Hide app dock on iPad

Your response was as though you had all the right answers, but also obviously it is a personal opinion and choice whether or not someone would/does want to look at or have the “Dock” always exposed on the “home screen” of an iPad. It’s ridiculous for you to tell everyone suck it up and like it, let’s get real! Just as yourself, this is ‘Just’ another opinion… Period~

thank you LotusPilot for helping users understand there "is no... need". users should learn to shut up and just be happy with their lot.

Nothing related to an iPad merits using the word “need”, but for sure there are reasons to want to hide the dock on the home screen. It undeniably chews up substantial real estate. Especially with widgets getting more widely implemented in apps, there are folks (like me) thinking outside the box to leverage the many capabilities of these versatile devices to fill all sorts of neat applications. Many of these are excellent ways to make use of older devices, getting consumers more bang for their buck and helping to keep perfectly good electronics out of the waste stream.

I have set up an old pad as a digital picture frame / home info center. I run a slideshow for the pics, and when I stop it I have a single screen populated with widgets for an easily-read, convenient display of weather, temps, recipes, and in my case solar charging info. Along with a useless, empty dock.

I still have to manually stop and start the slideshow to use the widgets. If I could hide the dock I could just set my Home Screen wallpaper to auto rotate and leave the iPad on an empty home page for my “picture frame” function, then simply swipe over to the info page when I want to view the widgets and swipe back when done.

Theres at least two other non-dock ways to launch apps already in iOS, not to mention the possibilities opened up with Shortcuts; the dock is far from critical UI. It’s totally reasonable to want to hide it.

👍 I think with my last update something changed, perhaps sensitivity? All I want is to do my jigsaw puzzles in peace, but every move I make with a puzzle piece brings up the stupid dock. Very frustrating!!!

The dock will always be visible on the iPad Home Screen; there is no mechanism (or need) for it to be suppressed from a Home Screen.

The dock will, however, automatically hide when viewing an App - but can be exposed by swiping-up from the bottom edge of the screen.

Crow-mama wrote:

👍 I think with my last update something changed, perhaps sensitivity? All I want is to do my jigsaw puzzles in peace, but every move I make with a puzzle piece brings up the stupid dock. Very frustrating!!!

If you are experiencing difficulties or unexpected behaviour with a specific App, the issue will be with the App itself. The App Developer may need to update their App:

How to contact an app developer - Apple Support

Many older Apps that existed prior to iPadOS multitasking may not be designed or optimised for more recent versions of iPadOS.