- So iOS 14 is here.

Well, it'll be here this fall,

but it's announced

and developers can try it right now

plus there's going to be a public beta in July.

So when you do get to install it,

your iPhone is going to look totally the same

and it's gotta look the same

'cause Apple's not gonna move your stuff around

on your home screen but Apple is finally changing

what you can do on your home screen.

Is it a little bit more like Android

or Windows Phone?

Yes, there are widgets that you can put right

in your home screen and there is this app drawer.

They call it an app library thing

but it's also different.

And you know what, you know me,

anytime I see a big user interface change,

I need to talk about it so here's the question,

why did Apple finally let the iPhone home screen

get a little complicated.

Alright, so obviously the big headline news is widgets.

You can put them wherever you want on any home screen.

They're not just trapped in this vertically scrolling

today view that you have right now.

I still have the today view actually

but now you can put them anywhere,

you can intersperse them with your icons

and your folders.

So it's just like Android,

except not really for a couple of reasons.

The first reason is,

I just think these widgets look better

than Android widgets

and widgets they're not that well supported.

And I don't know,

I just have a sense that these are all gonna

just be a little bit nicer on the iPhone.

The other reason I don't think it's like Android

is because it's more like Windows Phone.

All of these widgets they basically come

in three different sizes, small, medium, and large.

They all sort of fit into rectangles or squares

which means that they fit into a grid

that feels a lot more like a lifestyle home screen

Windows Phone than an Android home screen does.

Okay, so widgets how do you use them?

Well, it's pretty simple.

You can long press on them on the today view

and then drag them out

to where you wanna put them on the home screen

and then you can put them anywhere you want

on your home screen.

Except not because Apple still forces icons and folders

and widgets to flow in from the upper left

and then across and down.

You can't just put an icon on the bottom

of your Home screen like you can on Android

because Apple apparently hates people having their icons

or they can reach them more easily with their thumb or,

but hates people seeing you know their wallpapers.

I don't get it.

Anyway, there's one other way to get at widgets

and that's actually the more fun way

and that's to go into jiggly mode.

So we should talk about jiggly mode for just a second.

You long press anywhere in the home screen

to get into jiggly mode and I'm saying jiggly mode

because that's officially what it's called now

in my opinion because Apple itself called it jiggly mode

in the keynote and when you're in jiggly mode,

you get the minus buttons as usual,

and I'll get to those in a second

but you also can tap this little plus button

in the upper left hand corner

to get to the gallery of widgets.

You can search for them, you can tap on an app

to see the available sizes for that apps, widgets

and then you can grab one of them with a long press,

drag it out and then move it anywhere you want,

anywhere you want on your home screen.

But jiggly mode actually has one new really interesting

feature that I wanna get to really quick.

If you tap on the dots that represent

all your different pages on your iPhone,

it opens up a view of all of your pages on one screen

and you can turn them on and off so you can uncheck them

and then they aren't there scrolling on your iPhone

or you can go back into jiggling mode,

go back into those pages and turn them on.

So in theory, you could have a page that's like,

specifically for work and you turn it on

when you're at work and then you uncheck it

to turn it off for the weekend so you don't get out there

when you're scrolling through your iPhone.

You can do the same thing with social media apps,

if you're afraid you're gonna look at them too often.

It's really, really clever.

The other thing I love about Apple's widgets

is you can stack them.

You can have them all in a stack and swipe through them

with your thumb to get to the one that you want.

Now, this does mean that developers

have to redo their widgets

so the old widgets that you currently have

in your today view won't automatically work

on the home screen.

And that's for battery life actually

but it also brings up an interesting feature

with these stacks.

There's a smart stack

so when the App Maker remakes their widget,

they're able to put a timeline on it that says,

well, you should update my app at 4:25,

there's a storm coming

and it's really, really important

and so that smart stack will look at all the widgets

in the stack and see which one thinks it's most important

and then float that one to the top which is really clever.

I hope nobody abuses the priority thing, we'll see.

So that's widgets but to me,

the bigger change for the iPhone is

this thing called the app library.

See on Android, there have historically been two places

where your apps could show up.

There's the home screen where all you know,

you rearrange all your apps

and put them in folders and put widgets there and whatever.

And then Android also has the app drawer

which is usually just an alphabetical listing

of all of your apps

and so Apple is now doing the same thing.

Your apps might not be on your home screen

if you choose not to put them there.

They might instead be in the app library

or in both places like Android.

So that is a bit of complication

that wasn't really they're before on the iPhone.

Now the app library the way Apple implemented it,

it's interesting.

You can swipe down to get a alphabetical list

of all of your apps

if you just wanna find something that way

or Apple puts them in these little categories

and it figures out on its own.

So there's suggestions in the upper left

and that is four apps that Apple thinks

you might wanna launch and I don't know,

we'll see how accurate that is, often it's not.

There's a recently added box for all the apps

that you've just installed

and then the rest are just categories that Apple decided on.

I think they're based on like the store categories.

I don't love them.

So for example, my WiFi utility app,

eero is in the lifestyle category for some reason,

the Apple Store is in the lifestyle category

which I guess makes sense

but the productivity category has my banking apps

which I don't love

and you can't actually customize any of this.

And so it's not so much that Apple stole this idea

from Android as they kind of stole it from Samsung

because Samsung has an app store

but they kind of try and customize it for you

with all these little categories

and it's just a little bit too confusing.

We'll see how this goes.

I think that eventually you'll learn where your stuff is

and if you can't remember where your stuff is,

well guess what, you can put it on your home screen.

The interface is also interesting

because it shows three big icons

and then for little icons and they do different things

depending if you tap on it,

if you just tap on one of the big icons,

it doesn't open a folder it like opens the whole app

which is like surprising.

If you tap on the little icons,

you get a listing of everything inside that category

but there's no obvious way to get out of it.

You have to know to sort of tap on a blank space

on the screen or swipe up to go back

just like going home.

So the app library is fascinating to me

because it is the first real time

that Apple has added real complexity

to the iPhone home screen.

The third application is this thing called App Clips

and these are just like instant apps on Android.

They're little baby versions of an app

that you don't technically like go through

the full Apple Store install process.

You can install just a little baby version of the app

on the fly when you need it and then it sits there

inside your app library, the little dotted line around it

and eventually goes away

or if you want the full version of the app,

you can tap on the app clip

and then you can install the full version

of the app from the App Store.

The idea behind it is actually really clever.

Sometimes you wanna do a thing that only an app can do

but you just don't want the whole damn app sitting there

on your phone forever.

So a good example of this is

if you're renting a smart scooter or paying for parking,

I don't know I go to a random city,

they have their own custom parking app.

I don't, I'm gonna, I don't want that app.

I'm gonna delete it.

I'm gonna forget to delete it.

I'm gonna be annoyed and might track me

and I don't know.

Just having an app clip for that thing is really smart

but I don't know how much use this thing is

actually going to get because if you think about it,

you've got webpages for stuff that you just wanna look at

and you want to go away pretty much right away

and you got apps for things that you wanna be permanent

and App Clips live in the middle for things

that can do things that webpages can

but you don't want them to stick around like full apps

and I just don't know how many things live in that

the middle zone like parking meters, renting scooters,

maybe you know paying for like certain things or like a,

I don't know, amusement park app or something

but really that's about it.

You install them using QR codes or NFC codes

or maybe it'll be some custom URLs

but we'll have to see just

how much developers really adopt this kind of thing

because on Android it's sort of been seen that many of them.

Alright, so let's review the ways that I think Apple

has made the iPhone home screen more complicated in iOS 14.

There are widgets that you can put anywhere

on the home screen and you can scroll through them

into little stacks that might algorithmically

try and figure out which one should go at the top

at any given moment.