Had I known that I could connect a Bluetooth mouse to my iPhone and use the pointer to reorganize my Homescreen I would have done that a long time ago. Apparently, this has been a feature since iOS 13, and later added to iPadOS 13.4. I know that using a pointer on my iPad is quite useful, but it never occurred to me to think I could do the same on my iPhone. As luck would have it, a fix found me!

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When I came across Tinyblock’s Minimal iPhone Setup guide in a toot on Mastodon I was intrigued. It’s always taken so much time to organize, group icons into folders, set up the right widgets, and whatnot. Then you have to swipe around or open folders or, even worse, search to find an app. The Minimal iPhone Setup Guide promised an entirely new way to interact with my iPhone.

IMPORTANT: This guide requires certain features available in iOS 18 not earlier versions, so keep that in mind.

After donating a fiver* to the author I was redirected to the guide. I’d never seen anyone deliver an experience using Notion before, and I was pleased with the experience. It works more like a slide deck app than just some hokey web page, and the formatting is nice and clean. The guide walked me through the steps of how to set up their concept of a Minimal iPhone Homescreen and had it set up in a total of about 15 minutes.

*NOTE: The author lets you set the price you’d like to pay for their work. I chose $5 US, and I felt that was perfectly fair. I ask that you consider a similar donation for their effort.

The result is almost indistinguishable from a standard homescreen setup, but the added functionality is transformative. Using a clever combination of Focus modes, Shortcuts, and various iOS standards like the Dock, Lock Screen, and Control Center, you can configure a wide range of easily customizable dashboards that suit your needs in the moment. And, at least for four of these, at a single touch when placed in the Dock (as shown in the image below).

Left to right are my Dashboard, Blogging, Finances, and Multimedia pages, each accessed by a single tap to the icons in the dock. If you look closely, you’ll note that the icon that appears next to the time roughly corresponds to the icon on the dock the page is associated with. The reason they are slightly different has nothing to do with the guide, but iOS. Focus and Shortcuts do not use the same icon sets. It’s as simple as that. It would be nice if Apple were to fix that…

With this setup, I only have two folders (top left on my Blogging Focus) for things I need access to, but don’t open very often. That means everything I use regularly is no more than two taps away or otherwise inside a folder, and often just the one tap to launch. And I can still Swipe Right to get the Today view and Swipe Left to get the App Library in each of the Focus modes.

For the first few days I found myself swiping like my old setup, but I soon got used to that and now I’m fully on-board with this new approach to accessing apps. I highly recommend it to anyone who’s tired of swiping and searching.

For additional details, head over to the Tinyblocks website.

PS: This is an entirely independent review. Tinyblocks has not asked for this review nor have I offered them to review it before posting.