It’s 2026, and I still can’t believe Apple won’t change the most frustrating thing about iOS

Moving apps around in iOS 26 is still maddeningly frustrating

22 Mar 2026, 15:00 · TechRadar

Features By Roland Moore-Colyer published 22 March 2026

(Image credit: Lance Ulanoff / Future)

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The year is 2026, and I still cannot fathom why moving iPhone apps and organizing my Home Screen is one of the most frustrating things in my technology life.

Now, I have a somewhat obsessive approach to app layouts and management in that I like to try and keep a logical flow to them — Google productivity apps are in one row but, due to the same color scheme, they'll be joined by Google Photos, which also sits under the native iOS Photos app. Basically, I do a form of visual sudoku with my apps so that they all fit a logic in my head; everyone has their quirks.

But while this process is trivially easy on Android, it’s a nightmare with iOS. Despite the ‘just works’ nature of iPhones and the often-touted simplicity of iOS, I’m baffled as to why Apple still won’t let users simply tap and hold an app and put it wherever they want.

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There’s still the absurdity that moving one app affects all the others on a given page of the Home Screen — if it’s a particularly packed one, iOS will shunt apps onto another page. Often, this results in me losing track of an app or folder — something I just noticed as I write this article.

The Home Screen customization interface in iOS (Image credit: Future)

Now, this is nothing new; iOS has been like this for years. And while I’ve felt white-hot fury at the idiotic nature of app management in iOS, by the time I’m done tweaking, I’ve either decided to blame (my) user error, or have simmered down.

But I feel that with iOS 26 and Liquid Glass, it feels more finicky than ever. Maybe it’s the design or the way the apps respond, but when I accidentally deleted an entire page from my Home Screen (the result of a too-fast reaction after a phantom pocket press) and decided to recreate the dead page and do some app-layout spring cleaning, I nearly lost my mind.

Not only is there the male-bovine-excrement situation of apps I’m not interacting with flying around the screen as I try to move a particular one, but there seemed to be an utter refusal of one folder to accept an app I was trying to give it.

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