5 ways to make your Android phone’s home screen really useful & more related news here

Out of the box, your Android phone’s home screen is just a bunch of apps that the manufacturer thinks you want to use. You get a few preloaded apps, 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, the first thing you should do is customize the home screen. This mainly involves removing all those preloaded app shortcuts and adding the ones you prefer.

While it’s a solid start, there are actually more ways to customize your Android home screen, not only to give it a cleaner look but also to make it more useful in your daily routine. It doesn’t have to be a simple dumping ground for your favorite apps when you can turn it into a handy hub instead. We’ll show you some tips and tricks on how to do it, including adding widgets and sorting your app shortcuts into folders.

While the app drawer is always just a tap away, it’s much faster if you can perform the desired actions directly from the home screen. That’s what widgets are for. They make tasks faster since you won’t need to check the 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 you need to use, always default to the tasks you perform throughout the day. Maybe that’s doing quick Google searches, recording your daily water intake, or checking your email. Those are the widgets you should add to your home screen for quick access. The process is usually different depending on the manufacturer, but here is a general guide:

1. Press and hold the key 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 your 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 problems adding one to your home screen. However, some applications do not support widgets. You need 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 more 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 Gmail with the compose screen already open. Compared to widgets that come in different shapes and forms, these app shortcuts look like regular app icons. The only difference is that instead of simply opening the app’s home screen, it goes directly to a supported action.

To add app shortcuts to your Android home screen, go to the app drawer and long-press the app you want. A small pop-up window will appear with all the action shortcuts it supports. Choose one and drag it to the home screen. Below is a quick breakdown of supported actions for some of the top productivity apps:

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

Please note that shortcuts may vary from app to app. Not all apps come with shortcuts. If you don’t see a list after long-pressing on an app, that means it doesn’t have any shortcuts.

Therefore, you constantly visit the same website from your mobile browser every day. That means having to type the same URL every time. For convenience, you can set it as a shortcut on your browser’s home page. But even then, you’ll need at least two taps to open the site. An even faster way to access your favorite websites is by adding a shortcut to your Android home screen. This way, everyone will be just a tap away.

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

1. Open the website in the mobile browser of your choice.
2. Go to the menu (hamburger icon or three vertical dots, depending on the browser).
3. Find these options:
   1. Chrome and Brave: install and create shortcuts.
   2. Edge: All Menu > Add to Phone.
   3. Firefox: More > Add to Home Screen.
   4. Opera: Add to > Home Screen.
   5. Samsung Browser: Add 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 still add some apps to it. It is simply more convenient compared to searching in the app drawer every time. Fortunately, you can still make your Android home screen work without making it look cluttered. You just need to make sure you add apps that are really useful for your daily routine. Think Gmail, Keep, Calculator, Messages, and Google Docs. To avoid visual clutter, try to keep your Android productivity apps to ten apps or less.

You can then organize apps into categories and place them on separate pages to make them easier to find. For example, you can have one page for your work applications and another page for your personal applications. Or one page for your messaging apps, another for your document and file apps, and a final page for your utility tools.

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

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

You can also consider switching to a minimalist Android launcher that is designed to display only a few apps on the home screen, forcing you to stick to the essentials. You can still open your other apps, but it would require some extra steps. While inconvenient, this encourages you to be more mindful of the apps you launch. In addition to making your Android home screen more useful, a minimalist launcher can also help reduce your screen time. It usually removes icons and wallpapers from your home screen, so you’re less tempted to use your device. Some highly rated minimalist Android launchers on Play Store include Minimalist Phone and Olauncher.