this is an unpopular opinion but i know the aesthetic reason for apple not implementing this for so long, and like eveything, it’s to make money.
android design is pretty good, but user created android phones home screens can often look pretty hateful, often with 4-6 screens of more empty space than icons, tons of widgets with an inconsistent design scheme, random half empty folders and a notification bar overcrowded with overshrunk icons. android phones often look like old Windows XP desktops—even on flagship distributions.
in contrast to google, apple cares what your phone looks like because they have a highly visual brand.
apple, by not allowing placement anywhere intentionally enforced a consistent top-left to bottom-right aesthetic which is now ubiquitous to the brand. among other design decisions, the result is that when you blur your eyes and look at a phone home screen you can tell whether it is apple or not.
- but the functionality is worse, yes i know.
- but it actually does look worse too, to you maybe, but not to apple. my belief is they did this for the same reason they put the magic mouse’s lighting port on the bottom (to keep users from always using it plugged in. which looks “ugly”).
the power of a strong and unmistakable brand is incomparable. in many cases, the value of a brand can even outperform raw product utility when it comes to customer satisfaction, a theory which i believe apple has been leveraging in this case very much intentionally despite the seeming paradox of utility.
edit: already getting downvoted to heck i should have known better than to be aware of basic marketing principles lol. i promise you im not defending apple im just explaining why they did this to make more money.
I have to disagree on one point – that iOS home screens somehow look more orderly because they’re full of icons arranged in a strict top-left-to-bottom-right fashion. It doesn’t look any less cluttered than an overly full Windows desktop.
I found desktops that limit themselves to core functionality and maybe a nice wallpaper to be better looking and more usable since the days of Windows 95 and that hasn’t changed since.
That “strict grid of icons” look certainly is uniform across iDevices and that’s what appeals to Apple but I never found it to be particularly attractive.
we actually agree on this point. i don’t argue they look more orderly i argue they look uniform across the ecosystem which was central to my thesis :)
You wrote all that and only used a single upper case letter. Impressive
i count at least three but thanks lol
Don’t second guess the willingness of an Apple-hater to spend that much time dissecting something bad Apple has done.
LOL
How will Apple users now manage with so many decisions to make??
Oooh wow will they let you change your brightness and font too?
Welcome, to the world of 2015!
Wake up babe it’s 1.153695229E+5785
iOS lookin more like Android with each release.
@Shadywack @Dex otherwise they are saying monopoly 😂
I know people have been horny for this for the longest time - just like the app drawer, but honestly if I wanted this, I would’ve bought an Android phone. I need a way to disable the shitty app drawer and this upcoming “feature” cuz I never asked for it.
I have yet to see anyone use the app drawer in the wild (gods know I sure as hell don’t).
Completely useless especially since pull-down Home Screen to search is so robust.
EXACTLY! It’s so annoying and I remember you could disable it until you couldn’t for whatever stupid reason. Now I just leave the apps that I don’t use more than once every two weeks in there and search for them. Imagine actually wading through those folders looking for an app and not calling yourself a lunatic when Spotlight is so much faster.
I use it semi regularly because I’ve limited myself to just two pages of Home Screen, and spatially, it is faster to launch a couple of apps that I use semi regularly, but didn’t make it to the Home Screen. It is faster than Spotlight search for me because it is super fast to short swipe twice and tap the icon, instead of longer pulling down spotlight, orient the keyboard and wait for search results to populate. I understand this is not for everyone as most people I know have more than two screens of icons, and would take more time to get to the drawer, but at least it works for me.
I think another thing that might make it faster is if Focus based Home Screen is used, the amount of pages could be drastically reduced in various customized focus modes… but I’ve never gotten into that and frankly I’m inclined to think that’s a super power user mode very few outside of Apple dives into.
Edit: also spotlight search is slower when you’d need to change keyboard languages to search for a non-default language app, especially if the other language is slower/less familiar to input (Chinese and Japanese comes to mind for me).
Wtf lol
They’re getting this now? I could do that on my old LG G5.
Every modern release of iOS is more like Android, and every modern release of Android is more like iOS. Welcome to convergent evolution.
By 2030, the only major difference between Android and iOS will be that, when you hit the bottom of a scrolling page, one will be a little bouncy and the other will be a little stretchy.
People will still fight over which OS is the best.
That’s not a feature already???
This should be fun to play with for a little bit, but I put a lot of thought into my current layout and I’m not sure how much I really want to mess with it at this point.
My next phone is an Android probably because Apple stopped making “small” phones.
And so did android manufacturers. The last small-ish Android phone, the Asus Zenfone is now also ginormous in its latest revision…
Like, below 6“ there’s the ZenFone 10, the iPhone 13 mini (both not current gen but still up to date), the Sony Xperia 10 IV (the V is above 6“), and a bunch of rugged phones (that aren’t exactly small either) and a few cheap af phones that are exactly 6"
The marked is harsh to us small phone fans…
The big ones, true. But at least with Android there’s some sort of a possibility that somebody tries. Like the Unihertz Titan and Jelly models. Unfortunately stuck at Android 13 officially.
Yea and also their screens are comically small. The Jelly‘s 3“ are barely useable… I want sub 6“ not sub 4“…
It’s a matter of how you use it and for what, really. My watch screen is 1.5"
Yea but like, then why bother with android at all? KaiOS seems to do everything you‘d want it to do, if you’re looking for a device that small. Or really just a standalone smartwatch.
When I talk about small phones, I want a phone without compromise (besides maybe battery). I want to be able to use any app, consume content, communicate via mail or chat apps on a useably sized keyboard, etc. I just want it to be below 6“ (Or rather around 5“ considering modern borderless designs). I loved the 4“ iPhone sizes and I love my 5.4“ iPhone 13 mini. Wouldn’t really want a phone bigger than those 5.4“ and also wouldn’t really want a device much smaller in footprint than the old 4“ iphones.
There’s the 2nd gen SE although they said it sold poorly.
I got my parents those. They are crap devices.
What’s crap about it? I really like mine. Small, thin, snappy, good battery, never heats up. Beats the hell out of my Zenfone.
Off topic but I never see articles posted here about what the new features in Android are going to be, but Apple haters will undoubtedly let me know what I can expect to see in iOS.
Big whoop.
