There’s a major redesign coming to Apple’s HomeKit Home app with iOS 16 this fall. I recently previewed all the new features coming to the smart home platform, but I wanted to do a quick tutorial on one of my favorite new features: personalization.
In the new Home app, the options to customize how smart home devices, rooms, and favorites appear on the screen have been greatly improved. You can rearrange your home view to put your most used rooms at the top, or designate your favorites or camera feeds as the first thing you see when you open the app.
You can also rearrange individual buttons on your devices, such as lights, door locks, and blinds, just as if you were arranging the apps on an iPhone’s home screen. This means that the smart lights or door lock you use the most can be in an easier place for your thumb to quickly touch and you can put two related items together.
There are new icons to help identify a light by its type (table lamp or ceiling light, for example) or quickly differentiate between other devices like displays and smart plugs. Scenes, which can set multiple devices to change state at once, now have more icons and the option to choose a color for each scene. And finally, there are new wallpaper options to give the app some personality.
You must be running iOS 16 to use the new Home app; the app is available on all Apple devices including iPad, Mac and Apple Watch. It’s releasing this fall, but there’s a public beta you can download today if you can’t wait.
Here’s how to get started customizing your Home app in iOS 16 on an iPhone.
How to reorder your rooms and groups on the Home View page.
Customize the home view screen
Home View is the screen that opens when you launch the Home app for the first time. You can also access it by tapping the Home icon on the bottom menu bar. Home View is where all the controllable devices in your HomeKit home appear, sorted into Rooms and Favorites. There are also Scene and Camera groups here. Now you can rearrange them to better fit the way you use the devices.
Reorder sections in your home view
- Open the Home app on your iPhone.
- Tap the three dots in the top right corner to open the Menu.
- Select Reorder sections.
- You will see a list of all rooms and groups (cameras/favorites/scenes) displayed in the home view.
- Touch and drag the three horizontal lines next to a room or group and drag your selection to the position you want in the home view.
- Paste Doneand your home view will be rearranged.
You can now rearrange device buttons and tiles the same way you can rearrange apps on your iPhone’s home screen.
Edit tiles in your home view
- Open the Home app on your iPhone.
- Tap the three dots in the top right corner to open the Menu.
- Select Edit home view. (You can also press and hold any button/tile and select Edit home view.)
- All chips will go into “jiggle mode”.
- Drag any tile where you want on the screen. You must stay in your designated Room.
- You can rearrange any tile on the home screen, including new shortcut buttons at the top, scene tiles, and camera tiles.
You can also resize any tile in the home view if it is below the room.
- To do this, tap on the tile when in jiggle mode.
- A resize arrow will appear in the upper right corner.
- Tap it to make the tile big and again to make it small. There are two size options.
Now you can banish that forgotten smart plug by hiding a device from home view.
Hide a device from home view
If your home view is cluttered with a lot of devices that you rarely access in the app, you can hide them to keep your home view a bit tidier.
- Open the Home app on your iPhone.
- Touch and hold a device tile and select Remove from home view.
- The tile will disappear from home view, but will still appear in individual room view.
- To bring it back to home view, find it in room view, press and hold and select Add to Home View.
Customize the icons in the Home app
Customizing the icons for your devices and Scenes can make it easier to quickly find what you’re looking for. In the new Home app, there are now 15 options for lighting icons (up from 10 before), while other categories have redesigned icons to help clarify that the icon represents a ceiling fan or table fan, for example.
The biggest change in terms of icons is in Scenes. There are now over 100 new icons, compared to just 12 in previous versions. You can choose a roaring fireplace, birthday cake, book, or ghost emoji to help encapsulate what your Scene will bring into your home. Also, you can now assign one of 12 colors to your scene.
Change the icon of your light or other devices
- Open the Home app on your iPhone.
- Long press on the device you want to change the icon for.
- Play accessories details from the pop-up menu.
- tap on the Settings in the bottom right corner (or swipe up from the bottom).
- Tap the current icon.
- A menu of icons will appear.
- Select the new one.
- Play Done.
Change the icon of your Scene
- Open the Home app on your iPhone.
- Press and hold the Scene button you want to change.
- Tap the icon.
- A menu of icons and colors will appear.
- Select the icon and color you want.
- Play Done.