How To Move App Icons on an iPhone

Organize your phone and clean up your Home screen by moving around your iPhone app icons.

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Part of the fun of owning a modern smartphone is setting it up for individual needs. Some owners don't much mind where their app icons or widgets go, while others prefer to move their icons around either for ease of workflow or just to nail down a specific visual aesthetic. Either way, here's how to toggle the iPhone Edit mode to rearrange or otherwise move app icons on any iPhone model.

How To Move App Icons on an iPhone

It's become easier and easier to fill up the iPhone's home screen with various app icons. After all, every time a new game or application is installed, a fresh icon will appear either on the Home screen or in an app menu so that the user can find their way back to the software. And while that's all fine and dandy, many users prefer to keep their most frequently used shortcuts front and center, and push lesser-used app icons to distant pages or convenient folders.

Fortunately, moving icons is as simple as can be. With the phone powered on and the screen displaying the page with icons to be moved, lightly press and hold on an app icon to send entire the page's icons jittering. Though it may look like the icons now fear for their lives, this is just the phone's way of visually indicating that the user has entered the Edit mode. Once the app icons are all wiggly, users can tap and drag on any icon they wish to move, using a second finger to tap additional icons in order to move several icons at once.

Be warned that the iPhone will try to place the icon in whichever place the user drags it to, meaning the system could wind up rearranging more than the active icon in question. To put the icon on a new page, users can drag the icon to the side of the screen — and if a second Home screen doesn't exist, one will be created. Alternatively, users can also stack several icons together to form a new folder that can be used to group together similar apps. To do this, just drag and hold the app icon over another icon to create and open a new folder.

Once the app icons have been moved and the user is satisfied with the results, the last step is exit the Edit mode by pressing the Home button. For users running the iPhone X, exiting the Edit mode is accomplished by tapping on the Done button in the upper right-hand corner.

We've got loads of handy guides for iPhone users, so be sure to head over to our ever-expanding iPhone page to discover plenty of great tips, tricks, how-tos, and more.

Guides Editor

Kevin Tucker is a core component of Shacknews' powerful guide development team. For questions, concerns, tips, or to share constructive criticism, he can be reached on Twitter @dukeofgnar or through e-mail at kevin.tucker@shacknews.com.

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