How to organize your iPhone home screen with AI

In a Reddit thread on r/mcp about letting an AI agent arrange a home screen by colour (181 comments in our snapshot), people asked which MCP server was used, how it was connected, and what the prompt was. A separate r/iphone post asking whether people would describe a layout and have it done in seconds drew 25 comments. Outside those threads we found almost no one asking this yet.

How it works

TidyGrid reads your iPhone or iPad home screen over a cable and keeps it on your Mac as a draft. Its MCP server lets an agent running on the same Mac look at that draft and replace it with a new one. The agent gets five tools:

• get_layout: the Dock, pages, folders and widgets as TidyGrid read them.
• get_icons: the main colours of each icon, so it can group or order by colour.
• evaluate_layout: checks a planned layout fits the grid and that no app went missing, without changing anything.
• propose_layout: replaces the draft in the TidyGrid window. You can undo it like any other change.
• list_backups: the layouts TidyGrid saved before earlier applies.

Setting it up

1. Connect the iPhone to your Mac with a cable, tap Trust if asked, and open TidyGrid so it reads the home screen.
2. Add TidyGrid's built-in MCP server to your agent's MCP settings.
3. Ask the agent to read your layout first, then describe what you want.
4. Watch the draft change in the TidyGrid window. Undo, ask for changes, or adjust by hand.
5. When you are happy, press Apply in TidyGrid. The agent cannot do this step.

What to ask for

Agents work well with clear rules. Some prompts that work well:

• “Keep my Dock and first page as they are. Put everything else in folders by what the apps are for, with short folder names.”
• “Move every game into one folder on the last page, and put the apps I left in the App Library into a folder called Rarely.”
• “Put my pages in rainbow order by icon colour, but keep the widgets where they are.”
• “List apps that look like they do the same job. Do not move anything yet.”

Do you need an AI for this?

Not for simple orders. TidyGrid's Arrange puts every app on your pages in order by color or A to Z in one click, without an agent. Where an agent helps is judgement: grouping by purpose, naming folders, or following your own rules like “work apps on page two”.

Many people prefer their apps not to move at all because they find them by memory. An agent proposal is a draft, so you can look at it and throw it away with one undo.

Who this works for

• Agents that support MCP, including Claude Code, Codex and Cursor, running on the same Mac as TidyGrid.
• TidyGrid needs a Mac with Apple silicon and a cable between the device and the Mac. Reading a layout is tested on iPadOS 15, iOS 16, iOS 17 and iOS 27.
• Applying a layout is tested on iPadOS 15.3.1 and iOS 27.2. iOS 16, iOS 17, iOS 18 and iOS 26 are still in testing, and on those TidyGrid opens the layout read-only and says why.

What it cannot do

• The agent cannot write to your iPhone or iPad. There is no MCP tool for that; only you can press Apply.
• The agent can only move icons that are already there. It cannot install or delete apps, add widgets or change icons.
• Neither TidyGrid nor the agent can know how often you use each app, unless you tell the agent.
• TidyGrid cannot see empty spaces you left between icons on purpose, so neither Arrange nor an agent can keep them.

Questions