People are making real money by selling icon sets for iOS 14 Home screens

Custom iOS Home screen Icons (Image credit: Traf)

What you need to know

Apple's iOS 14 launch brought widgets to iPhone and people are customizing their Home screen like never before.
People are using Shortcuts and custom icons to create personalized Home screens.
People are making money by selling those icons.

Apple released iOS 14 to the public last week and brought Home screen widgets to iPhone for the first time. Ever since, people have been creating some truly amazing Home screens and sharing them online. But it isn't just the widgets that are catching the eye – it's the icons, too.

People have always tried to make their Home screens look good, but things have ratcheted up a notch since iOS 14 arrived with people matching widgets with new app icons. We teach you how to add Home screen widgets and how to add custom icons on iPhone Home screens, but some people are going even further – they're buying icons that have been created by professionals. And those professionals are making bank.

Take this one example. Someone created some app icons, uploaded them to Gumroad, created a simple website, and went to bed. And earned more than $5,000 while they slept.

1. Share my iOS home screen setup
2. Notice some crazy interest in the icons
3. Design icon set, and upload it to @gumroad
4. Create a website on @notionhq using @super_
5. Make $5,264 in my sleep, all from ~2 hours of work

The internet is wild. pic.twitter.com/BSOq0rosVg1. Share my iOS home screen setup
2. Notice some crazy interest in the icons
3. Design icon set, and upload it to @gumroad
4. Create a website on @notionhq using @super_
5. Make $5,264 in my sleep, all from ~2 hours of work

The internet is wild. pic.twitter.com/BSOq0rosVg— traf (@traf) September 21, 2020 September 21, 2020

A few hours later that same person had earned almost $10,000 from a total of 330 customers. They say it all took a couple of hours of work. I'm in the wrong business!

On the other end of the transaction, people are taking icons like these and creating some truly stunning Home screens. We've never seen anything like this outside of jailbreaking and it shows that, given the choice, people don't want to sit and stare at a standard grid of boring icons anymore.

iOS 14 Home Screen setups are one of the most popular trends on TikTok/YouTube right now.

So cool to see how creative some of these are 🤩 pic.twitter.com/eDVj503ffiiOS 14 Home Screen setups are one of the most popular trends on TikTok/YouTube right now.

So cool to see how creative some of these are 🤩 pic.twitter.com/eDVj503ffi— Brandon Butch (@BrandonButch) September 21, 2020 September 21, 2020

Who knew? Oh, Android peeps did.

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too.

Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.