Labels, dock & spacing

Hiding icon and folder labels

Two independent switches in Settings → Home screen — “Hide app names” and “Hide folder names” — hide the text label under home screen app icons and under folders. Turn one on and labels stop showing for that item type. Hiding app names reclaims the space the label used to take, giving the icon itself a bit more room. Hiding folder names does the same, but only within that folder’s own space — it can’t make the icons on the rest of the page any bigger, since every icon on a page shares one label-height allowance.

Under the hood

Hiding app names extends the same automatic space-reclaiming behavior that already runs when a page is too cramped to show labels — this setting forces it on everywhere, instead of waiting for the page to run out of room.

Renaming a pinned icon’s label

Long-press a home screen or hotseat app icon and choose “Rename” to open a dialog with the icon’s current label already filled in. Saving sets a custom label for that one icon only — the app’s real name, its entry in the drawer, and any other pinned copy of the same app are unaffected. A “Reset” button in the same dialog restores the icon’s original label.

Hiding the dock

Settings → Home screen → Layout → “Hide dock” removes the dock — the fixed row of apps across the bottom of the home screen — and gives its height back to the grid, so existing rows grow slightly taller rather than a new row being added. Hiding it only changes how the space is presented: the apps that were in the dock are untouched and return exactly as they were if you turn the dock back on.

Even with the dock shown, its icons already sit closer to the bottom than they used to — the dock no longer reserves empty space below its icons for a search widget that was never actually there to show.

In portrait orientation, a small gap survives at the very bottom even with the dock hidden — that’s space reserved for the phone’s on-screen gesture bar, and it stays so the grid doesn’t slide underneath it.

Under the hood

The dock’s whole footprint collapses through one shared size calculation that roughly twenty other layout values are derived from, so hiding the dock updates the grid’s padding, the page dots, folder positioning, and the dock’s own space all at once rather than needing each one adjusted separately. Hiding the dock also needs a small guard elsewhere: a hidden view keeps its last measured position, so without it, dragging an icon to where the dock used to be could silently “drop” onto the invisible dock instead of onto the grid underneath.

Home screen spacing

The bottom row of home screen icons sits close to the page dots rather than floating well above them — this is on by default, with no setting to turn it off. How close depends on whether app labels are hidden (see above): labels take up vertical space, so hiding them lets the bottom row settle even closer to the dots. A layout with icons in a vertical side bar instead of the usual bottom bar doesn’t get this adjustment.

With the dock hidden, the space below the dots becomes the same small gesture-bar gap described above, rather than the taller space normally reserved below the dock.

Under the hood

The available slack is recalculated on every layout pass rather than fixed, because how much room is reclaimable depends on the row’s own content height, which roughly halves when app labels are hidden. Measured on a Pixel 10 Pro XL at a 7-row grid, the full adjustment is worth about 24dp with labels hidden and about 12dp with labels shown — a single fixed value tuned for one case would land badly in the other. The adjustment is capped so it can never add padding, only reclaim what’s already reserved for the dots.

Limits

Hiding the dock doesn’t add an extra grid row — the reclaimed height is spread across the existing rows, so cells grow taller instead. Grid shape itself stays a separate setting. A small residual gap directly under an icon’s own artwork is the icon’s own built-in padding, unrelated to any of the settings on this page.