Space for your iPhone

How might I make my iPhone easier to navigate and declutter the home screen?

I don’t have big hands. I don’t see my self having small hands either, but nevertheless the phones are becoming bigger and bigger and that is putting a strain on my thumbs.

So, I decided to figure out how I might make my iPhone easier to navigate and at the same time declutter my home screen to get rid of distractions.

The problem is evident. Unless you’re Scottie Pippin and have thumbs suited a top tier NBA star, then you will have a hard time navigate certain areas of your smartphone.

I wanted to create a homescreen where I didn’t need NBA grade hands to navigate my homescreen. I wanted to do that by placing my app in the bottom right corner, so I could easily reach them with my thumb. I also wanted to get rid of some of the apps that stole my attention from time to time (without deleting them).

But how could I achieve this?

I figured that if I could somehow come up with a custom app icon in black or some other color I could make “invisible” icons and fill up my homescreen with them. I started prototyping in the prototyping tool Invision, which let you make custom icons for the prototypes you add to your homescreen. However, this was a tiresome process, so Idecided to figure out another way.

A clever thing built into the iPhone is that you can add homepages to your home screen, so I thought, that if I could somehow create an invisible “favicon” I could achieve the same effect as with Invision.

The solution

Like most good solutions the final way to do it was extremely simple and only required four lines of code and a .png file. I’m not a great developer, but this was within my comfort zone.

The final little piece of HTML-magic that made my hack come to life.

I made a simple website containing the code and added it to my home screen. The website is http://jahmas.dk/space/. And to make black spaces I did the following:

Now I could easily add as many black spaces I wanted to. I could do it by simply add a simple webpage containing the code and the .png file to my homescreen. And I could arrange them just how I wanted them.

If you have small hands

I’ve made the hack available on http://jahmas.dk/space/

Disclaimer: This hack currently only works on a black background and there is probably smarter hacks out there

So if you have small hands, then hack your phone. No jailbreak needed.

Results

I shared my hack with my network on Linkedin to test it out and in one week I got the following metrics:

• 180 users in total 🦸‍♀️
• Adding around 10 users per day, but growth is slowing 📉
• 823 spaces created, which translates to 4,5 spaces per user
• 92% of the traffic comes from mobile devices (duuuh) 📲
• Users from the following countries: 🇩🇰🇸🇪🇫🇮🇳🇴🇩🇪🇬🇧🇭🇷🇬🇱🇱🇹🇵🇹🇺🇸🇳🇱🇬🇷 and many more.

I stopped tracking metrics, since I made this primarily for myself, but after about a month Space had 800 active users.

Roles

Side project. I executed everything myself.