Home screen, Widgets, and App Library
New ways to organize absolutely everything
THE LATEST iPADOS introduces a new way to get organized on your tablet, bringing iOS 14 features to the iPad for the first time. Our favorite new feature is widgets, which have made it across from the iPhone. These can sit anywhere on your Home Screen to provide instant access to whatever you like: Calendar events, the weather forecast, your Apple Music playlist, your favorite photos and so on. To add a widget, simply long–press an empty bit of the Home Screen and tap the “+” icon at the top left to see the available options. As you’ll see, there are lots — including Smart Stacks, which change over the course of the day. Smart Stacks will even predict what other widgets you might like and show them at the top of your Stack.
Widgets can be moved just like app icons, and your apps will move out of the way as you drag a widget around to get it in the perfect place.
The App Library is another iPhone feature made bigger and given a place at the very end of your Dock. It’s a bit like Launcher on the Mac, giving you an easy to navigate place for all your apps to save you swiping on multiple Home Screens. It automatically organizes apps into categories, and you can remove apps from your Home Screen but keep them in the App Library; to do that, touch and hold the app, tap Remove App and then tap Remove From Home Screen.
Moving things to the App Library isn’t the only way to keep your Home Screens simple. You can also hide individual Home Screen pages, or reorder them. If you tap and hold an empty space, you’ll see three dots at the bottom. Tap them and drag a page to reorder it or tap the circle that appears underneath it to hide it.