iPhone season will be here in just a couple of days, and with it, iOS 16 will be launched to the public. Before you know it, everyone and their dog will be posting their new home and lock screen configurations, showing off new widgets, app icons, and apps. So what better time as any to show you my home screen(s) on all of my devices, show you what apps I’m using, show how my home screen has changed over the years, and make you spend egregious amounts of money on apps you certainly don’t need. The economy is certainly fine, don’t worry.

My iPhone Home Screens

Let’s start with my iPhone, because let’s be honest, that’s what everyone wants to see. I have 2 home screens on my iPhone, and honestly, I hate myself for it. I’m still old school and need multiple pages because I can’t get used to the idea of searching for every app even though that’s what I do anyway. Who knows, maybe I’ll change my ways one day. Starting on my main page:

I’ve got a medium widget stack with way too many widgets. Here are the apps, in order: CARROT Weather with tons of information and the automatic cycling between different information, Fantastical with the calendar view on the left and agenda view on the right, Tot with a couple lines of the last opened page, Timery with my recently used saved timers, a Widgetsmith countdown widget for the Apple Event, and an Apollo pictures widget for cool nature photography across Reddit. The idea is simple here; I like information and I want access to that information without opening the app. I used to be against large, stacked widgets when they first came in iOS 14, but they slowly grew on me over time. I used to previously have one small widget in the top left corner, but as I used App Library more and more, I removed apps from my home screen and eventually moved to a bigger widget. As you can see, I have tons of widgets, but I don’t like to clutter my home screen with widgets (hence, the stack). Many people ask me why I don’t ditch the apps that are in my widget stack and save more space — I fundamentally dislike this approach. I believe that widgets should rarely be interacted with — but rather used as “windows” to apps. To open it, I tap the app from the home screen. Additionally, I switch throughout the widgets throughout the day, and it’s inconvenient to swipe and tap around to get to something so important that it sits on my main home screen. In the morning and throughout the day, I use CARROT to keep track of Florida weather (which is very important), switch to Fantastical before meetings and appointments, Timery for when I’m at my desk and working, Apollo for the evenings when I want to look at pictures, and Widgetsmith for when I feel excited about the upcoming event. Either way, I highly recommend using multiple widgets in a stack. They fill up headspace on your home screen and are super useful.

Settings: sometimes, you just want to set your ings.

YouTube: I’m addicted, but I keep using it less and less. I hate the algorithm, videos keep getting crappier, Shorts are more popular than ever, and the comments scams make me want to interact less. Still, it’s the most used app on my phone.

Things: this is my latest addition to my home screen, and wow, I’m loving it! If you’re not familiar, Things is one of the best task managers on the market. It’s $10, but well worth that price. It’s simple, beautiful, has powerful search and filtering, and is easy to use. It also has great widgets, and that’s a plus.

Fantastical: Fantastical is one of the best apps I’ve ever been blessed with subscribing to, and I’m not even joking. I’ve been paying for it for 2 years straight, and have never once thought about it. It’s that good. First, the design automatically makes it the best Calendar ever made. It’s so intuitive, beautiful, and well organized for such a complicated app. It has one of the best natural language parsers in any app, so for example, if I wanted to make an event titled “Walk the dog” at 4 PM on September 7th at Lake Eola Park in my Dog calendar, I could simply write “Walk the dog at 4pm 7th at Lake Eola Park /dog” and it would automatically fill in the information and remind me of the event. It also has advanced rescheduling, advanced and customizable widgets, drag and drop, multiple filters, colors, reminder sounds, and so so much more. But that’s not even the best part and the reason I bought it 2 years ago: it has full support for video conferencing apps. If you just simply input the meeting link into the “location” box when creating an event, Fantastical will automatically alert you, save the password into a link that’ll open the video conferencing app, and show a button in your Mac’s menu bar that allows you to join the meeting with just one click. It works with Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, WebEx, and even FaceTime now. It’s absolutely superb, and I can’t recommend it enough in times like these.

Overcast: Overcast is one of those apps that I can’t stop recommending. Seriously, I have a problem. Overcast is the best podcast app ever made and will ever be made. It’s built by an awesome developer and podcaster, Marco Arment, who has had expertise in the field for 15+ years. It’s super simple and elegant, with multiple filters, customizable playlists (you can change the color, choose between thousands of icons, pick specific podcast parameters, and act on them), and the entire app’s theme color can be changed to any color of the rainbow. But that’s not all; Overcast has robust support for rich text show notes, something that no other podcast app can claim. It has support for chapters and chapter art, something you probably didn’t even know of if you’re using a bad app. But the best part is its Smart Speed feature, which is unique to Overcast — what it does is shortens silences in between sentences, but doesn’t overdo it so that it feels like you’re hearing robots converse. It also equalizes audio between hosts, so if one host is speaking way slower than the others, it’ll intelligently speed them up. It’s beyond amazing what Overcast can do, and the best part? Every feature that I’ve outlined here is 100% free with no tracking in the app. The only thing is that you get small visual ads at the bottom of the playing screen that look like part of the UI for recommended podcasts similar to the one that you’re listening to right now. That’s literally it. You can additionally choose to hide those for $10 a year, which I choose to do. Go check Overcast out — it’s available on iOS, iPadOS, macOS with Apple Silicon, and watchOS for free, and they have a web app for your Windows devices. No harm in trying it. I love it.

Craft: Craft is one of the best writing and note-taking apps ever. It’s pretty and native to the OS, which is my #1 complaint with everything else. But it’s also extremely powerful, allowing for complicated tables, deep-linking, custom folders, mathematical formulas, customizable headers, colors, quotes, and so much more. It has advanced share functionality and export functionality to automatically open in other apps, can create custom password-protected links, and even can share to Wordpress or Medium with one button. If you’re a student like myself or a writer in any way, check Craft out. It’s $5 a month. I’m even writing in it right now!

Notion: Everyone knows Notion; it’s a project management app that’s more customizable than god. I use it to track assignments for school, and that’s pretty much it.

Home: Last year, I took 2 months and built a comprehensive smart home by myself, and all of the controls for that are in HomeKit. I like it over Google Home, but the app sucks. They should really speed it up.

Apple Notes: This is for long term thinking and personal projects. While Craft is for school and my writing (like this), Apple Notes is for niche things that I just need to keep around, like old recipes and links. I really don’t like Apple Notes, so I only really use it for tables and handwritten notes from my iPad (which we’ll get to).

CARROT: CARROT Weather is the best weather app for a weather nerd like me. The truth is, weather is unpredictable, and the more information you have, the better predictions you can make. I pay for the most expensive plan, which is $50 a year and that is extremely expensive. I know that. But for that price, I get the most complex radar data straight from the NWS and a variety of weather sources, can switch between them with no API limits, can customize the app however way I want, can set up custom notifications for thresholds, and can even view niche information that only a Florida man would need, like flooding and tides. I don’t expect anyone to want this kind of data, but to have access to the data a weatherman in a big, fancy studio would have on my cellular telephone is so cool, especially for an data nerd like me.

Weather: Additionally, I do like to have multiple weather sources, and that’s where the Apple Weather app comes in. I use it pretty sparingly, but I’ve been testing out the new Apple Weather Service and it’s sat on my home screen for that.

Photos: I like photographs. I have 8,000 of them all dated and categorized. I use Apple Photos for that because I’m an Apple sheep. Good enough for you? Carry on.

Tot: Tot is another note taking app. Any surprises? Great. Tot is like one of those fancy yellow notepads everyone used to carry around back in the early aughts. There are 7 dots, or pages, that you can write stuff in. The idea is for you to write stuff down like phone numbers, addresses, links, and other info and then move them somewhere else or just delete them. It’s a temporary note-taking solution, and that’s what I love about it. Before, I used to just open up an Apple Note, dump stuff in there, get the stuff out, and have a bunch of poorly formatted notes I didn’t need. Now, it’s all in one pretty elegant app. It’s $20 one time, and you should get it. It makes your life easier. Also the app icon is purple and I’m a sucker for anything purple.

Uber Eats: I need to feed myself sometimes. This is the only app in my city that’s reliable enough to do the feeding.

Reeder: I like reading articles online, but “GET 15% YOUR DAILY DOSE OF WEED” is really not something I like to be interrupted by when I’m reading. I also don’t like having to memorize the websites I like going to and manually checking them. Reeder solves those problems; it’s an RSS (really simple syndication) client that grabs your articles, strips away all the junk, formats it in SF Pro, makes the text the same size, does that for all of the articles, and puts it all in one app. When I want to look at tech news and feel depressed, I just open the app and read away. It also has a read later part where I can save articles and links to… read later. It’s $10 once. Get it.

Camera: To take digital photographs with my mobile cellular telephone.

In the dock:

• Phone, to make cellular telephone calls with my cellular telephone
• Messages, to make text messages with my cellular telephone
• Safari, to search the internet for very important things
• Spark, to read emails because the Apple Mail app is junk and the Gmail app wants a DNA sample to serve you ads

I also have a second screen for other, less interesting apps that I use with less frequency. I’m old school and still can’t wrap my head around the idea of putting all of your apps away, so here we go. Let’s make this quick:

PCalc: As a math and Computer Science student, I deal with numbers. I don’t necessarily like dealing with numbers, so I give them all to PCalc to deal with. PCalc is the best calculator for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. It’s a full blown Scientific calculator with every single operation you’d ever want to do. It’s great to convert things to binary, or hex, or oct, or dec, or find all of the digits of Pi, or do other math things. Look, its a calculator. It’s boring. It’s mean to be boring. It’s $10 once.

Files: I use iCloud Drive for everything because again, Apple sheep. As so, I need a way to view my iCloud Drive files. That’s where this app comes in handy. That’s pretty much it.

Timery: At the beginning of the pandemic, I lost sense of time, and that feeling worsened throughout the course of the past 2.5 years. I needed to know what I was doing when I was “working,” how long I was working for, and what subjects in school took the most time. Timery is a really elegant app to track all of this information. It’s easy to learn, has really nice widgets, graphs to help you understand all of the data it’s collecting, and so much more. It’s made my life so much easier, and is absolutely worth the $10 a year.

Google: This is the official Google app, and it’s really only for Google Assistant when Siri fails.

DoorDash: Another app to feed myself. Carry on.

Apple Store: This is for buying the new iPhone.

Maps: I’m a geography nerd. If you gave me a map of the world, I could entertain myself with it for hours. And that’s exactly what I do with the Maps app.

The personal folder houses things that I don’t know what to do with and that fall into no category:

• Google Drive, for sharing files
• Google Translate, for translating stuff
• Apollo, for browsing Reddit
• Google Docs, for opening documents
• Best Buy: to buy electronics
• Amazon: to buy other things

Chipotle: This is yet another app that I use to feed myself.

Instacart: This is for ordering groceries to feed myself.

App Store: This is for downloading and updating apps.

Nest: The Nest app lets me view 24/7 recordings from my cameras around the house and access 2 way audio on my doorbell. I rarely use it since HKSV is pretty good.

Clock: I set tons of alarms because I’m not a morning person, and I use Clock to do it if it’s not my usual one that I set via a Shortcut.

Apple Music: I’m not much of a music person, but sometimes, you just have to turn on some good music with a nice pair of headphones, and that’s where Apple Music comes in. I hate Spotify, and once again, Apple sheep.

The Smart Home folder has things for Smart Homing:

• iRobot, to control my Roomba sometimes. I usually control it via Shortcuts, but sometimes, the iRobot app is just more useful. It’s slow, it’s ugly, and it’s bad. But it’s what I’m stuck with.
• UniFi Network, to control my home UniFi network, view IP addresses and stats, fix the internet when it goes down, and all of that other cool stuff.
• FedEx, to track FedEx packages
• UPS, to track UPS packages
• AfterShip, which looks through your email for tracking numbers and puts all of your package information in one place and maps their status out. It also sends notification, which is what I mainly use it for.
• GateAccess, which is an app my neighborhood uses to let guests through the guard gate
• Apple TV, which is great for sports notifications, and finding new sports/news to watch
• discovery+, to watch the Home & Garden Television Network
• Hulu, to watch television

I have one more folder, labeled school for schooling:

• Desmos, for graphing mathematical formulas and equations
• Quizlet, to prepare for quizzes
• Photomath, which is a cool app that allows you to take pictures of math problems and have the computer solve them, and show you how to solve them with step-by-step instructions. It’s really handy to actually understand math, which a lot of us don’t do
• iFraction, which is the dumbest app ever for my dumb brain that still thinks of fractions as fractions and not decimals, and allows you to convert obscure fractions to decimals and add fractions together

At the bottom of this junk home screen is something that’s not junk, and that’s my Things widget. I frequently lose track of what to do, and a widget for my to do list is the best thing ever. It’s always one swipe away to view tasks and open my Today list. The plus button adds tasks to my Inbox, which I can then act on the next day when I’m planning. Before iOS 14, this page used to be terrible. I had a bunch of junk and bloat I never/rarely used, all in one home screen. I could never find anything and resulted to searching. Now, it’s easy to find what I need and get to it. It might not be as clean as some of the other home screens you’ll see on the internet, but hey, it’s functional. If you’re curious about the amazing wallpaper, it’s by Silvia of MacStories, made for Club MacStories members. If you are one, check the latest MacStories Weekly. And those are my home screens that I use daily. Pretty boring, but these apps are crucial to the way I work.

My iPad Home Screen

My iPad setup is pretty simple; it’s just one home screen with everything important in the dock, and multiple widgets to make things easier. Since iOS 14, I’ve fundamentally changed the approach I’ve held with my iPad. I wanted to make my iPad as useful as possible, jam packing it with every single app from my phone in hopes that I’d use it more. I was wrong. Now, I’ve picked the apps that work best on the iPad, and tried to take a more Mac-like approach. A lot of the apps are the same from my iPhone, so I won’t go over them as I did in the iPhone section, but a lot of them are new/used differently on this fundamentally different device:

In the top left corner, I have a large widget stack similar to my iPhone, but with different widgets. Here are the apps, in order: Shortcuts, Music, and Tot. The Shortcuts widget is the most used, because who doesn’t like making their life easier? It includes Shortcuts that I use all the time, like Apple Frames, which I used to frame the screenshots in this blog post. Music simply shows the latest songs that I played, and Tot shows the last edited dot. One again, I don’t access the apps from the widget. They’re simply used to glance at information.

Speaking of glanceable information, the extra large widget is mainly used for that. I also have just 3 apps in a stack: CARROT Weather, Fantastical, and Timery. The uses for those widgets are pretty self explanatory.

I have one more widget which simply is a shortcut to my Notion page for easy access.

Settings: Let’s set some ings.

App Store: I like downloading and updating apps. Do you?

Find My: A lot of the time, the reason I’m using my iPad is because I forgot where I put my phone. That’s why I have this app there.

Entertainment houses every streaming app under the sky. I’m pretty sure you can guess what’s in it.

Photos: To look at digital photographs.

School houses the same school apps from my iPhone.

Adobe Express: Adobe Express is like Photoshop Lite Lite Lite. No, that wasn’t a typo. It’s basically a graphic design program that’s web based and has quick templates and icons. It’s kind of like Canva, but for Adobe. I’ve been meaning to swap this out with the official Photoshop for iPad, but just haven’t gotten around to doing it yet.

Pigment: Pigment is a really cool drawing app for the iPad. You know those “adult drawing books” you can get at the Barnes and Noble for $15? Yeah, it’s basically one of those, except way easier and more fun. You can pick between a variety of designs and color palettes to play with, and it works great with the Apple Pencil. If you own an iPad and Apple Pencil, you have to try out Pigment. It’s a lot of fun.

CARROT: The CARROT app on the iPad is full screen and has a much better layout than on the iPhone, and it’s really nice to see the radar maps on a giant screen. So yeah, I have it on there.

Home: This is for controlling the lights.

Overcast: It’s the same as the iPhone.

On my dock, it’s all of the apps that I actually use with frequency. Stuff in the middle is apps that I use with more frequency than apps on the edge. It’s weird, I know. Here’s the dock:

• Reminders, I used to use Reminders before I switched to Things, and I just haven’t gotten around to buying the Things for iPad app yet. I should probably get on that
• Reeder, sometimes, you just want to read your stuff on a bigger screen
• Files, which is the file manager on the iPad and hence I need it to do stuff
• Messages, to message other fellow humans on this planet earth
• Notion, for project management
• Spark, for checking my email
• Fantastical, which has Apple Pencil support, so you can write in the little squares that represent the days like an actual physical wall calendar
• Safari, for web browsing
• Notes, which I use entirely for handwritten notes. I haven’t been able to find an iPad app for handwritten notes that’s as reliable as Apple Notes. Its iCloud sync is just fantastic, it has never failed me, and quick note is pretty handy. I do occasionally use GoodNotes 5, but I always switch back to Apple Notes anyway
• Craft, for my typed notes
• YouTube, for watching YouTube videos on a bigger screen
• Tot, which syncs with Tot Pocket (the iOS version of the app) and is great for quick notes
• Timery, for time tracking. I frequently have the iPad open with Timery next to my Mac when I’m working with Universal Control enabled to save some space. It’s actually really handy
• Music, for listening to some tunes. I actually like the lyrics feature on the large screen!
• PCalc, which brings a calculator to the iPad (and the crowd goes wild!!!)
• App Library, for everything else, which isn’t much

The theme with the iPad is that it’s the core apps that I depend on every single day on my iPhone, but the iPad versions, which provide more features. It’s kind of boring, but hey, it works.

That’s it for my iPhone and iPad home screen setups! After iPhone season, I’ll be going through the best settings and apps on the Mac. But until then, stay safe out there.