How to Stop New App Icons from Appearing on the Home Screen

With the Android 8.0 Oreo update, it seems like Google has moved the option to enable or disable new application icons from appearing on the Home Screen.

Since Android has both a Home Screen and an App Drawer for applications icons to sit in, getting used to where your newly installed icons go can be an adjustment for new users. Some people like it when an application or game they just installed shows up in a Home Screen page but others dislike this idea.

Instead, they would rather it just appear in the App Drawer and if they need it at some point then they’ll manually drag it to a spot.

Whatever you feel is best is up to you, but it can be beneficial to know how to change this behavior. Before, the option to disable or enable new application icons from always showing up in the Home Screen was hidden in the settings section of the Play Store. With Android 8.0 Oreo (at least on the Nexus and Pixel phones), this feature has moved out of the Play Store application entirely and now resides in the settings of the launcher instead.

Add Icon to Home Screen

1. Long press on an empty spot of the Home Screen
2. Tap the Settings option
3. Toggle the Add Icons to Home Screen option on/off
4. Press the Home button to go back to the Home Screen

Explanation

This is a weird change from Google all of a sudden, but you may have already been used to it if you used a custom launcher like Nova Launcher. Since even if you had that toggle set in the Play Store, with Nova Launcher there was an additional toggle in the settings of its own application. So either way, it’s nice to see this feature will now work as it should no matter which launcher you’re currently using. To start, we simply need to long press on a blank space of the Home Screen.

This will shrink down the Home Screen page itself and reveal three options at the bottom (this example is done with the Pixel XL, but your launcher settings may be located elsewhere). Tap on the Settings option and then you should see a list of different features including App Suggestions, Displaying the Google App, Changing the Icon Shape, and more. We want to ignore these and simply focus on the Add Icon to Home Screen toggle that is sitting in the middle of them.

Before, Google had a check box for this feature in the Play Store settings, but it has now transitioned to a toggle. By default, this will be set to On but you can turn it off by tapping on it. Alternatively, if you have previously disabled this in the past and want to turn it on now, you just need to toggle the feature on. There isn’t anything more to it as knowing the feature exists but has just been moved is likely all you need to know.

This feature only impacts new applications that you have installed so this won’t have any effect on other aspects of the Home Screen or the Play Store.