If you don’t like the cluttered Wallpaper on the first Home screen, then one feature that has gone unnoticed till now is the ability to have a blank home screen, without any app icons.

iOS 8 lets you have a home screen that just shows your wallpaper, and no app icons, which is great for minimalism fans who want their wallpapers to take center stage. Of course not everyone would want to clear out their home screen, which is often used for the most frequently used apps, but I see this as the equivalent to an empty desktop on your PC or Mac.

To make your home screen blank:

• Go to the first page of your home screen, and press and hold an app icon to start the rearranging mode, where all icons start shaking.

• One by one, move each icon to the second page, and when you’re done moving all icons, exit the rearranging mode by pressing the home button.

• If you want, you can empty the dock as well by moving icons to other pages.

Usually you’d expect the blank home screen to disappear, but the home screen stays blank. Note that this only works for the first page of your home screen, and if you make any other page of your home screen blank, the page would simply disappear.

Do you like the idea of having a blank first home screen? Let us know in the comments below.

Update:

The original version of this post had assumed this works only on iOS 8, but it works in iOS 6 and iOS 7 as well.