Why Are iPhones Still Limited to 9 Apps Per Folder Page?
With all the apps we have on our iPhones these days, organizing them into folders is pretty much a requirement. But why does Apple still only show nine apps per folder page, especially with screen sizes getting bigger?
Apple first introduced folders were in iOS 4, and you could only have up to 12 apps in a single folder—they bumped up that number to 16 starting with the iPhone 5. But the nice thing was that all 16 would appear on the screen at once.
However, the introduction of iOS 7 meant a completely redesigned user interface, and that included folders. While folders now came with pages you can swipe through (up to 15 of them!), you can only fit a measly nine apps on a page at once.
This still made sense on the iPhone 4 and even on the iPhone 5, both of which had a much smaller screen size than current models. On the smaller models, opening up a folder with nine apps filled out the screen quite nicely. But with iPhone screen sizes all the way up to a gargantuan 6.5 inches with the iPhone XS Max, using that same folder size wastes screen space.
Unfortunately, on these larger iPhones (even on the regular iPhone XS’s 5.8-inch screen), folders look kind of…bad. Just look at this screenshot of an open folder. There’s a lot of wasted screen space that could otherwise be put to good use. And why is the folder title so far apart from the folder?
Of course, this could be a deliberate design choice by Apple so that you wouldn’t have to reach way up to the top of the screen to select an app in a folder, but you have to do that anyway to select apps at the top of the home screen.
In any case, we did a bit of Photoshopping to see just how much better a folder could be on iOS, and how much nicer it would look on newer, larger iPhones.