Why You Won't Be Getting Infinite-Page SpringBoard

It's come to my attention that people that were running Five-Column SpringBoard 0.55 and upgraded to 0.56 over the last week and had over 144 apps installed now have up to 12 pages of icons on their home screen. Now I'm getting requests from people to allow SpringBoard to have an infinite amount of pages. To you I have this to say: No.

Now I might seem like a bit of a dick for saying that, right? There are two reasons why I'm not going to do Infinite-Page SpringBoard or whatever you want to call it.

The first is that what happened was entirely accidental. Up until 0.56, FCSB would run the uninstall script on upgrade, which would reorganize the apps into pages of 16. If you had more than 144 apps, it would reorganize them so you'd have enough pages to hold whatever amount of apps you had installed. 0.56 actually adds a check, so if you have over 144 apps, you can't uninstall or toggle FCSB to avoid unexpected behavior. Luckily, the unexpected behavior just added pages to SpringBoard, which is a lot better than if SpringBoard would have stopped launching altogether, because I would have gotten a ton of emails within the first 15 minutes of it going up saying it blew up their phone.

The second is that I believe anyone with 144+ apps should be re-evaluating what it is they're using regularly on their iPhone. I'm serious. Go through every single one of your apps and ask your self if you use it enough for it to be on your device at all times.

I strongly recommend you reduce your SpringBoard down to three pages of apps. One for the default set of apps, one for third-party apps, and one for games. If you have anything left that you use occasionally but don't want cluttering up the pages, you can just put it in the SBSettings dock and have it still accessible from anywhere while being invisible.

That might seem completely insane if you have 144 apps, but just pick a screenful of apps and a screenful of games and live with that for a week. Not only will you waste less time sifting through 9 pages of apps to find the one you're looking for, but you might realize that you only really use 4-5 apps from each page regularly, and then you'll think having 144 apps on your iPhone is silly for the same reasons I do.