Through the method presented in the tutorial below, you can hide apps on your iPhone or iPad, including WhatsApp, Instagram, photo gallery apps, streaming apps or games installed on iOS.
iPhone devices can be secured with password and biometric authentication Face ID, Touch ID, to prevent others from unlocking your device and accessing apps, games, photos, or other personal data. Even with these security measures of iOS or iPadOS, there are situations where you need to hide apps on your iPhone or iPad, so they won't be found by someone who managed to unlock the device somehow.
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How to hide apps on iPhone or iPad
To hide apps on your iPhone or iPad, you first need to disable their notifications, remove them from the device's home screen and Siri suggestions.
For this tutorial I'm going to choose to hide the MyPics app on my iPhone. This is an app that allows you to store photos and videos separately from the app Photos, native on iOS and iPadOS. Access to the MyPics application can be done with password or code authentication, separate from that of the iPhone or with biometric authentication Touch ID, Face ID.
App Store: MyPics
With all these security measures provided by MyPics, I want this app to not be visible on my iPhone when my device is in someone else's hands.
The first step is to turn off app notifications. You don't want to get a notification from an app you want to keep hidden when your iPhone is with someone else.
How to turn off notifications for an app on your iPhone or iPad
To turn off notifications for an app installed on your iPhone or iPad, follow the steps below carefully:
1. Open “Settings”, run to the app and open its access settings.
2. In the app access settings turn off all notifications.
Now the app will never issue notifications again.
The next step is to remove the app from the suggestions Siri and from search results.
How to remove an app from suggestions Siri and from searches?
To provide quick access to the most frequently used applications, the iOS operating system uses an application indexing and user behavior learning system. When you want to search for an app on your iPhone, the most frequently used ones will be presented first in the suggestions. This is not an advantage when you want to hide apps on your iPhone.
As with turning off notifications, go to the app's permission settings, then turn off all options from “Siri & Search".
After this step, the app you want to hide will no longer appear in the suggestions Siri and in searches. The application will also be removed from the share menu suggestions.
The next step is to delete the app from your iPhone's home screen, regardless of which page it's on.
How to remove an app from your iPhone or iPad home screen
To remove an app from your iPhone's home screen, press and hold the app's icon until the options menu appears and select “Remove App". A dialog menu will open in which you choose "Remove from Home Screen".
We can consider the app as hidden. It no longer appears in Siri suggestions, in searches, on the home screen, and will no longer issue notifications.
There is one small inconvenience though. The application can be accessed from "App Library", but even here it will no longer be highlighted. It will be quite difficult for anyone but you to find it.
I know many of you are asking the question "Can you disable App Library on the iPhone?". Unfortunately, the feature App Library, was first introduced on iOS 14 and cannot be disabled.
Related: How to hide photos and videos in the app Photos, native on iPhone, iPad, Mac devices.
In conclusion, to hide apps on iPhone or iPad, you need to disable their notifications, remove them from Home Screen and disable them from suggestions Siri and from search results.
