iOS 15 Home Screen Setups! Aesthetic, Retro & More!

What's that? I'm too rich? It can't be. Hold on, let me get my third iPhone. I can't hear you clearly. Okay, hey, just joking. Hey, what's up guys? I've got three phones, because I want to be showing you today how to do three different setups. Something pretty advanced, like this, like an iOS 6 theme on your iPhone, to something a little bit more feng shui for all the VSCO girls out there. Sort of a, I don't know, they call it aesthetic. I don't know, I'm way too into this now. And also something basic just to start messing around with widgets and probably the most practical setup of the bunch. All right, if you guys are excited for this one, drop a like down below. Hit subscribe for more. I want to show you how to do all three. So here's my aesthetic page right here, and I want to show you from scratch how I got here. Now, I'm going to also throw some screenshots up of other similar ones that I've seen. They are far better. I just think, like, this is the best I can do as a guy, okay? Cut me some slack, please. So you need two things to do this. First, you need some pictures or images to use for your app icons. Second, and really most importantly, you need this app called Widgetsmith. Again, link is down below. Once you've downloaded Widgetsmith, all you have to do is launch it up. So I type in Widgetsmith. You can see right there, it popped up for me. And you're going to have a couple things in here off the rip. It'll just say, like, small number one, medium number one, large number one. For my setup, I just messed with small and medium. So let me show you from scratch what it's going to look like. This is what you get. I know, it looks a little boring, right? So what you do is just tap on it again, and then you can start customizing everything. So for me, I wanted to do, like, scrolling down a little bit, a photo, maybe of a quote. So what you do here is once you have the photo saved, you just hit choose photo, it pops up with a bunch of stuff, and you can tap on what you want. It formats it for you, you go back, you hit save, and then we'll also do one more for medium. So let's say I want to do something a little bit more advanced, like the time at the top of my display. You can change the location, you can change the font just by going through here. And then I want to make the background very, I don't know, very different. So I'm going to tap on pastel purple, hit save again. Okay, so this is just the basics. Once you've gotten that, go ahead and make a new page or add it to one of your existing pages. And once you've done that, you can hit on the plus, then scroll all the way down to the bottom where you see Widgetsmith. And then you're going to have three options. Now, right now they don't look like your widgets, but you just tap on one. For example, I'm going to start with medium, and you can see it automatically formats it to just basically what I'm looking for, quarter to six. It's already starting to look pretty cool, right? Next up, we'll go back, go tap on Widgetsmith one more time, and tap on small, add widget. And there you go. You've got your most recent widget in there as well. Now you can do this a couple of times. Like when you tap on one, you can go back to your widgets and see all of these. There's even a super large size that takes up like three or four rows of app icons. So you go here, you do it, and then once you've got like a couple pre-made ones, you can just go back, hit the plus again, and add something else. So now I've got my previous ones that I made as well, add a small widget. You just want to tap and hold on it, tap on edit, and then go to like small number one. And right there, you've got whatever you want. This is the first part. This is the fun part. Like basically finding the images you want or customizing the actual widgets, messing around with the medium stuff. You've got all these different things you can do, most of which is actually free. I got my wallpaper by literally just searching aesthetic wallpapers, tapping on view images, and I found like one like this. It's pretty cool to me. Listen, I don't know if this can be my vibe forever, but it's my vibe today. But for me, the part that makes it the most special, it's like the wallpaper is nice. Yeah, the widgets add a lot of personality here. It's the custom app icons. And I promise you, this is the hardest part. It's also the most worth it. So with the widgets set up with images that we've gotten and the wallpaper in the background, we're two-thirds away there. But the most challenging, patience required part, but also the most satisfying, is the custom app icons. So instead of looking at Apple's app icons, which I mean, admittedly are okay, you can make it look however you want. And for my setup, I had the idea to do these color gradients like this, because I think they fit with this wallpaper really well. So what you can do is just head over to the internet, insert aesthetic images, or I think I searched like aesthetic gradients, that'll probably pop up something just like this. So you can save these, they're super subtle, or make any images. Just have as many images for as many apps as you want to customize. So now you want to find this app on your phone called Shortcuts. It's free, it's on the app store if it's not on your phone already, but it should be pre-installed. And when you tap on it, you might see something totally different than me, that's okay. You don't need to worry about what's on the screen, just tap on the plus icon, and then tap on add action right here. Go to scripting, and then open app. And what you're essentially doing is creating a piece of code for your device to run to open what you want with your custom image. So I'm going to keep it simple and open up the cache app, right? That's something that we all use from time to time. So then you tap on these three dots, and this is where it gets cool, because you can tap on add to home screen, and this is how you'd name it. So I'll just name it cache to keep it simple. And then you tap on that icon right there, and this is where you can choose literally any image on your phone. So I'm going to hit choose photo, and you can see I've got all this stuff right here. For cache app, I don't know, there's some green in it. So I'm going to use this one. You tap on choose, it automatically formats it. You'd see it's looking pretty cool already. And then you just tap on add. Done. And then you have to hit next, and you have to like name the shortcut to completely save it. But then you're ready to go. So now watch. When you go back to your home screen, there's your new app on there. You can just obviously tap and hold as always to drag it, and that's how you do it. So you got to go through that process for every single app, which again is shortcuts, plus add action, scripting, open up, choose the app, and then tap on the three dots, add to home screen. Yeah, I know. It's like there has to be an easier way, right? No, there's not right now. Perhaps there's some speculation in the future Apple would make it simple, but that's how you do it. So that's how I got my aesthetic setup. I just made a ton of app icons, saved a ton of gradients, and found some cool quotes, and also used Widgetsmith. Again, link is down below. So that's the aesthetic theme. And what's cool about the custom icons is that they all work. If I tap on mail, it takes me over to mail. If I go to clock, it takes me over to clock. But you can see my icons look a little bit different now. That's because I invested some minutes, probably close to like an hour or two, customizing all of these icons. So I've collected these iOS 6 ones for you. I'll leave a link down below. I found all of these images and went through step-by-step and shortcuts to do the exact same thing as the aesthetic theme here. Tap plus, add action, scripting, open up, choose, and then choose the icon. So we know that process now, but what's amazing is that it's fully functional. So Twitter takes me to Twitter, Snapchat takes me to Snapchat. I mean, for all intents and purposes, like this is basically what Android has had forever, custom theming of your apps. And now you have that live. Of course, as you go to your other pages, like it starts to look a little bit more normal, but the fact that you can get like a proper home screen page now that looks however you want is insane. It literally just comes down to, are you comfortable sitting still for a while and doing the same process for every single app? Again, I hope it gets easier in the future, but this is the best and only and fastest way to do it right now. If you're looking for something a little bit more user-friendly, a little bit more practical, arguably, then you can keep your icons and not mess with those at all. And obviously just do something simple on iOS 14 like this, where I don't have any Widget Smith on here. I could, if I wanted to, but I've just got Calendar in the top left and Weather on the right. And then you've got all your other widgets over here if you want to use them. Now, listen, this took me about 30 seconds to set up. So it's a start. Is it as cool, as impressive as the other themes? No, but you can still play around with widgets however you want. It's fun. It's easy. It's simple. And the coolest part about iOS 14, I got to give a thank you to Apple for finally doing this, is that you can customize it to your liking. For the first time ever, you're not wrapped up in Apple's constraints. They don't stop you from doing what you want. If you have the time, if you want to customize every app icon, you can do that. Or like the simplicity of iOS as we've always had it, you can just have a couple of widgets like so and use them, and find out the weather, find out what's on your calendar. So I hope this video helps you out. I hope you guys enjoyed it. And again, links to everything are down below. Drop a like if you did, hit subscribe for more, and I'll catch all of you in the next one. And this is your favorite VSCO boy signing out.