I love watching YouTubers create content like this, so in an attempt to recreate the fun for myself (and to provide some help to my readers), I thought I’d go through what’s on my iPhone and how I’ve set it up so the phone tends to my needs and not the other way around. Please note that my phone layout tends to change 1–2 times a year, so I may do a follow-up if it changes significantly, but this is my current layout.

Lockscreen

I hate bulky and crowded lockscreens, so I’ve decided to keep it super simple. I just have a clock (which I enlarged thanks to iOS 26), nothing else. I even got rid of the two shortcuts at the bottom. P.S. My wife designed this wallpaper. If you would like the same wallpaper, it can be found here.

Today View

I like having a dedicated page for all my widgets, but one condition I had is that this should fit the phone display, meaning I shouldn’t need to scroll. So the widgets I’ve gone for are: 1) Clock, 2) Battery, 3) Smart Stack, and 4) Counter.

The Smart Stack is built from three individual widgets that help me save space: Forza (my app of choice to keep up with football, or soccer for my North American readers), Apple Stocks, and CoinMarketCap to keep up with cryptocurrency prices. The Counter widget helps me track some monthly or occasional habits I’m building. This time I’m trying to go 30 days without any aspartame, an artificial sweetener found in diet sodas and sugar-free foods.

Homepage

This is the most crowded my homepage has been in months, or even years. I usually don’t have all these items, but I wanted a change and got bored of my previous setup. Anyways, going top to bottom and left to right, the apps and widgets are:

• Apple Calendar
• App Shuffle widget
• Google folder (only contains Gmail and Google Keep)
• Settings
• Photos
• Apple Maps (I’ve been testing this for over a month now)
• Messages
• Libby (for my public library)
• YouTube
• Custom shortcut I’ve created that opens my to-do list automatically in Apple Notes
• Phone
• Brave Browser
• Spotify (might move to Apple Music eventually)
• WhatsApp

The two items I’d like to tell you about are App Shuffle and the custom shortcut. The former is a native Apple widget that uses Siri and my habits to suggest apps that I use at specific times, on certain days, or in certain places. It’s not perfect, but it’s slowly getting better as it learns my phone usage habits. Even with some random suggestions, it knows which app I want to use around 8 out of 10 times, which is pretty darn impressive. For example, if I happen to be in the plaza with my gym, it will suggest ‘Strong’ to be – my workout tracker app of choice.

The other icon on my homepage was made using Shortcuts by Apple and is linked to my to-do list in Apple Notes. This saves me 3–4 taps every time I open it. I’ve tried multiple to-do list apps, but I like having everything in one place that can be accessed through Siri either at home or while I’m driving. The setup to create this custom shortcut was super simple and well worth it.

One thing you’ll notice is the lack of social media apps. I don’t have Reddit, LinkedIn, or Instagram on my phone. If I need to use any of these apps, I use the browser on my phone or my laptop. This extra bit of friction saves me from the awful doomscroll that kids nowadays (I’m almost 32 years old so I can say this) are addicted to.

I love the new iOS because I get to hid all the app names by making them larger and also adding a nice dark tint to the icons. Granted, this does make it difficult to sometimes spot the right app that I’m looking for but it’s a small price to pay for appearances. My wife and family absolutely hate using my phone for this reason.

That’s it. I only have one page on my main screen. I like my home screen to be simple and junk-free. In my next post, I’ll discuss some of my favourite apps and why I use them over other alternatives. Stay tuned!