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 “...

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