(upbeat music)
- 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.
There's the new jiggly mode
which lets you go to the app pages view
and turn app pages on or
off if you don't wanna have
to see them at a certain
time of day or whatever.
There's the app library which means
that your apps are potentially
in two different places,
the home screen or the app library
and your home screen folders
in your app library folders
work a little bit differently
and last but not least
there are App Clips which
is a whole new kind of app
and you need to know what that means
or what the dotted line
around an icon means.
And that those apps
might go away in 30 days
if you don't use them.
Oh, and there's actually
one more complication.
There's now a setting for the home screen
where you can go in and
decide whether app badges
show up in the app library
and whether new apps
show up on your home screen.
So that's a lot of complication
and it probably sounds
like I'm complaining
about all that complication
but I'm actually not
and don't get me wrong,
I can complain about complication
on Apple's platforms.
I think that Apple has made
the iPad way too complicated
when it comes to selecting
text or knowing what's going on
when there's multiple windows
especially multiple windows
from the same app.
But on the iPhone, I think it's different
and that's because the
defaults on the iPhone
are not complicated.
You don't have to learn any of this stuff,
the widgets, jiggly mode,
even the app library
you could ignore even
though it's over there.
The defaults are still the
classic grid that you're used to
and you can just keep using
your iPhone in the same old way
that you always have.
So well Apple makes you understand
the new iPad OS interface.
They've made it more complicated.
With the iPhone, Apple
lets it get complicated.
You get to do this new
stuff if you want to
or you can ignore it.
If you don't know me,
obviously I'm a power user.
I wanna use all this new stuff
and I'm really excited
to try a bunch of it out
and make this thing just
feel a little bit more
like it's mine and a little
bit more like it's customized
to the way that I wanna use smartphones
and so it's great that I have that option
but if you don't, I think it's also great
that you don't have to.
Everybody, thanks so much for watching.
Let me know what you think of
the iOS 14 home screen stuff
down in the comments
and I know I said I
wouldn't cover everything
in iOS 14 and I meant it
but I do have to point out that there's
this new feature and accessibility
where you can double tap
the back of the phone
or triple tap it to do custom actions.
So just for fun, I did what
everybody else is doing
and I map double tap to
launching the Google Assistant
'cause why not?
