We install a lot of apps on our iPhones. Some apps such as e-mail, messengers, shopping, browsers, etc. have frequent usage. While we do not use other apps such as banking apps, games, etc. that frequently. All these apps make the home screen cluttery and crowded. What if you could do something to maintain a clean and organized home screen? Is there a way to hide unused apps? If so, how to hide apps on iPhone? This is a common question among iPhone users.
If you have the same doubt regarding hiding iPhone apps, then this guide is just for you. Here, we will see different ways to hide apps on iPhone.
Why Would You Want to Hide Apps on iPhone?
There is an app for everything. Online shopping, OTT, Games, Banking, Office, and Productivity. You name a category. There is an app for that.
When we install all these apps on our iPhones, the home screen becomes messy.
An easy solution to clean up the home page is to hide unused or less frequently used apps.
Another reason to hide iPhone apps is to keep certain apps private from appearing on the home screen.
Is it possible to hide iPhone apps? Yes. You can hide apps on your iPhone. The next question is how to hide Apps on iPhone. The solution is quite simple.
How to Hide Apps on iPhone?
Irrespective of the reason, if you decided to hide some or all apps on your iPhone, then continue reading.
Hide Apps from iPhone’s Home Screen
Let us begin with an easy and simple way to hide an app from iPhone.
- Look for the app you want to hide. Long press on the app’s icon for a couple of seconds.
- A menu pops up with some generic options as well as app-specific options.
- At the end, you can see a ‘Remove App’ option. Tap on it.
- You will now get further options associated with removing the app. The options are ‘Delete App’, ‘Remove from Home Screen’, and ‘Cancel’.
- As you might have guessed, select the ‘Remove from Home Screen’ option.
- The app is now hidden from the Home Screen but you can still access it from the App Library.
NOTE: To access App Library, swipe all the way to the right from your Home Screens.
Dump Apps into a Folder and Hide Them
You can follow the above procedure and hide any number of apps. But an easy way is to group all the unnecessary apps into a folder and hide them. Interesting, right?
- You can use an already existing folder or create a new folder. To create a folder, drag and drop an app on another app.
- Add as many apps as you want in this folder.
- Make sure that you also add the app which you want to hide.
- Now, open the folder. Tap and hold the app which you want to hide and drag it to the right of the folder.
- This action creates a new page within the folder.
- Do this for all the apps you want to hide.
- If you are wondering how this works, it is very simple. Only the apps on the first page of the folder are visible. All the apps on the second page or any further page are hidden from the home screen.
Hide an Entire Screen/Page
The previous method of using folders to hide apps is okay but there is a better way to hide multiple apps on iPhone. You can place all the apps that you want to hide on a home screen and hide the screen/page itself.
For this, you need iOS 14 or a later version on your iPhone.
- Long press anywhere on your Home Screen, usually a blank space at the bottom.
- This will enter the edit mode. You can see the page dots at the bottom of the screen. Tap on these dots.
- Here, you can see all the pages of the home screen. Each page has a checkmark just below it. When a page has a check mark, it means the page is visible on the Home Screen.
- To hide a page, remove the checkmark of that page.
- Tap on ‘Done’ in the upper right corner of the screen to apply the changes.
- Only the pages which you selected will appear on the Home Screen when you swipe through. You can easily reverse this process.
What Happens to Hidden Apps?
You took all this effort to hide unnecessary and unused apps on your iPhone. But what exactly happens to those hidden apps?
Don’t worry. When you hide an App on iPhone, you are just changing its visibility from the home screen. This action won’t delete or uninstall the app.
- You can find hidden apps by searching for them in the search bar of the App Library.
- An alternative way to open the app is to command Siri. Just activate Siri and say “Open [app]”.
Hide Apps from Search
From the above section, it is clear that you can easily access hidden apps using the search or Siri. But what if you want apps not to appear in these search results? You can hide apps from appearing in the search or Siri results.
- Open the Settings of your iPhone.
- Look for ‘Siri & Search’ option and open it.
- This will list out all the apps on your iPhone.
- Select the app that you want to hide from search results.
- Now, turn off the ‘Show App in Search’ option.
- You can see there are several other options associated with the app.
- To stop the app from appearing in smart suggestions and other notifications, turn off the following: ‘Learn from this App’, ‘Show Content in Search’, ‘Show on Home Screen’, ‘Suggest App’, and ‘Suggest Notifications’.
Hide App Purchases from App Store
One final method of hiding apps on your iPhone is to hide them from purchase history. This is very important especially if you have a family group, where anyone can see all the apps.
- Open ‘App Store’ on your iPhone.
- From the top right corner, click on your profile picture to open Account Settings.
- Tap on the ‘Purchased’ option. If you have Family Sharing, you need to tap on the ‘My Purchases’ option.
- This will list out all the apps that you purchased from the app store.
- Look for the app you want to hide and swipe left on the app.
- This action will hide the app from purchase history.
- Once you are done hiding all the apps, tap on ‘Done’ at the top right corner.
Conclusion
Whether it is to clear the home screen or to keep some apps private, many users are looking to hide apps on their iPhones. If you don’t know how to hide apps on iPhone, then we covered everything about that topic here.
In this guide, we saw multiple ways to hide apps on iPhone. We hope that this guide was helpful to you. If you have a better way to hide apps on iPhone, then do share it with us.
