Your home screen is the central location for all of your personal data and applications, and is a seamless and user friendly platform that facilitates easy access to the rest of your device. This section of the iOS course will outline the basic navigation and main features of your home screen, including opening and closing applications, and organizing your applications.
Home Screen Features
From your home screen you can access all applications installed on your device. These applications will be designated by a small, square thumbnail, with the title of the application listed below. Depending on how many applications you have installed on your device, your home screen may have several pages of applications. You can determine how many pages of applications you have on your home screen by counting how many white or clear dots you have along the bottom of your screen, these dots represent how many pages you have of applications. To navigate between these pages, swipe left or right anywhere on the screen, depending on which direction you would like to go.
If you swipe all the way to the right of your home screen, you can access your app library, which shows all downloaded applications, even those you may not have installed on your home screen. You can search through your application library using the search bar at the top of your screen.
If you swipe all the way to the left you can access your most frequently used widgets (for more information, see the “Widgets” section of this lesson) and a search bar that not only searches your application library, but your messages, emails and the internet as well.
Control Center
The control center allows you to access and adjust certain software features, such as wifi, bluetooth and airplane mode. You can also interact with the hardware of the device, such as the brightness and volume of your phone, as well as turning on the flashlight or camera. You can access the control center from your home screen. To access the control center on an iPhone without a home button, swipe down from the upper right corner of your display, to close the control center, swipe up. To access the control center on an iPhone with a home button, swipe up from the bottom of your display, to close the control center swipe down or press the home button.
You can also customize your control center by going to your “Settings,” selecting “Control Center” and on the next screen you can remove controls by tapping the red circle next to the icon of the control you would like to remove, and then selecting the “remove” button that appears on the right hand side. You can add controls by tapping the green circle next to the icon of the control you would like to add. You can also limit access to the control center, so that you can only open the center from the home screen of your device, rather than from within applications.
Applications: Opening, Closing and Quitting
To open an application, simply tap on the icon that represents the platform that you would like to use, and wait for the platform to load. To navigate back to the home screen you will either swipe up from the screen on iPhone X models or newer, or press the home button once if your device has one.
While returning to the home screen allows you to close the application so that you no longer see it on your screen, the application will still be running in the background and using your device’s processing and battery power. As such, we recommend that when you are no longer using the application, or if you do not anticipate using it for a long period of time, that you quit the application.
To quit an application (if your device does not have a home button) swipe up from the bottom of the screen, stopping and releasing your finger when the application window is half the size of the display. From there, you will be able to see all open applications. In order to quit an application, swipe up on the application that you would like to quit until it no longer appears on your screen. To return to your home screen tap outside of the application windows, or press the home button.
We recommend that you close all open applications every few days, in particular if you notice your device running slowly or overheating. Additionally, if you notice an application has frozen or become unresponsive, or if it is unable to load any data, we recommend first that you quit the application following the previous steps before reopening to see if that resolves your issue.
Takeaway: the home screen is the central location for all of your applications, and allows you to access and control all downloaded software onto your phone.