Customise Your iPhone Icons with Colour Tints

One of the many new ways you can personalise your device on iOS 18 is with new colour-tinted icons to match the wallpaper or theme you’re going for on your device. It’s really easy to turn colour tint on, but there are a couple of cool features I’m going to show you to make it that much more useful for you.

To enable this feature, I’m going to long press on my home screen, and in the top left corner, I’m going to press Edit and then Customise. From here, at the bottom, I’ve got that new icon picker where I can choose Light Mode, Dark Mode, or Colour Tinting. Obviously, I’m going to go for the colour tinting mode here.

At this point, we’ve got these two sliders, and we can simply play with those to find a different colour and a different brightness of that colour—whichever intensity you might like for your home screen. I want one that matches the green of this wallpaper, so I’m going to try and find a green colour that looks kind of similar. It looks good, but it’s not quite right yet.

It’s also worth noting before we get too far into this that your wallpaper can now appear in either Light Mode or Dark Mode, which is slightly darker, as you might expect. There’s a little icon here where you can toggle between light and dark wallpaper and choose whichever of those you want to go with your tinted icons. I’m going to go for the light version, and now that I’ve chosen that, I’m going to make sure the colour tint of my icons is the exact same green as that in the corner of my wallpaper by using the Colour Picker tool.

When you use this tool, your icons disappear, and you can tap anywhere on your home screen to sample that exact colour. You can even tap and drag to find the perfect shade. Now, when I let go, you’ll see my icons match perfectly, and that means I can leave editing mode completely, safe in the knowledge that my new home screen matches my wallpaper.

But there’s one more thing: these colour tints are actually linked to the wallpaper you’re currently using. That means if I jump into Control Centre, tap and hold on my screen, and then change my lock screen to a different version, when I unlock my phone, those colour-tinted icons won’t be there anymore. Essentially, it pairs them all together. So, if you change your wallpaper regularly and also change your lock screen, your icon tints can change as well.

This is just one of the many new features on your iPhone, now updated to iOS 18. I’ve spent some time playing with iOS 18 to find all the new tips, tricks, and features that make your phone better than it was before, and I’ve written an eBook that you can find down below. It’s called 100 QuickTips for iOS 18, and it will show you everything new on your device. And of course, if you want more QuickTip videos, check out my channel down below—there are hundreds of videos there waiting for you!