The biggest headline of iOS 18 is undoubtedly Apple Intelligence, but if there’s one larger theme for the release, it’s customization.
iOS 18 lets you personalize your iPhone experience like never before. There are new tools for arranging apps and widgets, changing your app icon colors, customizing Control Center, replacing the flashlight and camera buttons, and more. Apple has even made several of its individual apps newly customizable, like Photos.
Get ready to customize your iPhone like never before in iOS 18.
Free placement of Home Screen apps and widgets
From the earliest versions of iOS, the iPhone’s Home Screen has required apps to be placed on a strict grid. Want an app in the bottom corner? First you had to fill in all the space above it with other apps.
iOS 18 brings introduces much more freedom to the app grid. Now, you can leave empty space anywhere on the screen and put, say, just a couple apps or a single widget near the bottom of the screen. This can be especially nice when you have a wallpaper subject that you don’t want covered up by apps.
App icon design: color tints and jumbo icons
iOS 18 also offers new tools for changing how app icons look on your Home Screen.
You can apply a tint to all your app icons so they look uniform. By long-pressing on your Home Screen then pressing Edit, you’ll be able to select the color that all your app icons are tinted with.
This is the same place you can choose to make all your app icons larger and hide their names from being displayed.
Powerful new Control Center
With Control Center in iOS 18, you can prioritize the controls you care about most with more power than ever.
In iOS 18 controls can be added or removed directly from the Control Center view itself, and you can modify controls to make them larger or smaller—similar to what’s possible with Home Screen widgets. Soon, third-party apps will be able to make their own controls available for your use.
Controls can now live across multiple pages. By default there are dedicated pages for media playback, Home, and connectivity, but nothing’s stopping you from ignoring or removing those altogether and assembling your own custom pages of go-to controls.
Replace flashlight and camera buttons
For the first time, the iPhone’s flashlight and camera buttons can be replaced on the Lock Screen. You can replace these controls with any of the variety of controls supported by Control Center, including third-party options.
You can still only have two Lock Screen buttons, but Apple does let you set different controls for different custom Lock Screens—a nice touch.
Customizing Apple’s apps to your liking
Customization doesn’t stop at system-wide tools. In several cases, even Apple’s individual apps have gained new customization powers.
- Photos: The major redesign of Photos in iOS 18 brings powerful new abilities to customize nearly every aspect of the app, including what types of collections it displays, how your library is sorted and filtered, and more.
- Reminders: Other than Reminders being integrated into the Calendar app, one of its other main iOS 18 updates is that you can reorder the sections in your Today list, such as moving overdue reminders to the bottom.
- Fitness: Even the Fitness app is getting in on the customization game. Now you can modify the Summary screen to display only the data you want to see, whether that’s your Activity Rings, trainer tips, or any of the many other options.
Wrap-up
There once was a day when it seemed like Apple would never provide powerful customization options on the iPhone. The company’s opinionated designs that sought to serve all users were intended to provide a simpler, more elegant experience.
Whether you preferred those times or not, they are certainly gone and done with. iOS 18 makes your iPhone more personalized than ever, and I’m fascinated to see how users take advantage of its customization tools this fall.
How do you plan to customize your iPhone? Are there any customization options still missing? Let us know in the comments.
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