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Apple will let you choose ‘bigger’ or ‘more’ app icons on your iPad’s home screen

Apple will let you choose ‘bigger’ or ‘more’ app icons on your iPad’s home screen

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Switching between 20 or 30 apps on the iPad

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Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Apple’s latest iOS 13 beta version was released earlier today, and with it came a few surprises. The most notable is that the company is planning a previously unannounced feature that will let users, for the first time, resize app icons on the home screen.

At least, that’s how Apple refers to it. It’d be more technically accurate to say grid layout customization, as the smaller or larger app icons are a product of adding an extra two columns to the overall grid layout. But “App Icon Size” is how it’s labeled in Settings. So it goes.

Between a 4 x 5 layout and a 6 x 5 layout

As noted by MacRumors, this feature is currently available in the fifth beta of iPadOS, so it’s unclear if it will be an official feature of iOS 13 for the iPhone. (That seems unlikely for now.) It’s also building off a previous change introduced in iPadOS, when we first saw the 6 x layout introduced as part of the redesigned home screen.

But now, users have the ability to revert back to the existing standard through the app icon resizing setting, which will let you customize the amount of columns on the home screen between a 4 x 5 layout and a 6 x 5 layout, labeled as “bigger” and “more,” respectively. The text beneath the feature seems to suggest you can only switch between 20 and 30 apps on a single screen at this time.

That said, this is the first time Apple has allowed users to do this level of customization on app icons. It’ll will be nice both from an accessibility standpoint and because it’s a rare but appreciated case where Apple has taken an age-old jailbreak feature and brought it to its official iOS platform.

Some other interesting developments in the latest iOS beta include some fresh new wallpapers, more granular volume control options that expand the number of volume levels to a total of 34, and the addition of Shortcuts to the iOS Share Sheet for faster access.