With the introduction of iOS 14, Apple brought a ton of features for its devices and completely redesigned the home screen with support for widgets. One of the home screen editing features in the latest iOS update lets you manage and hide the extra app pages on the device. However, it does not let you hide all the pages. Well, now a probable bug bypasses that “one mandatory page” criteria and lets you get a clean app-free home screen on your iPhone.
Apple, after releasing the third iteration of its iOS 14 developer beta, rolled out the public beta for the public beta testers. Now, a Redditor has found a bug in the latest update that hides all the app pages on the iPhone, leaving you with just the dock, the legacy widget page, and the new “App Library”.
How To Get an App-Free Home Screen On Your iPhone
Now, I tried this on my iPhone X (running iOS 14 public beta 3) and it really works. So, to do this follow the steps below:
- First, tap and hold any app on your home screen to go into the “Jiggle Mode”.
- Then tap the bottom bar with the dots, that represent the number of pages, to enter the “Edit Pages” screen.
- Now, here you will find that although you can untick the pages, you cannot untick the last page. This means, by default, you have to keep at least one app page as your home screen.
- However, as the Redditor shows, when you are left with the last to ticked pages, instead of unticking just one of them at a time, you have to tap the checkboxes of both the pages simultaneously.
- As soon as you do this, your device might respring by showing the boot loop logo (mine did). However, after a few seconds, it will come back to normal.
- So now, you have a clean and app-free home screen on your iPhone.
There Are Consequences…And a Fix
Now, the Redditor, u/Robinhoed123 shared the video (below) on the r/ios subreddit showing the bug in action. However, at the end of the video, he also says that after you disable all the app pages, when you try to go to the “Edit Pages” screen from the “Jiggle Mode”, the device resprings every time.
However, apart from references to the hilarious WWDC song, there is a fix for this issue in the comments section of the post.
It is shared by the same guy who found the bug in the first place and according to him, to fix the issue, you have to again go to “Jiggle Mode” and just add a widget from the “Widget Gallery” to the blank home screen.
Now, when you enter the “Edit Pages” screen, it will open up just fine and show all the existing app pages. You can then just start ticking the checkboxes to restore the pages as they were.
Now, I know that this is a bug and Apple will surely fix it in the upcoming betas. However, after taking a look at the clean, minimalistic, and app-free home screen on my iPhone X, I am kinda hoping that the developers let this bug remain in the OS in peace. Or even better if they let us officially disable all the app pages from the “Edit Pages” screen.
What do you guys think? Let us know about your thoughts on this bug in the comments below.
