If you have an app on your phone that you can’t find anymore, it may have been hidden by accident. Hidden apps are apps that do not appear on your phone’s home screen but are still somewhere in your phone’s files. So how are you supposed to find these hidden apps?
To find hidden apps on your iPhone, swipe left on your home screen until you reach the App Library. From here, type the name of your hidden app in the search bar, and it should appear. You can also see a list of all the apps on your phone by scrolling down in the App Library.
Now that you’ve been introduced to the concept of hidden apps on your iPhone, you may want to know more about them. So let’s go through this idea in more detail to help you get the most out of your iPhone.
What are Hidden iPhone Apps?
Hidden iPhone apps are exactly what they sound like. They are apps that do not appear on your phone’s home screen but are still located in the files of your iPhone. But why would someone want to hide an iPhone app?
Privacy
The main reason people choose to hide certain iPhone apps is privacy.
For example, say you have downloaded an app from the app store that you’d rather someone not know that you have on your phone. This would be a perfect app to have hidden from your iPhone’s home screen.
Productivity
Some people hide apps from their iPhone’s home screen to promote productivity. For example, many people find that when they open their phone to be productive, seeing things like social media and games can cause them to become distracted from what they were doing.
In this case, these people hide their social media and game apps so they won’t have those distractions when trying to be productive.
How to Hide iPhone Apps
Knowing that you can hide iPhone apps is all well and good, but having this knowledge is worthless if you don’t know how to hide them.
There are several methods to hide iPhone apps from your home screen. Let’s go through these to help your privacy.
How to Hide a Singular App on Your iPhone
This method is probably best if you only need to hide an app or two. This method will only hide one app at a time, making it suitable for people who don’t have much to hide.
To do this:
- Find the app that you would like to hide on your home screen.
- Next, press and hold the app icon until a menu appears.
- In this menu, select Remove App and then choose Remove from Home Screen.
Removing the app from your home screen will make it impossible for anyone to find it without performing a search specifically from the App Library. This makes it almost impossible for someone to see the app on your phone by accident.
How to Hide a Whole Page of Apps on Your iPhone
With the introduction of iOS 14, Apple added the ability to hide apps from your iPhone’s home screen in bulk by hiding an entire page of your iPhone’s home screen.
Unfortunately, this means that if your iPhone runs on something older than iOS 14, this method is unavailable to you without updating or getting a newer device.
To hide a page on your home screen:
- Press and hold on to the background of your desired home screen until the apps on it shake.
- From here, tap the three dots at the bottom of your screen and then tap the circle under the page you want to hide so that it does not have a checkmark.
- Finally, tap Done in the top right corner, and you have successfully hidden an entire page of apps from view on your iPhone.
How to Find Apps on Hidden Home Screens
Knowing how to hide an iPhone app you don’t want others to see is a good bit of knowledge to have. However, it can be a problem if you don’t know how to access the hidden apps.
Thankfully, finding these apps is easy enough as long as you know their name. We just need to perform a search of the app library.
To do this:
- Begin by swiping left past your home screen pages until you reach the App Library.
- At the top of the App Library, you should see a search bar. Open this search bar and type the name of the app you would like to access, and it should appear ready to be opened at your command.
It may concern some people that their hidden apps can be found so easily. However, one of these steps was to enter the name of the hidden app. Without knowing what the app is called, people won’t be able to find your secrets so easily.
Can All iPhone Apps Be Hidden?
All this talk of hidden apps may have some people wondering if this process has any limitations. For example, can you hide every app on your iPhone and have an empty home screen? Are there any apps your phone won’t let you hide?
The answer to these questions depends on your iPhone. You can hide pages on your home screen if you have an iPhone running on iOS 14 or later. It is possible to hide every app on your iPhone using this method.
However, this hide pages method is unavailable if your iPhone runs on an iOS version older than iOS 14. This makes it so there are certain apps that you can’t hide.
So you must go through the Remove App option to hide apps on an iPhone running iOS 13 or earlier. However, certain apps preinstalled on your phone do not have this option and thus cannot be hidden.
In alphabetical order, these apps are the App Store, Camera, Clock, Find My, Health, Messages, Phone, Photos, Safari, Settings, and Wallet apps. These are the only apps that you can’t hide on an older iPhone.
If you were worried that you might download an app, you don’t want others to know about it only to find that it can’t be hidden; this won’t be a problem. Every app you download from the App Store can be deleted and thus can also be hidden.
How to Hide Apps So They Don’t Show Up in Search Results
Some readers may be a little distressed that their hidden apps can be found by simply typing their names in a search bar. Thankfully, Apple once again has your back. It is possible to make it so that your hidden apps do not appear when you search for them.
To do this:
- First, open the Settings app and scroll down until you see Siri & Search.
- Select this option, and a menu should appear showing all apps on your phone.
- Next, scroll down until you see the icon of the app you would like to hide from searches.
- Select your desired app, and then you should see a toggle that says Show App in Search. Turning off this toggle will make the app no longer appear when you type its name in the search bar.
In this case, you will probably want to keep the app icon somewhere on your home screen because you won’t be able to open it using the App Library’s search bar. So either have it hidden in a hidden home screen or hide it in a folder somewhere on your home screen.
How to Unhide Your iPhone Apps
Unhiding your iPhone apps are generally just as easy as hiding them in the first place. However, since we went over two different methods to hide your iPhone apps, there are also two ways to get them back.
How to Restore Individual Hidden Apps
Restoring a singular app is extremely simple. All you have to do is restore the app using the App Library. This means we’re going to do the same steps as before.
To do this:
- First, swipe left past your home screen pages until you reach the App Library.
- At the top of the App Library, you should see a search bar. Open this search bar and type the name of the app you would like to access, and it should appear.
- From here, hold down on the app’s icon, and you should be able to drag it back onto your home screen.
If you have your hidden app’s search settings turned off, you will need to turn them back on before doing this.
How to Restore Hidden Home Screen Pages
This is a straightforward process if you have a whole page of hidden apps that you would like to restore. For this method, we have to do the same steps we did to hide the page with one different step at the end.
To begin:
- Press and hold on to the background of your desired home screen until the apps on it shake.
- From here, tap the three dots at the bottom of your screen. Here, you will see a list of every page your home screen has, including the hidden ones.
- All you need to do to unhide a page is tap the circle underneath it until it has a checkmark.
- Finally, tap Done in the top right corner, and you have successfully unhidden your hidden page of apps.
How to Change the Layout of Your Home Screen
Changing things around is simple if you don’t like how your iPhone’s home screen looks. All you need to do is move the apps.
To do this:
- Tap and hold on to any empty space on your iPhone’s home screen. This will cause all the apps on the page to shake.
- From here, you must drag the apps wherever you want them.
Many people sort their apps in different ways. The most popular ways to sort apps are alphabetical, by purpose, and by color. Play around with your iPhone’s sorting to find what way you like best.