If iOS’s stock apps—Stocks, Tips, iBook, and the like—are too unsightly for you, there’s a way to hide them beyond just sticking them into an app folder.
According to various videos on YouTube, there are a few different ways to accomplish this, but all involve dragging around the unwanted app in and out of a folder or the home screen. Regardless of the method, once the app has been hidden, it can still be found by using the Spotlight search feature. Most of the tutorials are for iOS 9 and newer, though at least one technique we found claims to work for iOS 8 as well and was posted on YouTube a year ago.
For the most part, users wishing to modify their iOS experience in ways that are unorthodox, like this one, have had to resort to jailbreaking. Hiding the stock icons, however, doesn’t require it.
What’s interesting is that Apple (AAPL) likely baked these hidden workarounds into its mobile operating system because it’s aware that many of its customers want to get rid of these stock apps. In an interview with BuzzFeed in September, Apple CEO Tim Cook acknowledged that it’s a common gripe with the way iOS works right now, and that it plans to someday let users delete these apps.
“It’s not that we want to suck up your real estate; we’re not motivated to do that. We want you to be happy. So I recognize that some people want to do this, and it’s something we’re looking at,” he said.
He added that the reason Apple hasn’t made this possible from the beginning is because some of these stock apps are connected to other apps or features in the phone. Removing them would create complications with those other elements, Cook said. This is probably why, so far, hiding these apps is the most users can do until the company truly lets them delete at least some of them.