How many times have you struggled to find an app on your phone? You know it's there somewhere, but on which screen? Find apps faster by organizing them into folders with colors for visibility.

If you are anything like me, you probably have dozens of apps on your phone. It is hard to pin down how many people have, but some most estimates are over 50 and some are over 100. I keep the number of apps to a minimum and still have 62, including standard Android apps and extra apps bundled with the phone.

After downloading a few dozen apps for your phone and adding them to the home screens, which quickly multiply, it becomes difficult to find the one you want. You end up swiping left and right through screens looking for the app. Some people complain that apps disappear from the home screens, maybe it's a bug, but maybe they just have too many app icons and the home screens are full.

More home screens can be added so you can have more app icons, but then you end up swiping between multiple screens looking for an app. A better way to organize apps on the home screens is to create folders. You can go a step further and assign them different colours to make them stand out.

Just as you would put files into folders on your computer, such as Documents, Music, Videos and Pictures, putting similar apps into folders on your phone enables you to easily find them when you need to access them. Putting these folders only home screen means that you can have quick and easy access to your apps without having to hunt for them across several screens.

For example, you could create a Social folder that contains all your social media apps like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and whatever else you use. You could add work apps to a Work folder, Exercise and health apps to a Get Fit folder and so on. It makes starting an app a two-tap process. Tap the folder to list the apps and then tap what you want. Job done.

Here I show how to create folders on an Android phone. It is a Samsung, so it runs Samsung's One UI on top of Android 10. However, you may find similar features on your own Android phone if it is a different model.

1 Create a folder on the home screen

Creating a folder to contain apps and to organize them is easy. Just press, hold and drag an app icon and drop it on another one. In some old versions of Android you had to long press the screen to get to a menu option to create folders, but now it is drag and drop.

2 New folder options

The screen looks like this and there is a brand new folder containing two app icons, the one you dragged and the one you dropped it on. Choose two apps that are similar in some way, like all Google apps, games, social media, news and so on. Tap Folder name at the top.

3 Name the folder

Tap the folder name placeholder at the top and the keyboard appears below. Enter the name for it. I initially named it Brain Training, but found it split the name over two lines on the home screen, so I renamed it Brain Games. It looks odd when one folder nae is two lines when all the others are one.

4 Color the folder

On the folder screen (step 3) press the grey blob on the right and a row of colored blobs is displayed. Pick a color for the folder. Here I chose green, but the last blob, the multicolored one, enables any color to be selected in case you don't like the current ones or run out of different colors to use. Tap the X after choosing a color.

You are returned to the folder screen (step 3) and tapping outside the folder returns to the phone's home screen. You now have a folder containing two apps.

Tap a folder to open it and see the apps it contains, then tap an app to run it.

5 Add more apps to folders

Go back to step 1 and create more folders in the same way. Here I created a Social Media folder. If you change your mind about the name and want to change it, just tap it at the top to call up the keyboard and edit it or replace it. Tap Done on the keyboard to apply the new name.

6 Add apps to folders

The simplest way to add more apps to folders is to drag and drop them on the folder on the home screen. Press, hold for a second or two, then drag it to a folder and lift.

Another way to add apps to a folder is to tap it to open it and then press the plus button. Select apps to add from the A-Z list.

7 A more organized home screen

After experimenting with folders, I ended up with these four: Google, News, Social and Brain Games. Those folders contain 32 apps, but instead of being spread over multiple screens in a random order, they are organized and it is easy to find the app that is needed.

Place folders at the bottom of the screen where they are easily reached with a thumb when holding the phone in one hand.

The icons in the tray at the bottom of the home screen can be replaced like any other icons on the home screen. You may find that you can fit five icons in the bottom tray, so a folder could be dragged to it and dropped on it to add it. The icons scoot around to make space.

You might find it useful to place one or more folders there instead of one of the usual icons. For example, you could put your Social folder in the tray instead of just the instant messenger app you use. How about creating a folder for text messaging, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and whatever else you use. Replace that single messaging app with a folder, then you can tap and choose the one to use. There are endless possibilities.