How to make app icons bigger or smaller on your iPad Home screen

If you feel the app icons on your iPad Home Screen are too small, you can easily increase their size. This brief tutorial shows you how to make icons on iPad bigger for a more comfortable experience.

Small and large iPad app icons shown next to each other

Adjust app icons size on iPadOS 15 and later

Here’s how to increase the app icon size on iPad:

  1. Open the Settings app.
  2. Tap Home Screen & Dock.
  3. Enable the toggle for Use Large App Icons.

Now, go to the iPad Home Screen and you’ll notice bigger app icons in the same 6×5 grid. In case the changes don’t reflect, restart your iPad.

Use Large App Icons on iPad

The app icon size setting is an iPad-exclusive feature. The somewhat similar feature on iPhone is the Display Zoom feature which slightly enlarges everything, including app icons on the iPhone Home Screen.

Make app icons bigger or smaller iPadOS 14 and earlier

With iPadOS 14 and earlier, Apple offered two icon sizes for apps on the iPad Home Screen: More and Bigger.

As evident from the name, choosing More makes app icons smaller to squeeze more apps on the Home Screen. On the other hand, Bigger increases the app icon size and thus fits fewer apps on the iPad Home Screen.

Here’s how to change the app icon size and make app icons bigger or smaller on the iPad Home Screen:

1) Open Settings on your iPad and tap Display & Brightness.

2) Under App Icon Size, choose:

  • More: It makes the app icons a bit smaller in order to fit more of them on the Home Screen. This setting uses a 6×5 grid to show up to 30 icons on each Home Screen page.
  • Bigger: It swaps the 6×5 grid for a bit roomier 5×4 grid that fits up to 20 icons that appear a bit bigger with more space between them.
App icon size settings on iPad

By default, iPadOS uses the More setting unless you or someone with access to your iPad had manually changed it to Bigger.

Apart from the difference in icon size, the two settings do not bring other changes to how you interact with the Home Screen pages and app icons on your iPad.

Note: When using More, the widget area all the way to the left is a part of your Home Screen. When Bigger is active, the same Today View, as it’s called, appears as a translucent overlay similar to Control Center and Notification Center, as shown in the screenshots below.

More and Bigger app icon size settings on iPad

iDB video showing iPadOS features:

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