A few months ago, I was at my desk at work. I'd been staring at my big monitor all morning, and when I grabbed my phone to check a text, the letters on the screen were just... gone. Total blur. I didn't even realize I was doing it, but my arm started extending outward — phone getting farther and farther from my face — until the words finally sharpened up.
Two managers across the room caught me doing it and started cracking up. "Welcome to the club," one of them said, waving his reading glasses at me. Fair enough. But here's the thing — later that same afternoon, I caught both of them doing the exact same stretch. So naturally, I gave them the look. You know the one: chin down, lips pressed together, squinting hard at the screen like you're trying to decode ancient hieroglyphics. We all had a good laugh about it.
But later that night, it stopped being funny. I started thinking about my father-in-law. The man held onto a beat-up old Motorola flip phone for years. Scratched-up screen, buttons barely working — didn't matter. We offered to buy him a new one more than once, and he'd just shake his head. It took my sister-in-law physically buying him a smartphone and setting it up herself before he'd finally let the Motorola go.
I always figured he was just cheap — why spend money when the old one still makes calls? But after my own arm-stretching episode at the office, I got it. It had nothing to do with money. He probably couldn't see half the stuff on a new screen, and the idea of fumbling through menus he didn't recognize, with text he could barely read, was just too much. Easier to say "my phone works fine" than to admit you can't figure the thing out.
That's really why I sat down to write this. If someone had shown my father-in-law how to make the text bigger, clear off the junk apps, and keep only the stuff he actually used — he might have switched years earlier. So in this first part (of two), I'm walking through how to simplify your iPhone so it stops being a headache and starts being actually useful.
Step 1: Clean Up the Visual Noise (The Single Home Screen Rule)
Here's what makes a phone feel overwhelming: too many icons. A brand-new iPhone comes loaded with apps most people never open — Stocks, Compass, Tips, Shortcuts — and they're all just sitting there, crowding the screen. Finding the one thing you actually need turns into a scavenger hunt.
To solve this, we implement the "Single Home Screen Rule." We want to consolidate all your daily needs onto one page, and hide everything else.
- Identify your most essential apps. For most seniors, this is Phone, Messages, Camera, Photos, and Maps.
- To hide the other apps: Press and hold the app icon you want to remove. A menu will pop up. Tap "Remove App" (written in red), and then select "Remove from Home Screen".
- This does not delete the application or lose your data. It simply moves the icon into the "App Library," which is hidden away on the very last screen to the right.
Do that for every app you don't use daily, and you'll end up with a clean screen showing just five or six things. It's a small change, but it makes the phone feel way less like a tiny computer and more like something you can actually work with.
Step 2: Shrink the Operating System with "Assistive Access"
If clearing out icons still isn't enough, there's a feature Apple added in iOS 17 called Assistive Access. It basically throws out the normal iPhone look and gives you a screen with a few giant buttons instead. That's it — no tiny icons, no cluttered menus.
It's built for anyone who has a hard time reading small text or tapping tiny icons — whether that's because of shaky hands, low vision, or just not wanting to deal with all the extra stuff.
- Go to Settings > Accessibility > Assistive Access.
- Tap "Set Up Assistive Access" and follow the prompts. You can choose which applications to allow in this mode (we recommend starting with just Phone, Messages, and Camera).
- Choose your preferred layout: either Rows (a giant list of apps) or Grid (giant block buttons).
- Set a unique four-digit passcode. This passcode is required to exit the mode, preventing accidental settings changes or dialing errors.
Once you're in Assistive Access, the camera literally just says "Take Photo" and "Take Video." The phone app shows your contacts with big pictures next to each name. There's almost nothing to get confused about — which is exactly the point.
Step 3: Make the Screen Easy on the Eyes
Maybe you don't want to go full Assistive Access — you like the regular iPhone look, you just want to stop doing the arm-stretch thing every time you get a text. These three settings fix that:
- Enlarge System Font: Go to Settings > Display & Brightness > Text Size. Drag the slider to the right to increase the font size across all apps, including your email and text messages.
- Enable Bold Text: In the same menu, toggle the switch for "Bold Text" to "On." This thickens the letters, making them stand out much more clearly against the white background.
- Display Zoom: Go to Settings > Display & Brightness > Display Zoom (at the bottom) and select "Larger Text". This increases the scale of not just the text, but also all buttons, pop-up boxes, and menu bars.
Step 4: Stop the Constant Notification Interruption
Half the reason people get tired of their phones isn't the phone itself — it's the nonstop buzzing. News apps, shopping apps, weather alerts, games — they all want your attention, all day long. Time to shut most of them up.
Set Up an Emergency Bypass
If you want to silence your phone at night using "Do Not Disturb" but worry about missing an emergency call from your family, configure a bypass:
- Open your Contacts app and find your spouse or children. Tap the star icon or select "Add to Favorites."
- Go to Settings > Focus > Do Not Disturb.
- Tap on "People," select "Allow Calls From," and set it to "Favorites." Now, your phone will block all spam and minor alerts, but if a family member calls in the middle of the night, their call will ring through normally.
Setting Up Your Peace of Mind
Look, a phone is supposed to make life easier, not harder. Spending ten minutes cleaning up your screen, bumping up the font, and killing off pointless notifications — that's all it takes. After that, you've got a phone that actually works the way you need it to.
In Part 2, I'll cover the same thing for Android and Samsung Galaxy phones. In the meantime, give these settings a try on your iPhone — you might be surprised how much better it feels when you're not squinting at the screen anymore.
What does your iPhone home screen look like right now? Have you tried Assistive Access or any of these settings? Let me know how it goes in the comments.
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