Manually change the order of iPhone icons

When you have a lot of applications installed on your iPhone, the Apple way of moving their icons (dragging from one screen to the other) may be a cumbersome task.

If your device is jailbroken, it is possible to edit the programs’ locations by hand. You have to connect to your iPhone’s filesystem (by AFP or SFTP), and then copy this file…

/private/var/mobile/Library/Preferences/com.apple.springboard.plist

…to your desktop. (This path is for iPhone OS 2.2.1; it may have changed with OS 3.0.)

Open it with Property List Editor and unfold the iconState » iconLists. Icons are ordered by page (from 0 to 8), then an iconMatrix (line from 0 to 4, and column from 0 to 4). Each app is identified by a displayIdentifier code. Hex codes are for Safari desktop favorites, and integers 0 for empty spaces. Here’s a screenshot so you can see exactly what it looks like.

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