There are more home screen customizations in iOS 14 than ever before. Learn how to customize your iPhone’s wallpaper, dress up your home screen, and set up widgets to make your iPhone more personal.
One of the best parts about setting up your iPhone is customizing it to fit your style. iOS 14 takes it a step further by allowing you to use new Widgets, flexible tiles that will enable you to quickly perform actions or glean information at a glance. We’re here to teach you how to take advantage of some of the most common customization options in iOS 14.
This guide will start with the very basics and walk you through some of the more advanced features, so feel free to jump in wherever you feel most comfortable!
Apple provides plenty of high-quality wallpapers for your iPhone, which saves you the trouble of finding your own. Here’s how you can use one of Apple’s wallpapers on your phone.
Using a custom wallpaper has always been an option, and it hasn’t changed much in iOS 14. Here’s a quick refresher on how to set a custom wallpaper on your iPhone.
iOS 14, like previous versions, allows you to use Perspective Zoom. When toggled on, your iPhone’s wallpaper will move when you tilt your screen. It uses a little more battery than when it’s toggled off, so it is automatically disabled when Low Power Mode is on.
The newest version of iOS has brought an exciting feature — widgets! Widgets are tiles that you can place on your home screen that offer a bit of expanded functionality over something like an icon.
For example, adding a music widget can allow you to see what you were last listening to and enable you to easily jump right back into your favorite playlists.
Of course, there’s a chance that you don’t want to use the official Apple widgets. App developers are beginning to roll out their own apps that allow you to create your own widgets, and we expect there will be plenty available in short order.
Currently, a favorite go-to is Widgetsmith, which you can easily download from the App Store here. Here’s a brief guide on how to use Widgetsmith to make a basic custom widget.
For those of you who are comfortable using the Shortcuts feature, there’s one more thing that you can do to customize your iPhone’s home screen — create and use custom icons for apps. Because you’re executing an app through a shortcut rather than directly, there will be a slight delay — especially on older iPhones. However, this is currently the only Apple-approved way to set your own custom icons.
We won’t be walking you through the process of making or obtaining custom icons, so make sure you have the image you’d like to use downloaded to your iPhone’s photo album.
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