Set up a custom Home screen layout with Genous

Genous Home Screen Layout

For some people, adding a personal touch to everything they can on their jailbroken iOS device is what makes their device their own.

With a new jailbreak tweak dubbed Genous, you will be able to control how many rows and columns of apps you have on each of your individual Home screen pages.

Space ’em out!

Genous is a great new way to get the most out of your Home screen while still having a functional grid of app icons.

One of the ways that Genous stands out from other jailbreak tweaks that have accomplished similar tasks in the past is how it lets you configure app grid options on a per-page basis. Moreover, it has the ability yo discriminate between landscape and portrait mode, so you can apply different settings to each.

Using the tweak is very simple; when you’re ready to change the grid settings for a page, enter ‘jiggle’ mode on your Home screen by tapping and holding on an app icon, and then double-tap somewhere where you have empty space. You will then be presented with this interface:

Genous Home Screen Editing Interface

Within this window, you can tap on the + or buttons for the amount of columns or rows of app icons you want, and you can even adjust the size of your app icons if you want to.

If you feel like changing how much space appears in between your app icons, you can toggle on the Edit Size switch, and you’ll get these thumbnails that you can tap and drag on:

Genous Edit Page

As you drag, the icons will become more or less spaced out from one another.

If you tap on the Apply to… button, you’ll get the following set of options:

Genous Apply To

This menu lets you choose to apply your settings to your Home screen in various ways, such as:

  • To all of your pages in portrait mode
  • To all of your pages in landscape mode
  • To all of your pages in both orientations
  • To only this one page in landscape mode

If you choose nothing, it will default to only being applied to this one page in portrait mode.

If at any time you are dissatisfied with your changes, you can tap on the red Reset button, and your Home screen will be reset to the factory default icon spacing and size, so don’t be afraid to play around with the settings.

Reasons to modify the stock layout

I personally have no problem with the stock layout on my larger-screened iPhone 6 Plus, but on smaller devices like the iPhone 5s, the icons feel a little cramped and having the ability to either shrink the app icons, or space them out, or both gives me the ability to get the better look I want.

Of course, themers are also going to benefit from a tweak like this. I’ve never really been into theming myself, but I come from a community with a heavy background of theming, and one of the things they always did frequently was change the layout of the app icons to make room for custom HTML Home screen widgets and wallpapers to compliment the theme experience.

Overall, the feature is nothing more than a cosmetic one, so there’s no real functional benefit unless you have some sort of Home screen-based widget that you need to make room for.

Wrapping up

Getting that perfect Home screen layout you’ve always wanted is now possible on your jailbroken installation of iOS 9.3.3 thanks to Genous, and its ability to set different rules for different orientations and pages comes in handy when you want to combine this functionality with custom widgets or wallpapers.

You can grab Genous from Cydia’s BigBoss repository for $1.99. The tweak doesn’t add any options to configure to the Settings app after installation.

What are your thoughts on Genous? Share in the comments!