How to hide or show the iCloud Drive app on your Home screen

icloud drive icon

iCloud Drive is a feature that comes with iOS 9 and allows you to view and edit files in iCloud that have been saved there via your apps, whether they’re native apps or third-party App Store apps.

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to hide or show the iCloud Drive app from your iOS device’s Home screen.

Showing the iCloud Drive app on the Home screen

If you’ve never used iCloud Drive before, or you’ve always had the feature turned off since the initial setup of your iPhone or iPad, then chances are you don’t have the iCloud Drive app on your Home screen.

Showing the iCloud Drive app on your Home screen is actually a very simple process if you’ve had it removed before. You can follow these steps to display the iCloud Drive app on your Home screen and access your files within:

Step 1: Launch the App Store app.

Step 2: Search for “iCloud Drive” in the App Store.

Step 3: Download it like you would download any other application.

Hiding the iCloud Drive app from the Home screen

Hiding the iCloud Drive app from your Home screen can be done simply by deleting the app, just like you would delete any other app. With your finger, tap and hold on the app icon until it starts wiggling, then tap on the X mark to delete the app. A message will pop up asking you if you want to remove iCloud Drive. Tap Remove to confirm. And you’re done!

Why enable iCloud Drive

iCloud Drive stores all of your app data in one place, sort of like a Dropbox account. It allows your apps on your iOS devices and Macs to interact with the same files, allowing you to have a seamless integration between machines.

iCloud Drive is great for storing your documents, presentations, spreadsheets, PDFs, and other files that apps on your iOS device or Mac can edit and view. Any changes that you make on any of your devices are automatically synced in iCloud and will appear in iCloud Drive on the rest of your machines and devices too.

Should I use iCloud Drive or Dropbox?

iCloud Drive is made by Apple, so you get a more seamless experience between your iOS devices and your Macs. Although Dropbox and other cloud-based services integrate very well with the macOS operating system, iOS is a very closed operating system and Apple are the only ones that can build cloud services into it.

You can accomplish a lot of the same tasks in iCloud Drive that you can with Dropbox and other cloud services, but since iCloud Drive is hard-coded into iOS, you may find it could work much more fluidly than a third-party app would. On the other hand, a third-party app may have more features to offer depending on the platform, so it’s a hard call.

The APIs that Apple offers in its latest operating system do give third-party cloud services a fighting chance, so it ultimately comes down to preference on whether you should use iCloud Drive or a third-party cloud service like Dropbox. One of the largest moving factors might be storage space, which can be had a lot cheaper from third-party cloud services.

Conclusion

If you had iCloud Drive enabled already, and it’s being shown on the Home screen, you can use this tutorial as a means of removing the app from the Home screen too. Whether or not you want to use iCloud Drive on your iOS device is up to you.

Do you use iCloud Drive or another type of cloud service? Let us know in a comment below!