Hot take: iOS 14

pgangwani35

On Monday, Apple held its annual World Wide Developer Conference, where it announced new versions of all its major operating systems. Chief among these was the iOS 14 announcement, where Apple discussed a ton of new features that are going to find their way onto millions of iPhones come September.


After having watched the keynote and going through everything new in this update, it's hard not to think of iOS 14 as one of the most influential updates that the platform has received in recent years and one that will matter to a lot of people going forward, especially those on the fence.

This is probably the iOS update that is going to be the one that might make a lot of people jump over from Android over to Apple's walled garden. There are enough reasons to support this, but let's talk about the things that Apple announced yesterday first. Apple came right out the bat with the changes to the homescreen and widgets, and I don't think that was a coincidence.


For years, one of the common bugbears with iOS and the thing Android got right from version 1.0 was the homescreen. It's difficult to believe that the iOS homescreen has remained largely the same since it was first demonstrated on stage by Steve Jobs back in January of 2007 at the now-defunct Macworld. A grid of icon is the first thing any iPhone, iPad or iPod touch user saw when they finished setting up their device, and it's what they always saw no matter their personal preference.

Apple has been very strict about this over the years, never straying away from the formula even though the competition from Google and the various Android OEMs had clearly a more functional and flexible alternative. The homescreen sort of signified Apple's approach to the mobile platform in general where it was very much 'my-way-or-the-highway' even though the intention behind it was always to keep things simple, even for the least technologically inclined among us.

But things change and so do people and Apple's static grid of icon was no longer an adequate solution. Even long-time Apple users, who at one point may have appreciated the simplicity of the humble SpringBoard launcher had now started to get frustrated with the limited functionality on offer. And Android users, once they were done mocking the grid, would admit that the static homescreen was one of the things that would keep them away from switching to iOS.


Come September, that's about to change. For the first time, users will have some flexibility with regard to their homescreen. You now have a makeshift app drawer in the form of the App Library, which neatly arranges all your apps in categories with a handy search function. You can now also just hide or clear the app screens even if you have apps on them as they are all inside the App Library anyway. And new apps will now go inside the App Library instead of instantly cluttering your neatly arranged homescreen.

But what really takes the homescreen in iOS 14 to the next level are the widgets. The widgets themselves are massively overhauled from their sad little former versions that lived in the left-most screen of your iPhone. All built-in iOS apps have a widget of their own and they have all been redesigned. Developers can also make new versions of their widgets and they can now come in different sizes.

Most importantly of all, the widgets can now be integrated within the grid of apps, something that Android has always been able to do. This means you no longer just have a static grid of icons and every person can now have a truly custom homescreen experience, which simply wasn't possible before beyond just rearranging the icons. More importantly, it's also a lot more functional and Apple even has some clever tricks like widget stacking that makes smart use of space.

So the homescreen is different. What else is new? Quite a bit, actually. Apple also finally relented and started allowing users to use their own browser or email app as the default. Prefer having your links open

Source