In Praise of iOS 14 (Premium)

While I prefer Android over iOS, it’s pretty clear that Apple is doing a lot more to improve its mobile platform this year than is Google. The cynical view is that Apple maybe had more work to do to make iOS as usable as Android’s been for years. But I don’t really see it that way, and iOS 14 is good enough that I could see switching back, assuming that this year’s iPhones complete the picture.

But that’s a concern for a different day. Today, let me step you through the three big changes in iOS 14 that matter the most to me.

A more useful and configurable home screen

I’ve long had two major issues with the iOS home screen. First and most obviously, you can’t arbitrarily place icons anywhere you’d like on-screen, as you can with Android. Instead, Apple fills in each home screen with icons starting at the top left, which is the furthest and hardest position on-screen to reach, especially if you’re trying to use the iPhone one-handed. Second, because iOS doesn’t provide an All Apps screen like Android, it’s up to the user to find a place for every single app icon; these can be placed on various home screens or semi-hidden in folders.

iOS 14 doesn’t “fix” either of these problems, at least not fully. But Apple has made some changes in this release that somewhat mitigate the pain of each.

On the icon placement front, iOS 14 finally lets its users place widgets on the home screen among the icons. These widgets can each be one of three sizes—small (the size of four icons), medium (a wide style the size of eight icons), or large (huge, really, and the size of 16 icons)—and they can be used judiciously at the tops of home pages where they can force app icons closer to the bottom where they are more easily reached.

Or you could push things down even further with a bigger widget, or with more widgets.

Yes, this is a bit of a kludge. But used this way, widgets work much like the live tiles in Windows Phone, which should warm the cockles of any Lumia fan’s heart, providing “at a glance” views at useful information. I’ve placed two such widgets—Clock and Weather, both in the small size—at the top of my main home screen because they’re useful in this way. And because of the app icon placement thing.

As for the second issue, iOS 14 still doesn’t provide a true All Apps screen. But what it does provide are two features that sort-of/kind-of together emulate this screen. The first is called App Library, which is a categorized view of all of the apps on your phone that is available to the right of the right-most home screen. By default, App Library displays these app categories in what look like giant folders.

But you can swipe down on this view to see an alphabetical view of all of your apps. This view looks a lot like All Apps. I wish it could be the default view for App Library, but whatever.

A second new feature lets you hide app icons from the home screen by “moving” them to the App Library. As such, hidden app icons still appear in App Library, so using these two features together helps you to emulate the All Apps screen in Android. You can leave only your most-often used apps visible on the home screen and access the rest in App Library or via search (which you access by swiping down on any home screen).

That Apple has gotten so close to completely solving my two biggest iOS complaints and not quite nailed it can be a bit maddening, yes. And seriously, Apple, it’s 2020; why can’t we put icons where we want them? But thanks to widgets on the home screen, App Library, and app icon hiding, the iOS home screen is configurable enough that I could use this system without missing Android. This is a big deal to me, and it should be to anyone who is considering moving from Android to an iPhone.

Default apps

Another big long-time complaint about iOS is tied to Apple’s walled garden approach, which to date has prevented third-party apps from being designated as the default as is possible on platforms like Android—where you can configure default web browser, digital assistant, keyboard, launcher, phone, and text messaging apps—Windows and the Mac. Apple took a small step in this direction a few years back when it finally allowed users to configure a third-party virtual keyboard as the default. And in iOS 14, it’s taking another small step.

No, it’s not the full suite of default apps you can configure in Android. Instead, iOS 14 allows users to configure a default web browser and email app that launch when you tap a link or want to compose a new mail message, respectively. Two small steps for Apple, two giant leaps for all mankind, or at least the part of mankind that uses an iPhone.

I’m eager to configure both of these options—I’d choose Microsoft Edge for the web browser and Microsoft Outlook for email—because this functionality, like the home screen configuration options noted above, removes a pain point for me when I’m using iOS. But I don’t see it, even in the latest beta, and I think the reason is that you’ll set this up in the settings for the browser or email app you wish to use as the default. For example, the current version of Microsoft Edge doesn’t have this option yet (and neither does Safari or any other iOS browser, at least to my knowledge).

Privacy

Like many, I’ve become quite suspicious of Google and the insidious user tracking that powers the advertising engine on which its empire is built. That’s one of the reasons I switched away from Google Chrome on all platforms; that app is simply a means by which Google tracks its own users and sells the data it collects to advertisers. And it’s one of the things that’s troubling about Android, because it’s literally impossible to prevent this tracking on Google’s mobile platform.

By contrast, iOS has always afforded its users a more privacy-friendly environment, in large part because Apple doesn’t make money by tracking your activities and selling that information to advertisers. But in recent years, Apple has really amped up its marketing of the privacy protections in iOS as a selling point for the platform. And it has improved its privacy protections in meaningful ways in each of the previous few releases.

And it’s getting even better in iOS 14. There are several privacy enhancements that are coming in this release, but let me focus on the two that I think are most important.

First, iOS 14 will display a prompt when an app tries to track you. “Tracking refers to the act of linking user or device data collected from your app with user or device data collected from other companies’ apps, websites, or offline properties for targeted advertising or advertising measurement purposes,” Apple explains. “Tracking also refers to sharing user or device data with data brokers.” You can simply tell the app not to track you.

Second, Apple is separating location tracking into precise and approximate locations because most apps will never need your exact location. For example, weather and local news apps will work normally with an approximate location. Apps that require a precise location, like Maps, will continue to get access to that information if you OK it, of course.

Yes, there’s more

There are many, many more new features and changes coming in iOS 14, probably hundreds of them, many of which look very interesting. But the three changes noted above, collectively, will help to make the iPhone a more viable platform for me and others like me going forward and each is, in its own way, a game-changer of sorts. So while we need to wait and see what happens with the 2020 iPhones, the software is shoring up nicely. I wish I could say the same for Android 11, but I’ll be looking at that soon as well.