Those days are long gone, and with a slew of amazing iPhone apps comes a puzzling question: How does one best organize the plethora of applications downloaded to an iPhone? In the past, I’ve tried sorting my apps in a million different (and often bizarre) ways, and frequently found myself looking at friends’ phones, trying to figure out the logic they’d applied to their own apps.

After some careful consideration, I’ve finally settled on my favorite way to sort iPhone app icons. Of course, these methods are purely based on my personal taste and strange sense of “logic,” so take this post with a grain of salt. That said, without further delay, my 3 Rules for Keeping My iPhone Applications Organized:

My iPhone's Home Screen

1. I am an Apple purist at heart, and in a nod to the 1st gen iPhone, I keep the original twelve iPhone icons on my home screen (note: these are in addition to the four app icons found on the dock at the bottom of the screen). These icons are: Messages, Calendar, Photos, Camera, YouTube, Stocks, Maps, Weather, Notes, Clock, Calculator, and Settings. The reason for doing this is two-fold. First, I find that through years of using my iPhone, I’ve genuinely memorized the location of these twelve apps. Clicking on them is second nature to me. The second reason I like this organization scheme is that having twelve home screen icons on your phone leaves a nice empty row between the upper twelve app icons and the home row. I find this aesthetically pleasing–to me, it beats having a home screen crammed to the brim with icons.

2.  Apple has provided us with five more application icons since the first gen iPhone. These icons are: App Store, Compass, Contacts, iTunes, and Voice Memos. Based on my logic in Rule #1, one could reasonably argue that these Apple-given icons should be on the home screen of the phone (they are Apple-bestowed, of course). This would be a fair argument, except that there’s no way to fit them all on the home screen. For this reason, I opt to treat these five application icons the same as I do any other downloaded iPhone apps. Doing this still supports Rule #1, which aims to keep my iPhone home screen organized and uncluttered as it was in its first release.

3. Finally, the piece de resistance. For ALL application icons not located on the initial home screen of my iPhone, I simply arrange them alphabetically on secondary home screen pages. This way, I don’t have to wonder where an app should be located and any hesitation I have to download millions of apps is squashed. I’ve tried all sorts of ways to sort my downloaded apps, but nothing is as fool-proof and easy to remember as this method. My experiments with attempting to sort apps based on categories like “utility” or “games” have always ended up failing. Alphabetizing is simple through and through.

…Phew. I hope this makes some semblance of sense! Do you have a better method of organizing your iPhone icons? If you do, feel free to share with me. I’d love to hear your thoughts as I continue in my quest to find true iPhone nirvana.

A Secondary Screen on My iPhone