Home Screen Spaces and Spacers

by Mister Icon

17 September 2024

Apple released the first ever iPhone in 2007.
It ran iPhone OS version 1, which was quite limited.

There were no third-party apps then (they came in version 2).
There were no home screen folders (they came in iOS 4).
There was no App Library (that came in iOS 14 and iPadOS 15).

But the app grid, which shows on all of our home screens, was there right from the start. And up until now, that app grid has always been stubbornly inflexible.

In the past, it just hasn't been possible to have a blank space in the icon grid. You could have empty spaces at the end of a home screen page, but never anywhere else.

As soon as you moved an app icon—or a Mister Icon label— around your home screen, other icons in the grid would move to take the space of the one you moved. Unless it was at the end of the page.

It was all so frustrating, because if you wanted to align your icons in a specific way, sometimes all you needed was a blank space.

So even though spacing can be an important way to enable improved categorisation and organisation, it has never been properly supported on the iOS/iPadOS Home Screen.

But now, with iOS/iPadOS 18, the problem is fixed! Apple has finally allowed us to have spaces in our home screen grid.

Mister Icon Spacers

Of course, us Mister Icon users have always had the secret ability to have home screen spaces via special ‘spacer’ icons, which effectively served the same purpose.

‘Spacers’ are the blank icons shown at the end of each icon list in the Mister Icon app.

You install them to your home screen and move them around just like any other Mister Icon label.

But these ‘spacers’ will be visible as blank icons, unless you use a matching coloured wallpaper to make them blend in.

This method has done the job well in most cases, but it can be a bit annoying having to go back and get fresh spacer icons whenever you want to change your wallpaper colour (assuming you want the spacers to blend in).

How the new spaces work

Now that Apple has an official solution, home screen organising has become just that little bit easier.

And it works, pretty much just like you'd expect it to.

But it is also quite clever, as Apple seems to have tried to give us the best of both worlds.

The old system was actually quite useful. If you deleted an app from your home screen grid, you probably wouldn't want it to leave an empty ‘hole’ or ‘blank’ space in the icon grid. So in that case it made sense for the operating system to automatically move the next icon in the grid into the empty space.

In most cases, the new iOS/iPadOS 18 system still does this. In fact, if you keep your apps together in an uninterrupted left-to-right grid formation, you might not even realise that the new space option exists.

But the special new ability comes into action when you move an icon away from the last consecutive position on your app icon grid.

That might sound a bit confusing, but once you play around with it a bit, I'm sure you'll understand what I mean.

The best analogy I can think of is a mother duck and her ducklings. If the duckling directly behind the mother suddenly dived under the water and swam away, the remaining ducks would probably move up to take its place, leaving an uninterrupted row of ducklings.

But if the duckling at the end of the row swam off, then there would be no further ducklings to move up and take its place, so it would be able to sit away at a distance from all the other ducks.

Once separated from the bunch, the duckling is free to do its own thing, even if more ducklings show up at a later stage and try to join in.

The ducklings can all operate independently, until the main row is rejoined.

I hope that makes some sense, as the new home screen icon system works just the same way.

In short, the ability to add genuine spaces on the iPhone/iPad home screen has taken more than 17 years to arrive, but it is finally here, and it is a good implementation that works well with Mister Icon labels.