 Hey, it's Chaim with The Verge, and today, we're going to be customizing our iPhone home screen. Now, for years, every iPhone looked more or less exactly the same. But with iOS 14, Apple added widgets and new workarounds for customizing icons, causing a huge boom in bespoke iPhone themes. Now, if you're an Android user, this is old news to you, like over a decade old. But with 90% of iPhones running iOS 14 now, there's no shortage of awesome themes being shown off. Adding them isn't exactly straightforward, though. In this video, we're going to show you the basics, how to fully customize your home screen, and with iOS 15, how you can make your phone automatically go from this at home to this when you're at work. The first thing you'll want to do is make a plan for what home screen you'd like. There are tons of great resources for inspiration, Pinterest, Reddit, icon packs on Etsy. Next, make a note of what apps you'd like to have on your home screen. Most icon packs should include most of the popular apps, but if you're using less popular ones like a specific game or calendar app, you might have to be a little more creative when selecting an icon. Once you have your icons, you can download them directly from your phone's browser by clicking Save Image or by importing the images into the Files app using iCloud Drive. Finally, you're going to want to grab a wallpaper, and if you need some ideas, The Verge has excellent ones. Let's start with the easiest thing to change, your wallpaper. Now, a lot of you probably already know how to do this one, so feel free to skip ahead. If you don't though, head over to Settings, Wallpaper, and then hit Choose a New Wallpaper. From there, just select one from your photo album or from the Apple defaults if you're boring and then tap on it to set it. An important thing to note here is that iOS icons don't allow for image transparency, so if you want a floating icon effect, you're going to need to make sure that your wallpaper color matches the icon background for whatever icons you have. Next is widgets, which were introduced back in iOS 14 and add a whole new dimension to customizing your home screen. Again, Android users have had this for a while, but iOS users only got them recently. To add a widget, you're going to tap and hold on your home screen, the plus button, and then you can scroll through all your widgets over here. I'm going to grab a widget. You can see the different sizes and options for widgets that you have in the app. Hit the Add Widget button, and it'll place it on your home screen. Now, widgets can also be put into stacks if they're the same size, so I can tap and hold this widget, drop it into the stack over here, and then I can easily scroll through all those widgets without taking up so much space. All right, let's theme. Now, to start, I suggest adding a second home screen and hiding your regular layout, just in case you want to switch back when you're done. I'm going to warn you, this whole process can be pretty wonky. So to create a custom icon, you're going to want to head to Shortcuts, which should be pre-installed on your phone, but if it's not, you can install it on the App Store. Now, Shortcuts is a pretty complicated app, so we're going to try and make this simple. We're going to open the Shortcut app, and we're going to hit the plus button in this corner to create a new shortcut. Now the thing we want to do here is open an app, so we're going to add an action. We're going to type in Open App, and we're going to open an app. We'll find an app on our phone, let's say the Camera app, and now I've already done the shortcut. This is the action that we want to take. Now, we want icons though, so we have to do an additional step, which is we're going to hit the share button. We're going to add to home screen, and now here's where the magic happens. Here's where I give it the shortcut name, which will be the label on my phone. So maybe I don't like camera, maybe I want this to say photography. Now I need an icon, so I'm going to hit Choose File. I already have this folder of these great icons I made earlier out of the original Windows 98 icons, so I'll get this great camera icon, hit Add, and there it is on my home screen. Now I tap it, and it takes me right to the Camera app. Now there are a lot of quirks here. Using shortcuts means that you have to create a new shortcut for each individual app icon that you want to change, which is really time consuming and really boring. Worse, every time that you open an app using that custom icon, you'll see an annoying drop down banner notification from shortcuts letting you know that it's doing exactly what you asked it to do. And while there used to be a pretty annoying hacky way to get around that and block them, it doesn't seem to work in iOS 15 anymore, so you're more or less stuck with them. To take things to the next level, you're going to want some widgets to match. Widget Smith is one of the most popular apps out there for this, because you can use it to just display images that work well with your theme, like say a Windows 98 icon, or you can use it to create themed calendar and clock widgets that match your color scheme, font, and aesthetic. So we're going to open the app, and we're going to select the type of widget we want. You have small, medium, and large, which are the three iOS widget sizes. I'm going to go with medium, that's kind of what I want for here. I'm going to go with a default widget, and now you have lots of different options. We have date, we have time, we have weather, we have step counting, health activity, calendar, reminders, tides, astronomy, lots of choices. Now I just kind of want a simple clock and calendar, so we'll find that and select it. Now our setup can see, we're going to keep basic, I don't really need, you know, parts or, you know, Apple colors, maybe we'll go with terminal actually. Get that retro feel, we're going to customize it, because I really like these colors, have this nice blocky retro font. Background color though, doing like a Windows 98, so let's go with Morbid Teal, and then for my font color, let's just go with this simple white. So we'll save, apply to this widget, and we're ready to go. Go ahead and hit the plus button again, we go and find Widgetsmith, add a medium widget. We're going to choose that medium two that I just made before, and then it'll show up. All that's technically old news though, but iOS 15 adds an additional wrinkle to widgets and custom app icons called focus modes, which as a side effect, also allow you to selectively show and hide whole pages of your home screen, widgets and all whenever you want. The original idea is that you could have a home screen for work with your calendar and email widgets that automatically pop up when you're in the office, and a regular home screen with social media apps and music widgets for when you're off the clock. But since focus modes let you choose home screens, you can combine them with widgets and shortcuts to say, create a perfectly themed Windows 98 layout with your icons and widgets and everything that you can call up in a moment's notice to impress your friends without having to go through and manually hide all your home pages every time. Once you've got your home screen set up, here's how to enable focus mode to automatically trigger it. Again, to do this, you'll need to be either running the iOS 15 public beta or if iOS 15 is out by the time you're watching this, just regular iOS 15. So you're going to go to settings, hit focus, and we're going to create a new focus mode. I'll do a custom one here, call it Windows, get this color, this icon, hit next. Doesn't really matter for notifications, so we're just going to go right through these. Okay, our focus is ready. Now the important thing here is we're going to go to home screen, we're going to do custom pages. We're only going to let it show our main page that we have over here, which is the one that we've laid out with our custom widgets and our custom icons. Now whenever I go and set that Windows notification, it hides all my other home screens and just shows me the Windows icons. But let's say we want to take this a little further because focus will let you get to just showing you your custom icons, but not the wallpaper. So what we're going to do is we're going to use shortcuts to actually kind of hack our way through that too. We'll use shortcuts. We're going to create a new shortcut that will automatically set a wallpaper. So you have to set an album with whatever wallpaper you want, which I've already done. You're going to set up a shortcut that looks like this. Then you're going to go over to automation over here because one of the things you can do with automation is use focus modes as a trigger to do things. So what we've done is we've built an automation that automatically changes our wallpaper to our Windows 98 theme and we've set it up so that whenever we turn Windows 98 on, it'll run that shortcut. So now I have all my automation set up, so now I can hit the focus button, hit my Windows 98 theme, and you can see it is pretty janky. You still have to hit the set wallpaper button over here. With just one button, I've turned my phone into Windows 98. So that's pretty cool. Now, again, this is a really janky setup and if you're using this to change your wallpaper, you will either have to set up more automations to switch back, which is even more hacky or just manually reset it every time, but it is pretty cool. All these hoops you have to jump through highlight just how difficult it is to really customize your iPhone. You have to remember, it took Apple years before it let you even customize your home screen background. Even now, all these customization tools look more like hacked together workarounds, not useful methods to let you easily change the way your phone looks. The steps that Apple's taken though are some of the biggest concessions that it's ever made towards customization, which means that there's still hope for future updates that'll let you truly customize how your iPhone looks in the future. Thanks so much for watching. We've got links in the description for this cool Windows 98 theme that we've made, virtual wallpapers, and other how-to guides for customizing your iPhone. And if you've gone and themed your iPhone, send me a picture on Twitter. Show us how it looks.