Organize Your iOS Home Screen With iEmpty Camouflaged Icons

If you own an iOS device, you’ll know that the iOS environment is pretty strict. Without jailbreaking your device you can’t do much with your iOS device. And when it comes to customization you can only change your wallpaper, or maybe your your icons image with third-party apps.

Here’s a trick to customize or design your iOS device homescreen, (without jailbreaking) using iEmpty. In short, iEmpty is a web tool which allows you to customize your iOS homescreen by inserting camouflaged icons.

Getting Started

Since the native browser, Safari does not support uploading of files, we will use Picup, an app to help us upload images. Ths will be required for use with iEmpty in the later part of the guide.

Once you have Picup, it’s time to prepare a screenshot of your black homescreen (one with no icons on it).

Capturing Blank Homescreen

To capture a blank page hold down on one of the icons for a few seconds. Drag and move the icon to an empty homescreen.

Press on your ‘Power’ button and ‘Home’ button to capture a screenshot of it. An empty homescreen screenshot will be captured.

Using iEmpty

Next we need to upload the blank homescreen to iEmpty.

Press the “Home” button on your iOS device, open up ‘Safari’ and browse to iEmpty (iempty.tooliphone.net). On that page, tap on CUSTOMIZE!.

It will ask you to choose a mode. Tap on CUSTOM Mode and you will be at the upload page. Under ‘Upload’, tap on Add.

Tap on Upload Photo. A pop-up will ask if you want to open the page in Picup, tap on Open.

In Picup, tap on ‘Photo Library’ and grant access for Picup to enter your photo library. Choose the image of the blank homescreen. Tap on Upload Files to upload.

Selecting And Inserting Transparent Icons

Back on iEmpty in your Safari page, scroll down until you see the word Let’s GO! Tap on it.

You will be directed to a page where you see a mock version of your homescreen. Each square represents a position of the icon. iEmpty produces a crop out of that section which you can place on your homescreen.

To illustrate this, tap ‘1 x 1’.

Tap on the ‘More Options’ button on Safari and choose ‘Add to homescreen’.

Leave the icon name blank. You will see the icon where the most recently added icons usually go. Note that in our shot below, the icon we picked doesn’t fit into the background.

By moving the icon to it’s 1 x 1 spot, you can see that it has been blended to the background. Redesign your homescreen by slotting in the icons as you see fit.

One limitation from this is that you may need to redo the steps shown here every single time you change the wallpaper. That aside, this is perfect for users who like sorting their icons based on type and/or category per homescreen.