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How to hide apps on your iPhone
The ability to hide iPhone apps without deleting them was introduced in iOS 14, and it’s something everyone should take advantage of — many apps are used rarely or only in the background, so there’s no sense cluttering your homescreen. Here’s how to hide apps on an iPhone, and if you want, even prevent them from showing up in search results.
See also: How to find hidden apps on your iPhone
QUICK ANSWER
To hide a single app from your iPhone's homescreen, tap and hold its icon. Choose Remove App from the resulting pop-up menu, then Remove from Home Screen. You can hide multiple apps simultaneously by dragging them into a new homescreen page, tapping and holding the dot row just above the dock, then unchecking the extra page. Hit Done and the page will disappear.
JUMP TO KEY SECTIONS
How to hide an app from your iPhone’s homescreen
Once you’ve updated an iPhone to iOS 14 or later, hiding a single app is quick and simple.
- On your homescreen, find the app you’re looking to hide, then tap and hold its icon.
- In the pop-up menu that appears, choose Remove App.
- Next tap Remove from Home Screen. Be careful here — if you hit Delete App by accident, you’ll have to download the app again, and you may lose associated data. As a consolation, re-downloaded apps appear only in the App Library at first, not on your homescreen.
So what happens when you hide an app? It’s still on your iPhone, but only accessible via search, tapping notifications, or opening the App Library. Swipe all the way past your right-most homescreen page to see the Library.
How to hide multiple apps from your iPhone’s homescreen
To hide multiple apps at once, you can’t select several of them directly. What you can do is shuffle them off to a separate homescreen page, then hide that page.
Follow these steps:
- Tap and drag any unwanted apps all the way past your right-most existing homescreen page. This should generate an entirely new page.
- Tap and hold on the dot row just above the homescreen dock. You’ll see a view of all your pages at once.
- Uncheck the page with your unwanted apps and tap Done.
One advantage of this approach is that if you want those apps back, it’s just a matter of repeating the process then turning the checkmark back on. Homescreen pages are never deleted until you drag all apps away from them.
How to hide apps from iPhone search results
We’d recommend against this option in most circumstances. If you want to remove all traces of an app, you might as well delete it, and if not, search makes it easier to track apps down when they’re needed. Conceivably, though, there can be privacy concerns, or it might be irritating to have some apps (like Stocks) show up in search results when you’re trying to scour the web.
Do this to hide an iPhone app from search:
- Open the Settings app.
- Select Siri & Search.
- Scroll down until you find the app list, then tap on the app you want to hide.
- Toggle off Show App in Search.
In some cases, there may also be a Show Content in Search toggle. Turn this off if you don’t want data from inside the app to appear in searches — like the contents of Notes.
FAQs
Yes. It’s called the App Library, and you can find it by swiping all the way to the right on your homescreen. Apps are organized into folders by category, or you can search for an app by name. You can add items from the App Library to your homescreen by tapping and holding on them.