As Apple ushers in a more dynamic Home Screen in iOS 18, we gain insight into how the company sees iPhone and iPad users – and what it considers the future of this particular feature. And if you’re a long-time Apple user, the changes might not be as you’d expect. Because while there are indeed more features for customization, they aren’t always in the areas you’d have hoped for.
The big change from an organizational perspective is being able to scatter app icons freely across the Home Screen. No longer must they flow in from the top-left corner. Additionally, you can tap-hold any app and opt to lock it behind Face ID. And a choice few apps let you quickly switch them between standard icons and widgets. All of these are good things. But the other changes feel comparatively superficial, focusing heavily on aesthetics and seemingly forgetting that Home Screens were originally about organizing your apps.
I’d long hoped Apple might finally bring across basic sorting options from Finder in macOS, making it a cinch to quickly sort one or more pages of apps by name, date or size. But no. Instead, development time has been concentrated on allowing you to tint all your app icons the same hue and remove the text beneath them, making it harder to find anything the next time you want to launch it. The result may bring visual harmony, but it erodes usability, and provides no help in managing chaotic Home Screens that can come from growing app libraries.
To be fair to Apple, it goes where the market is. Presumably, more iPhone users clamor for visual Home Screen customization options than robust Home Screen organizational features. And with App Library, Apple is strongly hinting Home Screens are largely redundant anyway, bar for housing a handful of favorites and widgets. But for those of us wedded to old-school launching, it’d be nice if Apple would bring more old-school thinking to modern devices – in the shape of those sorting controls it mastered back in 1984 – alongside the means to change every icon on your Home Screen to the same fetching shade of purple.