How Do You Organise Your Smartphone’s Home Screen?

When you have a lot of apps on your smartphone, you want them catalogued in a way that is easy to comprehend, right? Do you even care? A quick look around the Gizmodo office reveals some widely different approaches to phone screen organisation.

Inspired by our pals over at Business Insider, I did a quick poll around the office, asking the guys from Kotaku and Lifehacker and here at Gizmodo how they organise their home screens. Here are the results.

Leading the story is publisher Danny Allen, who has a good mix of folders and standalone apps. He’s clearly a big fan of Samsung’s apps on his Galaxy Note 3, travels a fair bit, and uses a bunch of reading apps like Pocket. He still uses the stock TouchWiz launcher, though, so he’s stuck with the stock Internet browser in his quick launch bar instead of Chrome — ew.



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On the left, here’s what weekend editor Logan Booker does to get that customised monochrome layout on his iPhone: “I guess I like to keep mine clean, so this is my setup on my 5s (jailbroken of course). Just two screens with the essentials and folders along the bottom for everything else. I also use a custom font, PT Sans. FYI, I spelt “Favorites” because with the extra “u” the text disappears from the folder.”

My home screen — I only have a single pane, since I hate swiping sideways just to get to other apps — is organised in an upside-down triangle. Since the LG G3 has an awesomely large 5.5-inch display, and I usually use it right-handed, the icons are organised to be within a comfortable range of motion of my right thumb. Everything’s in ‘cover’ folders courtesy of Action Launcher, which is my Android launcher of choice. I usually use Muzei for my backgrounds, but haven’t installed it just yet.



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Lifehacker editor Angus Kidman, who runs a Nexus 5 daily, has a method to his madness: “This is how my (stock standard) Android phone is customised. Regular controls (phone, messaging, Chrome, camera) at the bottom. Google stuff on the lift (the Google folder has everything, but Drive and Maps are what I use all the time so I break them out). Then social networking in a column, photo management in a column and work apps in a column. Simple but effective. You’ll notice I haven’t even bothered to change the wallpaper!”

Giz editor Luke, who uses both an iPhone and an Android phone simultaneously, is big on folders, but keeps the clock out to set a bunch of alarms every day. The Play Store app also gets a regular workout, so it gets its own spot. The iPhone screenshot you see here is apparently hugely inconvenient, but at least it looks nice and colourful.

In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s an obvious omission here. Mark Serrels, Kotaku editor extraordinaire, doesn’t care in the slightest how his phone’s icons are arranged: “​There are times when I feel really out of place in this office. I honestly, truly put zero thought into this and never will.” Maybe we’re the weird ones.

How do you organise your smartphone’s home screen? Let us know in the comments.


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