iPad: Newly installed apps don’t show up on Home Screens

Question

I am on my fourth iPad - and just as many iPhones — and I have accumulated a very large number of apps. I would like the luxury of going through them one by one and deleting the ones I don’t use. But it's taking a while to get around to it. In the meantime, when I download any new apps they just never appear on my screens. I can locate them using Spotlight search, but the icons don't appear on the Home Screen.

Since I want to organize them onto my first Home Screen, I need to be able to find them to move them. I have tried restarting, hard resets — I even tried the recent suggestion on how to add another Home Screen by dragging an icon to the right to create a new page, but it won’t work. I am on an 12.9” iPad Pro running iOS 12.1.2.

Answer 1

To delete / hide apps on iPhone go to App Store while logged in. Tap on Today icon on bottom of screen. Then tap on your user logo in the right hand corner. Then a screen appears - tap Purchased. Select the category you want, All or Purchased. then find the app and swipe left. Detele should appear. Select to delete.

Answer 2

There's an upper cap on the maximum number of Home Screens that can be created on an iOS device. The count is a bit higher for iPad than for iPhone.

Once you hit the limit, any newly installed app doesn't show up on Home Screen, as no more screens can be created. You can still continue to install new apps as long as free storage space is available on your iPad.

You can search for an apps using Spotlight even if its icon is not visible. One way to view more apps is to organize apps within folders. A folder can house many apps (the limit varies between iPhone and iPad). Since a folder only takes up the visible are required for one app, you can see more apps when using folders than without one. (The maximum number of Home Screens or maximum numbers of apps in a single folder for a device are not officially documented and can be determined by experimenting.)

To create a folder, simply tap and hold on an app icon until all the icons start to wiggle. Now drag and drop an app icon onto another to house them into a folder. You can also assign a custom name to the folder to easily recognize it. However, you can not create a folder inside a folder.

Once you have organized apps into folders and are able to see the icons, you can drag to organize them on Home Screens as desired.

With iPad drag and drop support introduced with iOS 11, you can also quickly move multiple apps around.

Alternatively, if you have access to a Mac or a PC, you can also re-organize apps icons easily using iTunes.