Did you know that on the Apple TV you can rearrange and hide icons? If you have the Apple TV 5.1 update installed, you can. It’s worth it too, especially if you use the same couple of applications over and over again and prefer not to have to navigate past things like the WSJ app over and over again.
Moving Them
- Navigate to the icon that needs to be moved. Sadly, it cannot be an icon in the top row.
- Next, press and hold the Select button on your remote.
- The icon will begin to jiggle. Now you can move it to where ever you like using the arrow keys.
- Hit Select again to finish moving your icons around.
Killing Them
Icons can be hidden by going into the Parental Controls under General in Settings. From there you can choose to show or hide apps. Parental Controls do not need to actually be on to show or hide icons.
- Open Settings,
- Select General
- Select Parental Controls (turn on the Parental Controls)
- Set a passcode, twice
- Navigate down the list to the apps you want to disable.
- Click on them with the select button, and pick from Show, Ask, or ultimately Hide if you want to remove them from your Apple TV home screen.
I accidentally found out that icons can be rearranged. It makes sense to be able to do this since it can be done on iOS. Being able to rearrange and hide icons is very useful. I do not like the default order of the icons, plus most of the icons for me can be hidden (such as Hulu Plus, NBA, NHL, and so on).
