t provided dark versions.
iOS intelligently chooses the default tint color based on the colors in your wallpaper. However, you can pick any color in the visible spectrum using the sliders at the bottom. Or, tap 
(eyedropper) and select a specific color in your wallpaper.
Dim Wallpaper
When making icon coloration Dark or Tinted, the default is to also dim the wallpaper. In any of these home screen modes, you can manually toggle the brightness of the wallpaper with 
or 
in the top left of the panel.
How will you customize your home screen? Has this post inspired you to change up the appearance of your app icons or anything else about the way they’re organized? Sound off in the comments…
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