Rearrange and Hide Home Screens on the iPad

Learn how to rearrange your home screens and hide homes screens on the iPad.

Did you know you could rearrange your home screens on the iPad? As well as hide home screens? Why would you want to do this? I found it helpful to arrange my homes screens by task, and then view only the apps for that task (this really works well with the new Focus mode Apple introduced in iPadOS 15). You can easily rearrange these home screens, as well as hide them altogether. See how to rearrange and hide home screens in this video for the iPad.

Video TranscriptIn this video, I’m going to show you how you can manage your home screens on the iPad. What we’re able to do is rearrange our different home screens, as well as hide them. Let’s see how this works on the iPad. Let’s go to my iPad.

So I’m looking at my iPad here, and if we look down towards the bottom, you’re going to see I have different home screens here. Each one of these dots signifies a home screen. So when I swipe over to the left, I’m looking at a different home screen. I swipe over to the left again. I’m looking at another home screen.

What we’re able to do is rearrange these as well as hide them. The first thing we need to do is go into our jiggly mode where we can edit our home screens. Now, there are two ways to do this. The way that most people are familiar with is by tapping and holding on an app icon. When I tap and hold on this or long press on it, we get a menu that pops up and then if I keep holding it, you’re going to see it gets into the jiggling mode.

There is an easier way, or I should say a faster way to do this. I’m going to tap outside here to get out of the smoke. All I need to do is just tap and hold on any area where there is not an app icon. So this area here, I do not have an app icon. When I do that, I do not get that pop-up menu. It just goes immediately into that jiggly mode. So I’m going to tap it. And we’re in our jiggly mode. So if you want it to manage your home screens, without managing the actual apps, what I would recommend is just long pressing on any area outside of an app icon, let’s go back to our home screens.

You’re going to see, I have my home screens here to manage these home screens. If you want it to rearrange them or hide them. What I do is I tap on. And we can see all of our different home screens. Here are my three home screens. I can see thumbnails of the three home screens to rearrange them. I just drag them around. So I just take this and drag it and I can rearrange them. So now this home screen here is going to be my first home screen.

If I want to hide it, let’s go ahead and hide this home screen here. All I do is just tap on the check mark. You do not tap on the home screen or the thumbnail itself. What you need to do is tap on the check mark. I tap on it, that check mark disappears. And now that home screen will no longer show on my iPad. I tap on it again and it’ll show.

When you are done, you can tap on Done or what you can do is tap anywhere outside of one of the thumbnails. It brings you back to that home screen. Tap again to get out of that jiggling mode.

So that’s how we rearrange and hide our home screens on the iPad. To edit our home screens or to rearrange them or hide them, what we need to do is go into our jiggly mode. I find the best way of doing that is just by long pressing on an area that is not an app icon. When you do that, the iPad will almost immediately go into the jiggly mode. From there, you tap on the dots down at the bottom that represents your home screens. You’re going to see thumbnails of all of your different home screens. You can drag them to rearrange them. And then below each one of those thumbnails is a check mark. To hide that home screen, you’re just tap on the check mark. It will remove that check mark, and it’ll remove that home screen from being shown on the iPad. It’ll still be there, it’s just going to be hidden.

So that’s how we manage our home screens on the iPad.