How to Hide and Show an App on Your iPhone or iPad (And Why You May Want to Do It)

Sometimes you don’t want your iPhone or iPad to display all installed apps directly on the Home screen. The easiest method is to long press an icon, pressing the button – (less) icon next to it and choosing Remove from Home Screen. This banishes it to the App Library, but you can go further.

Maybe you want to declutter your iPhone and keep the list tidy, keep getting distracted by social media, or don’t want others to see what you have installed. In these cases, iOS and iPadOS give you several ways to hide apps to keep them out of your view (and that of others). While these methods aren’t secret agent-level tricks that hide in plain sight, they are suitable for keeping icons out of sight and locking down anything that requires extra security. If full locking and hiding isn’t for you, you can always remove apps from your screen or delete their content on your phone.

We’re focusing on the iPhone and Face ID for brevity, but it works the same on the iPad and models with Touch ID.

Before iOS 18, there was no official way to hide apps on iPhone or iPad; you had to stick one in a folder to keep it out of sight. Now there is a better way. To hide an app, long-press it on your device’s home screen and choose Require facial identification. This displays a new prompt that explains what happens during locking. You need to authenticate with Face ID or your password to open it, notifications won’t contain any details, and its contents won’t appear in places like Spotlight or CarPlay searches.

It’s a good idea to lock down financial tools for a second level of security. You will find many stories online of people being scammed by strangers who asked to use their phone in an “emergency”. Once they have your phone in hand, it only takes a few seconds for them to transfer money to each other using Venmo or similar. While you shouldn’t trust your phone to a stranger in the first place, requiring re-authentication for the app prevents such schemes.

Choose Require facial identification keeps the icon where it is while requiring authentication every time you open it. Alternatively, choose Hide and require Face ID to remove it from your home screen and searches. After hiding an app, you will not receive any notifications from it. You can’t lock most apps by default; this is limited to those you have installed. And the status of what you’ve hidden doesn’t sync with your other Apple devices.

Hidden applications are located in a special folder, aptly called Hiddenat the bottom of the App Library. Swipe to the rightmost page to see this. That Hidden the folder appears empty, no matter how many apps you have hidden (including zero). Tapping on it requires you to authenticate before you can see what apps are inside, and then you’ll have to check again when opening one. To view something later, long-press it in the Hidden folder, choose Does not require facial IDand the app will return to the top of the list after verifying you. You can then search for it using Spotlight and drag it where you want it.

Although this process significantly reduces an app’s visual presence on your device, it does not erase all traces. Anyone with your password can browse the Hidden folder, as well as the same list under Settings > Applications > Hidden applications.

But there are other places where “hidden” applications can appear: Settings > Screen Time > See all activity on apps and websites And Settings > Battery > Show all battery usage. These respectively show how long you used each one and how much battery it consumed on your phone. Even if it’s hidden, it will still appear in those places if there is data to report.

Apps you download also appear in your App Store purchase history (even free ones, despite their name). To hide them, open the App Store, then tap your profile icon in the top right and choose Applications and purchase history. If you’re in a family group, tap Your apps. Everything you’ve downloaded, including those that are no longer on your iPhone, appears here. Swipe from right to left and choose Hide to remove an item from this list. If you change your mind later, go back to the App Store top-level menu, tap your name at the top, and choose Hidden purchases. There you can Display any to put them back in the list.

This method is more for decluttering than any form of privacy. You do not need to authenticate to view the Hidden purchases list, and your transaction history is also kept under Purchase history in the Applications and purchase history menu. Hiding purchases prevents anyone in your family group from re-downloading them, but it won’t hide the apps themselves.

Hiding apps isn’t the only method for controlling what appears on your phone. As we’ve seen, it’s a good way to spend less time on addictive software because it adds extra steps to access it and hides all notifications. But you can add more restrictions for these.

Head to Settings > Screen Time to set a daily time limit for selected applications (Application Limitations) or set times when you cannot access it (Downtime). Also in this menu under Content and Privacy Restrictions > Allowed Apps and Featuresyou can disable access to some built-in tools (like FaceTime And Email), which removes them from the home screen. While many of these options are great for controlling a child’s iPad, anyone can benefit from them.

If an app bothers you too much, go to Settings > Notificationsselect the offender and refine their notifications so you don’t get harassed. To stop your iPhone from suggesting an app, visit Settings > Apple Intelligence and Siri > Appschoose one, then turn off the sliders to prevent your phone from suggesting it. And to remove an app from search, visit Settings > Searchselect it and turn off both sliders. Hiding an app does all of this, but you can perform these actions without hiding if you want to keep it visible.

Hiding apps isn’t 100% foolproof, but it adds extra steps for users to see what you’d prefer they don’t hide. Maybe you don’t want others snooping around your phone when you hand it to them, or you want to add extra protection against someone trying to use your phone for nefarious purposes. For added protection, consider enabling stolen device protection on your iPhone.