All iPads Tips for organizing apps on a multi purpose iPad

[annay49]

The show us your home screen thread got me thinking.

I use my ipad (and iPhone) a lot. I have 181 apps on my iPad (and 323 on my iPhone) and use about 60% of them on a regular basis - the other 40% or so are games that I play occasionally. My apps range from productivity, consumption, drawing, photo editing, video editing, coding, personal finance, to several apps I'm just testing to see if they'll fit in my workflow.

What I struggle with is keeping it all in an organized fashion that I like. How have people with a lot of apps organized their devices?

Currently for me I'm using my home page with mostly stock apple apps, second page productivity apps, 3rd page design apps with spillover into page 4 and 5 that just contains half empty folders upon folders of everything else. It drives me crazy!

Anyone else have similar scenarios or thoughts on layout? I've never had this issue on my laptop since I use spotlight mostly.

 

[ozaz]

The only option is to put stuff in folders isn't it?
That's what I do on my iPad. Only 5-10 of my apps are not stored in folders. I often launch apps via Spotlight so don't really need to remember which folder I have put an app in.

I use an Android phone, and one of the things I really like about Android is the app drawer. Wish iOS had this.

 

[M. Gustave]

I don't really have anything to add, I'm terrible at this myself, but I just wanted to applaud your heavy iPad usage.

And good thread topic.

 

[Abazigal]

Everyone has their own style. For me, I put all work-related apps on the 1st home screen so I can quickly assess all the apps at work without having to keep swiping left and right to locate them. This also makes it so my students can't see what else is on my iPad.

Second home screen is all my apps for recreation / consumption. Third home screen are apps I use way less often, or apps that provide services / extensions which I don't need to open directly (such as ad-blockers, 3rd party keyboards, photo extensions, Sidefari etc). I chuck all this into a folder.

One thing you can try is use an app launcher app such as Launch Centre Pro (the iPad app sadly hasn't been updated in ages) or Launcher Pro for the ability to quickly access apps and actions from your notifications screen.

First thing you can do is figure out all the apps you don't use or don't really need to open to use (your stock Apple apps?). I have a folder full of stock Apple apps that I never use which I chuck inside a folder on the 3rd page. Same with your extensions. Chuck them inside another folder called utility or something. This helps narrow down the apps you have to work with. Games can probably also all go inside a folder unless there is one or two games you really want to be able to access for a quick fix.

Next, ask yourself. What is the timetable for using your apps? Do you have a fixed / regular time when you access specific apps each day, or is it at a whim and fancy? Eg: My work-related apps are stuff I regularly access in class from 8 to 5 every day.

You won't necessarily get it right the first time, but half the fun is the process of finding that app layout which works for you.

 

[Night Spring]

One thing I've found useful is to put folders in the dock. I have three folders in the dock, that together contain my most used apps. That really cuts down on needing to swipe through home screen pages looking for the apps I need. Also, since it became possible to have multiple pages inside a folder, I keep my less used apps in the second and third pages within a folder. I do this even if the first folder page isn't completely full. So now on my iPad I only have one page of home screen. Sometimes the second page will have apps I'm evaluating, but if I decide to keep them, I drag them into appropriate folders.

 

[alecgold]

I have a totally different solution. Won't help you, but I try to keep my apps as much as possible to a minimum. Hmmm, counting 53 apps, that is way more then I thought I had. I have two folders, one with useful stuf on the first page, then the obligatory Apple apps that can't be deleted. Another folder with one page that has some entertainment apps on it. The rest of the home screen is used for the apps that I use daily for work.

 

[annay49]

Thanks for the feedback. I'm going to keep trying a few things. I'm a super commuter with a 4+ hour daily commute, so I make good use of my iPad and prefer more apps there, instead of using LTE to download something just in case I need to look 1-2 things up. I'm also a user experience designer, so I think about these things and organize and test apps just for fun.

I do use launch center pro to organize craft blogs I read. I'm going to look into expanding that usage.

After the iOS10 announcement I read this article. Basically made me think about all the utility app, and what will extend into something else. This may mean I make some changes when iOS 10 comes out. Thinking about this method, it makes sense to put a lot of things into back pages of folders that can extend to other things. This will be a very effective method on my iPhone.
https://medium.com/charged-tech/ios...apps-as-you-know-them-1d92b1a9f679#.a1nw6p8mn

 

[alecgold]

I travel a lot too, but by car. So on average I'm two days a week on the road, at clients etc and because I don't trust anybody else's wifi network, I use my LTE. But I did get a serious good deal, so I have 10gb a month and that is way more then I need. So except big apps like office, I can download almost anything if I happen to need it.
And I'm pretty much set in the way I do things, so it isn't that often I need to download.

Thanks for the link to that medium article. It's an interesting tought, but I'm not sure it makes iOS even more suited for consuming. It might also be even easier to keep focused on the work you are doing. You don't need to think hard what the conversation was about, you can see what it was, shoot a quick replay and get on with writing in Ulysses etc. My feeling is that iOS 10 won't Ben that big of an update if you look at it superficial. But I think it might change the way we use iOS more than you would expect. It might feel less like making an effort, more natural.

 

[annay49]

I think their thought about consumption was based on what other people are thinking of. But my thought was something along the lines of "will I be able to hide my uber app because I can order an uber out of iMessage, my mail client, and maps," or "will I be able to set a calendar event from a enriched PDF, and view all my events via a widget and then hide my calendar app"

I don't know yet, just got me thinking about how quick interactions will be quicker, and allow focus for actual tasks.

Anyway, slightly off topic. I'll post my setup once I figure it out. I'm getting closer I think.

 

[mcdj]

Not sure what the issue is, other than lack of imagination. Just come up with good category names and make folders.

Apple
Movies/Videos/Entertainment/Whatever you want to call it
Music
Painting/Drawing/Art/Whatever you want to call it
Travel
Local (Yelp, etc)
Weather
Photography
Books
Shopping
Games
Utilities
Misc

 

[Abazigal]

Not sure what the issue is, other than lack of imagination. Just come up with good category names and make folders.

Apple
Movies/Videos/Entertainment/Whatever you want to call it
Music
Painting/Drawing/Art/Whatever you want to call it
Travel
Local (Yelp, etc)
Weather
Photography
Books
Shopping
Games
Utilities
Misc

Folders aren't always the fastest or the most elegant way of organising things.

Think of it as your desk. You can keep everything in drawers and it would look quite tidy, but then it gets pretty troublesome when you want to access something. Not every app belongs in a folder, especially those you access regularly.

 

[username:]

If you start off organising by colour, it might surprise you how easily you find the apps you need. Have one folder of green, one of red, etc. Then you have 10-12 folders in which (for me) it is quite easy to find things. After I had that setup for a few months I made a couple of folders, one for mail, one for planning (calendar mainly), one for cloud (Dropbox, Evernote, etc)

 

[ericwn]

I find myself using Spotlight most of the time on my Macs and devices. Works fine for me.

 

[masotime]

The iOS springboard is definitely ripe for a redesign. I don't think Apple planned for the large number of apps that can now be installed with the large amount of storage space now available.

Frankly I'd like to see a kind of summary screen of my most frequently used apps, and / or most likely used apps augmented by current location and time of day, and a quick way to get at apps based on their categorization on the App Store.

In particular, I'd really like to be able to use 3D Touch on spotlight results....

 

[Osty]

I keep everything on my primary home screen and just organise by folder. I guess I don't have that many apps. Safari, Mail, Overcast and Editorial are 99% of my usage. I'll be adding Scrivener to that list when it's released next month.

 

[jdechko]

I use an Android phone, and one of the things I really like about Android is the app drawer. Wish iOS had this.

I know it will draw some criticism, but I really like Windows Phone's method. I'd love to see a hybrid approach from Apple that takes the best of all 3 systems. The today screen in iOS 10 (swipe right) is going to be great. But I'd also like just a list of all of the installed apps on my phone, and be able to have 1 screen of widgets (a la android and iOS 10 today screen), 1 screen of springboard icons and then 1 screen with a vertical list of every installed app.