How to Make Icons Clear in iOS 26 for iPhone & iPad
The Liquid Glass interface of iOS 26 makes everything more transparent, and you can bring that effect to your Home Screen icons too by making them clear. The clear icon look offers a dramatic visual change to the icons on your iPhone or iPad, stripping them of the usual bright neon colors and transforming them into translucent outlines instead.
Aside from many users liking the appearance of Clear icons, one of the biggest perks of using Clear icons on your iPhone or iPad Home Screen is that it strips away the color from the bright red notification badges that show numerical indicators of things like missed calls, voicemails, unread messages, app updates, number of unread emails, notifications, and alerts.
If you’re interested in dramatically transforming the look and feel of your iPhone or iPad Home Screen by making the icons clear, read along and you’ll have this neat customization enabled on your device in just a moment.
How to Get Clear Icons & Widgets on iPhone & iPad with iOS 26 / ipadOS 26
You must have iOS 26 / iPadOS 26 or newer on your iPhone or iPad to have this customization option:
- Go to the Home Screen on your iPhone or iPad
- Long press on the Home Screen until the icons start jiggling, then tap on “Edit” in the top corner, then tap on “Customize”
- Choose “Clear” from the bottom icon options, optionally choose Light, Dark, or Auto to adjust the Clear look further, or make it automatically adjust depending on what your overall system theme is (Light / Dark / Auto)
The Clear effect is immediate and significant, unmistakable that it is enabled.
As you can see it completely strips away all the colors and brightness from the icons and the red notification badges on each icon, giving a smoother simplified and less distracting look.
You can switch back to the default look at any time as well, but you might find that after using Clear for a while the default now looks quite garish and jarring:
If you’re one of the iPhone users who is not a big fan of Liquid Glass then you probably won’t like the Clear look much either, and you might appreciate some tips to reduce Liquid Glass and improve its legibility on your iPhone or iPad. For me personally, I initially did not like Liquid Glass, but it really has grown on me with iOS 26 on iPhone, though I can’t say the same for macOS Tahoe however.
What do you think of the Clear look for icons and widgets on the Home Screen of iPhone and iPad? Do you like the Clear look that blends well with Liquid Glass, or do you prefer the older default styles, dark icon style, or the color tinted icon look? Share your thoughts in the comments!
