Jim Rossman: Can your phone’s camera app disappear?

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An email from a friend last week led to a lengthy text exchange to help him locate his camera app, which had gone missing from his iPhone.

“Somehow the camera icon fell off my screen. I must have accidentally removed it. Can you tell me how to get my camera back on my iPhone home screen?”

This friend is proficient in using his phone, but moving and deleting apps is not something he’d ever had the occasion to learn.

My first thought was that he’d moved the icon to another page of his home screen or perhaps accidentally moved it into a folder. Moving apps around your home screens isn’t very intuitive if you’ve never done it or had it demonstrated for you.

You can move your iPhone apps if you hold down on the icon with your finger until they all start wiggling. While they are wiggling, you can touch and drag the app icons where you like. If you drag one app onto the icon of another and let go, you’ll create a folder. You can also drag apps into existing folders.

If you drag an app to the edge of the screen, it’ll jump to the next screen.

In the iPhone’s operating system, you can have multiple home screens of apps, and the last page is called the App Library, where you’ll find all your apps listed. To find your App Library, swipe right to left on your home screen until you can’t swipe anymore. That last page is the App Library

It is possible to have apps installed on your phone, but not visible on the home screen. They will still be listed in the App Library, and they’ll show up if you search for them.

You can search in the search bar at the top of the App Library screen.

If you are missing an app, the first step is to search and see if the app is still installed on your phone. If the app shows up in a search, you can touch and hold on the icon to bring up a popup menu. Two of the choices on that pop up menu should include “Add to Home Screen” and “Delete App.”

Apple used to not let users delete apps that came pre-installed like the Camera, Safari or Mail, but now you can really delete them if you like.

If you do delete an app, accidentally or not, you can re-install it by going to the app store and downloading it again.

My friend did find his camera app. He had apparently moved it to one of his other home screens, just not where he expected to find it.

Android users can move their apps around by touching an icon for about three seconds. You can then slide the app with your finger to where you want it to live.

On my Samsung Galaxy Flip 5, you can press and hold an app for a second and you’ll get a popup with options to select or delete the app. The phone goes into a “Select” mode where you’ll see a small circle on each app icon. Touch the apps to put a small check in the circle and you can select multiple apps and create folders.