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Phone keeps making new folders and shortcuts

BruceTheQuail

BruceTheQuail

Lurker
I gave my mother my old note 5 (good phone) and now have a note 8 and am waiting for my note 10 plus to arrive.

Anyway, back to my mum. She loves the phone with a passion but she is always doing things to it then wants me to sort it out. I barely know the basics.

Anyway the latest is that she wiped her contacts. I managed to restore about 30 out of 100 odd and told her she would have to go through texts to get the rest, but when doing that I noticed that she has probably 20 to 30 folders on her pages each with a couple of apps in them, and some apps are in folders 2 or 3 times and in multiple folders. One video app was on her home screen about 9 times, the calculator app was up 3 times and so on. As I said to her, it looks like a teenager's bedroom.

Can someone help me to clean that up, essentially remove duplicates of apps without deleting the app itself and get rid of the folders.

Any help much appreciated!
 
Icons on the home screen are just shortcuts, so you can remove them all without deleting the app.

Don't go into the system Settings (you can uninstall them from there), and don't try to remove them from the app drawer. But the desktops, remove away.

As for using a different launcher, that will produce its own desktops and will not start off with the litter of icons she currently has. The thing to understand is that in Android neither the desktops and the app drawer are part of the system, both are provided by an app called a launcher. The phone comes with a launcher of its own, so that's what get by default, but you can use a different one. And just as if you use a different browser it has its own home page, its own bookmarks, etc, different launchers have their own settings, and so how you set up one launcher has no effect on how you set up another.

(They will, in most cases, use the same wallpaper though).
 
Thank you very much. When I said we might have to do a reset she nearly cried and so I am trying to sort it. She will probably end up with my note 8 which I think is a bit easier to use.
 
yep. Actually I think she might be dragging apps on top of other apps and making folders that way. I did it myself a few days ago for the first time. If you drag the app back out the folder goes
 
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