My iPhone is a bit of a mess. My front page contains the apps I use the most, but the rest of my pages are in a random order that slightly resembles the order in which I purchased the apps, shuffled in my attempts to move apps to my front page. Sound familiar?
The linked article talks you through the relatively simple process of sorting all your apps in alphabetical order. This might not work for all people, but it does make it much easier to home in on an app when you have 9 pages of apps. Searching helps you launch an app, but it does not help you locate the app’s icon, in case you want to move or delete the app.
One thing I’d add to the discussion is the evolution of iTunes’ ability to organize your iOS device. If you haven’t plugged your iPhone or iPad into your Mac for a while, take a few minutes to plug in and see what you can currently do with iTunes. You can easily create new pages and drag pages and apps around. You can even use iTunes to transfer files between your iOS device and computer.
As the blog suggested, I would take a snapshot of my home screen, then put my apps in alphabetical order. I would then use iTunes to create a new blank home screen (click the plus sign on the Apps page, drag the new page to be first) and repopulate the new empty page with my favorites.
Any other suggestions or favorite technique? Leave a comment.
What I want more than anything is a way to list all of my apps in order of last launch date, that would totally help me find and delete apps that haven’t been touched in a long time
Using iTunes, you can sort your apps by date (I believe it is the purchase date). Not exactly what you want, but each app has a big Install or Remove button (only one of those) and the scrolling is much faster now. So sort by date, go to the bottom (oldest) and scan for a Remove button. I find that let’s me quickly locate those older apps that I no longer use.
I have my front page organized by colour (looks great, and is very functional since most apps have some sort of monochromatic scheme that carries over to their app’s icon). Beyond that, I utilize folders heavily, and within that, I go by most used – a highly manual process.
A feature I’d love to see is some way to allow apps to belong in multiple folders: for example, Plex, the spectacular media streamer for home media, should belong in Media Streaming, as well as Movies. Currently, I have to choose which is the better fit, but a taxonomy which allows for multiple ‘categories’ for an app (folders implying categories) would be superb!
Isn’t that effectively what the multi-tasking UI does?
I’ve given up on organizing. I keep a few daily use apps as icons, everything else goes into category folders. I NEVER open folders. A quick swipe down and one or two keystrokes into Spotlight, and I’m golden. I have 262 apps on my phone, in only 2 pages. One home page, and one page of folders with everything else.
Outside of a few things on my first homepage, most everything is launched from Spotlight for me.
I put all the apps I routinely use in one of several folders that populate the dock and home screen.
New apps automatically go to different pages and the ones I use frequently get promoted to one of the folders.
When storage space gets close to full, I connect to iTunes and bulk delete all the apps I haven’t used in a while.
I’m not sure what the utility of alphabetical order is…
I have mine grouped in folders with like functions like:
Audio (music, shazam, radio stations, gargaeband, pandora, etc.)
Visual (camera, photos, videos, remote, vlc, hulu, cvs, youtube, pbs, etc.)
Time (clock, alarms, wave timer, speed box, calendar, etc.)
Space (compass, sky view, maps, tom-tom, google earth, map quest, atlas, etc.)
Wallet (banks, credit cards, loyalty cards, cardstar, passbook, etc.)
search (white pages, find friends, duckduckgo, flight radar 24, etc.)
and as Yul Brynner as the King used to say:
etc…
etc…
etc…