How to Build App Folders on Your Android Home Screen

Android Smartphones For Dummies

Each Home screen page on your Android sports a grid that holds only so many app icons. Even when you can add more pages, an upper limit exists. Although you could use math to calculate the maximum number of Home screen icons, a better choice is to use app folders to avoid any overflow.

An app folder is a collection of two or more apps, both in the same spot on the Home screen. The following figure illustrates an app folder on the Home screen, shown both closed and open.

Folders are created in different ways, depending on the phone. The stock Android method for creating a folder follows:

Place on the same Home screen page the icons that you want to put in the folder.
Long-press one icon and drag it right on top of the other icon.

The folder is created. Both icon images show up inside a circle, similar to what’s shown on the left.
Continue to drag icons into the folder.

You can also drag an icon directly from the apps drawer.

Other phones may not let you drag two icons together to build a folder, as described in Steps 1 and 2. On those phones, long-press the Home screen and choose the Create Folder or Folder command. Name the folder, and then touch the OK button to create it. At that point, you can drag icons into the folder.

Open a folder by touching it. You can then touch an icon in the folder to start an app. Or if you don’t find what you want, touch the Back icon to close the folder.

Some phones require that you long-press the Home screen to create a folder. Drag an app icon onto the Create Folder icon to build the folder.
Folders are managed just like other icons on the Home screen. You can long-press them to drag them around. They can also be deleted.
Change a folder’s name by opening the folder and then touching its name. Type the new name by using the onscreen keyboard.
Add more apps to the folder by dragging them over the folder’s icon.
To remove an icon from a folder, open the folder and drag out the icon. When the second-to-last icon is dragged out of a folder, the folder is removed. If not, drag the last icon out, and then remove the folder as described.

About This Article

About the book author:

Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
He combines his love of writing with his interest in technology to create books that are informative and entertaining, but not boring. Having sold more than 14 million titles translated into more than 30 languages, Dan can attest that his method of crafting computer tomes does seem to work.
Perhaps Dan’s most famous title is the original DOS For Dummies, published in 1991. It became the world’s fastest-selling computer book, at one time moving more copies per week than the New York Times number-one best seller (although, because it’s a reference book, it could not be listed on the NYT best seller list). That book spawned the entire line of For Dummies books, which remains a publishing phenomenon to this day.
Dan’s most recent titles include PCs For Dummies, 9th Edition; Buying a Computer For Dummies, 2005 Edition; Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies; Dan Gookin’s Naked Windows XP; and Dan Gookin’s Naked Office. He publishes a free weekly computer newsletter, “Weekly Wambooli Salad,” and also maintains the vast and helpful Web site www.wambooli.com.