How to keep your Android home screen clean and uncluttered

Please note: this is a tutorial for inexperienced users.

Your Android smartphone's home screen can become quite messy pretty fast, especially if you constantly download a lot of apps. Fortunately, keeping the home screen clean requires little effort. That is, of course, if you want it clean, because some people may actually like their home screen to be chock-full of apps and widgets.

There are two important things that you can do to try and keep your home screen uncluttered.

First, you have to stop shortcuts from being automatically added to the home screen whenever a new app is downloaded. Sure enough, when an app shortcut is automatically created, you can just delete it from the home screen. But you might not always have time to do this for each and every app. Thus, here's a quick tutorial on how to stop app shortcuts from showing up on your home screen. After you turn off Android's automatic shortcut feature, if you think a certain downloaded app needs to always be at your fingertips, look for it in the app drawer and drag it to the home screen to make a shortcut.

The second thing that you have to do in order to keep your home screen tidy is to use app folders. To create a folder on the home screen simply long press on an app, and drag it on top of another app. Once you lift your finger from the screen, you'll have a brand new folder (always shaped like a circle) containing both apps involved. Then you can add other apps by long pressing and dragging them on top of the folder. You can give your folders separate names, and, if you want to, you can even add emojis to the names.

Thanks to app folders, you can always quickly access any app from your home screen (with just two taps), while also keeping everything clean and simple.