5 Ways to Make Your Android Phone’s Home Screen Actually Useful

Right out of the box, your Android phone’s home screen is just a jumble of apps that the manufacturer thinks you want to use. You get a few apps preloaded, including several from Google itself. Most of the time, you barely touch these apps. So when you first set up your Pixel, Samsung Galaxy, or other phone of your choice, your first task is to customize the home screen. This mainly involves removing all those preloaded app shortcuts and adding your favorite shortcuts.

While this is a good start, there are actually other ways to customize your Android home screen, not only to make it look cleaner, but also to make it more useful in your daily routine. It doesn’t have to remain just a dumping ground for your favorite apps when you can turn it into a convenient hub. We’ll show you some tips and tricks on how to do this, including adding widgets and organizing your app shortcuts into folders.

Although the app drawer is still accessible with a simple swipe, it’s still much faster if you can perform the actions you want directly from the home screen. That’s what widgets are for. They make tasks faster since you won’t need to go through your app drawer and open the app. Instead, they allow you to view information and perform certain actions directly from your Android home screen.

When deciding which widget to use, always default to the tasks you do throughout the day. Maybe it’s doing quick Google searches, logging your daily water intake, or checking your email. These are the widgets you need to add to your home screen for quick access. The process is usually different depending on the manufacturer, but here is a general guide:

1. Long press anywhere on your home screen.
2. Look for the Add Widget/Widgets button.
3. Browse the options.
4. Once you find a widget you like, drag and drop it to the home screen.
5. Reposition and resize the widget if necessary.
6. When prompted, tap the widget to configure it further.

Most of the time, mainstream apps offer different widgets for different actions, so you won’t have any problem adding one to your home screen. However, some apps don’t support widgets. You either have to replace them or try to find the widget you need in a third-party app like Widgeet or iWidgets. Once you have all your widgets on the home screen, you can separate them into different pages for further organization.

On many Android phones, you can pin app shortcuts for specific actions to your home screen. For example, you can open Chrome in incognito mode or launch your Gmail with the compose screen already open. Compared to widgets that come in different shapes, these app shortcuts look like regular app icons. The only difference is that instead of just opening the app’s home screen, it jumps straight to a supported action.

To add app shortcuts to your Android home screen, go to your app drawer and hold down the app you want. A small pop-up window will appear with all supported action shortcuts. Choose one and drag it to the home screen. Here’s a quick overview of supported actions for some of the common productivity apps:

• Chrome: Open a new tab or incognito tab.
• Gmail: Open the compose screen or inbox of one of the first three Google accounts connected to your device.
• Keep: Create a new text note, list, photo note, or audio note.
• Zoom: Open the login page or a “Join Meeting” page.
• Viber: Open My Notes or the chat thread of one of your three main contacts.
• WPS desktop: open the scanner; go to the search bar; create a new document.

Keep in mind that shortcuts may vary from app to app. Not all apps have shortcuts equally. If you don’t see a list after long-pressing an app, it doesn’t have any shortcuts.

So you constantly visit the same website from your mobile browser, every day. This means having to enter the same URL every time. For convenience, you can pin it as a shortcut to your browser’s home page. But even then, it will take you at least two clicks to open the site. An even faster way to access your favorite websites is to add a shortcut to your Android home screen. This way they are all within reach.

To pin website shortcuts from your mobile browser to the Home screen, follow these steps:

1. Open the website on your mobile browser of choice.
2. Go to the menu (hamburger icon or three vertical dots, depending on the browser).
3. Look for these options:
   1. Chrome and Brave: Install and create a shortcut.
   2. Edge: All menu > Add to phone.
   3. Firefox: More > Add to Home Screen.
   4. Opera: Add to > Home screen.
   5. Samsung Browser: Add a page to > Home screen.
4. When prompted, enter a name for the website shortcut.

The website shortcut, which looks like an app icon, should appear on your home screen. Feel free to move it or group it with your existing folders. If you visit multiple websites, you can create more website shortcuts from the same mobile browser.

No matter how much you want to keep your home screen clean, you’ll probably always add apps to it. It’s simply more convenient than digging through your app drawer every time. Fortunately, you can still make your Android home screen functional without making it complicated. You just need to make sure that you add apps that are actually useful to your daily routine. Think Gmail, Keep, Calculator, Messages and Google Docs. To avoid visual clutter, try limiting your Android productivity apps to ten apps or fewer.

Then you can organize apps into categories and place them on separate pages to make them easier to find. For example, you might have one page for your business apps and another page for your personal apps. Or one page for your email applications, another for your documents and files applications, and a final page for your utility tools.

If you’re not a fan of separate pages, you can also opt for folders. Group apps into different folders, such as Finance, Communication, and Tools, and organize them on one page to save space. To create a folder on your home screen, simply drag and drop an app into another app. Then rename this folder. You can add more apps and app shortcuts to the folder once it is created.

The home screen is the first thing you see as soon as you unlock your Android phone. To make it more useful, it’s essential that the apps you put on it are the ones that help you get things done. Start by removing all the distracting social media and gaming apps already on your Android home screen. They can easily lure you into doomscrolling, so it’s generally a bad idea to place them in the front where you can easily click on them.

You might also consider switching to a minimalist Android launcher designed to display only a few apps on the home screen, forcing you to stick to the basics. However, you can still open your other apps, but it would require a few extra steps. Although inconvenient, it encourages you to be more attentive to the applications you launch. Besides making your Android home screen more useful, a minimalist launcher can also help you reduce your screen time. It usually strips the home screen of icons and wallpapers, so you’re less tempted to use your device. Some popular minimalist Android launchers on the Play Store include Minimalist Phone and Olauncher.