How To: Easily Remove (some) Apple App Icons
by Rob on
June 30, 2009
Filed under Daily App Reviews, Devices, Firmware, Tips Tricks and How Tos, iPhone Operating System
I see and hear complaints all the time of people wanting to remove pre-installed applications from Apple off of their iPhone or iPod Touch. Everybody knows by now that to remove an app installed from the App Store simply touch and hold the app icon until all the icons jiggle. Once the icons start to jiggle the non-Apple apps will have a black “X” badge in the corner of them. Touch there to remove that app from your device. But what if you want an Apple app removed? There is no black “X” badge that appears for Apple apps, so that doesn’t work.
With the introduction of iPhone OS 3.0 Apple added Parental Controls called “Restrictions.” Using the Restrictions function you can block access to all sorts of content on the device – including a few applications. While not a surefire way to remove all of the Apple icons from the springboard, you can use Restrictions to block access (ie: remove) to a few of the Apple installed applications such as Safari, YouTube, Camera, iTunes and App Store. You’re still stuck with the other Apple apps such as Notes, Calendar, Weather, Stocks, Mail, etc. But for these few applications turning them off and hiding their icons is easy.
To use Restrictions to hide the icons of these apps you must first enable it in the Settings app. Navigate to Settings, select Restrictions, enable Restrictions, and enter a passcode. Now you can easily turn off the apps that you don’t want showing up anymore. That’s it! You’re done! If you need help on how to enable Restrictions via step by step then see our earlier post: Tour of Parental Controls.
i have an ipod touch and when i turn it on there are no icons on the home screen what so ever! please help me
This isn’t a support forum, sorry.
Use poof instead of this temporary method.
Poof is for jailbroken phones which we don’t promote.