How to Add Empty Spaces on iPhone or iPad Home Screen

If you have an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus, you may have made Reachability a part of your life by now. If you don't like it, or don't even use it, an iOS developer has an alternate method for keeping your icons within reach. FeedWrangler developer David Smith has an option for creating a blank row of icons at the top of your screen. There's no jailbreaking or other gyrations involved, either. 

Mr. Smith has created a custom black wallpaper for the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. It needs to be plain because of the parallax effect, patterns will end up out of alignment most of the time. Use the links above to view the image. Then tap and hold to Save Image. Once you have saved it, go to your Photos roll, choose the image, and then set it to be your wallpaper just like you would with any image.

Here's where the magic happens: once you have your wallpaper set, go to David's specially formatted webpage on your iPhone. At the top, you'll see a little action button, as shown in the image below. Tap that button and choose "Add To Home Screen." 

Use this buttong to "Add to Home Screen."

Save it just as it is. This is an invisible icon, and when we make a row of them, it will push all of your other icons down. It already has a name with an invisible character so the whole thing will vanish.

What it looks like to save the page. You want it not to have a name.

Repeat this for each space you want to fill with a blank. Arrange the blanks however you like, for example, across the top row of your screen. This will take spaces away from icons you could have there, but if you couldn't reach them anyway, you may not have been using them in the first place.

Action Shot courtesy of David Smith.

This can also come in handy to move icons up from the bottom, or create a space in a particular part of the screen.