Apple is notorious for giving users very little control over how their phones look and operate, and the dock is no exception. With a couple of small tweaks however, you can get a little bit more out of that precious screen real estate sitting at the bottom of your phone.

When it comes to basic productivity, you can get more out of your dock by placing a folder in the dock, giving you immediate access to a lot more apps no matter which screen you happen to have open.

And in terms of aesthetics, the light grey dock is something that is always there no matter what kind of wallpaper you use... almost. With one little trick, you can completely change the appearance of your iOS dock, making that background disappear.

How to Place Folders in the iOS Dock

  1. Create the folder of apps you want to place in the dock by pressing and holding down on an app until it starts to wiggle. You can then drag that app onto another to create a folder. Drag as many apps as you want into that folder. (If you want you can create a folder without a name, but it's technically not necessary.)
  2. If you have four apps in your dock, press and hold down the app you want to remove until it starts to wiggle. Drag it up out of the dock.
  3. With the apps still wiggling, find the folder you want to place in your dock and drag it down into the empty space. (The name of the folder will disappear when it's in the dock.)

How to Hide the iOS Dock Background

Another small hack that you can use with your dock is to opt for a particular wallpaper that makes the grey dock background disappear.

Usually to make these kinds of changes you'd have to jailbreak your phone, but this is one trick that doesn't require any drastic (or warranty-voiding) changes to your phone.

  1. Go to heyeased.weebly.com on your phone.
  2. Scroll through the wallpaper options and select the wallpaper you want to use. (They're all pretty similar.)
  3. Tap the image to open it.
  4. When the image finishes loading in Safari, tap the share button and tap Save image.
  5. Now you can navigate to your photos, open up the image you just saved to your phone, tap the share button and tap Use as wallpaper.
  6. Tap Set Home Screen if you don't want that image on your lock screen, otherwise you can tap Use as both.
  7. Now your dock background will have disappeared.

To see the process in action, check out the video below: