Welcome to 2013, Apple fans! Maybe in 5 more years you’ll get homescreen widgets customizable layouts (change number of apps per row etc). In 10 you might get custom launchers!
Welcome to 2013, Apple fans! Maybe in 5 more years you’ll get home screen widgets.
We actually do have home screen widgets, as of like 2020. They got it sometime before I had my iPhone. And an app drawer!
As a former Android user, my iPhone home screen looks wildly different from people who’ve had iPhones for many years. I have very few icons on my home screen, I have widgets taking up most of the top of the screen to push the icons I do have down near my fingers (because Springboard is still stupid as of iOS 17, as this gif is pointing out), I have more widgets to the left (“Today View,” Apple calls this, it’s basically just a scrolling widget section), and then the app drawer equivalent to the right (which Apple calls “App Library”). It’s clean and beautiful and reminiscent of my lovely Nova launcher setup I had on my beloved OnePlus 7T Pro (may it rest in peace).
Whereas most longtime iPhone users just have page after page after page of apps and folders. Every app they own is on there somewhere. Which is ridiculous since on iOS you can just swipe down, type the first few letters of the app, and there it is.
Before the app library existed you just had to have all the apps on a page and could not hide them. I ended up having like 20 page of apps. I eventually cleaned things up and have a page with apps I use, another page of widgets I use, and that’s it. But it took me years before I thought to do that.
Oh I know, it was madness. I briefly had a used iPhone 3GS and then was pure Android until 2022 when I got an iPhone. By the time I came back it was customizable enough that I could make it look like Android, but that’s work for someone who lived with the terrible setup it originally had. I don’t blame existing iPhone users, it’s just something I’ve noticed.
It’s funny, I’ve had an Android, a Nokia Windows Phone, and an iPhone, and Windows Phone was the only OS in which I didn’t open every single app through search. The utter lack of an app ecosystem definitely played a part, but I honestly don’t think either of the other two handle home screens/“app drawers” very well. Every modern social media platform/messenger/etc. is built around vertical continuous scrolling because it’s easier. Why is horizontal, paginated scrolling the default for home screens?
We had them before that but they were different and not a lot of stuff made use of them
They were kind of shit, and confined to that left-most view. The new widget system they added a couple of years ago is really nice, and the addition of making them interactive with the last update was solid too.
As someone that uses both iPhone and Android, the way it is right now Apple’s widgets feel better. I can’t quite put my finger on why exactly that is, but like with pretty much everything (stock) Android, it just feels a little bit janky. It works just fine, and I really like the adaptive theme thing that my Pixel 6 has going on, but it feels a bit off.
I toyed around with the phones side by side, and I think honestly it’s mostly just that Apple must be spending a fuckton of hours just working on getting animations to flow smoothly. That’s the main difference I notice between my Pixel 6 and my 15 Pro Max. They both have 120hz screens, but the latter doesn’t have any sort of flickering, weird clipping, animations that drop/bug out, etc. while the Pixel does.
I recorded two screencaps, doing roughly the same things, so I could see it side by side. This is from my iPhone, and this is my Pixel 6. I enabled the “record touch gesures” thingy on Android, an option I’ve no idea where/if it exists on iOS.
What’s interesting is, I learned that it actually does pick up my gesure when I try to open the app switcher, it just either ignores it, or I’m not precise enough. I’ve never had this issue on my iPhones, but I have it almost every time I use my Pixel. It then pulls up this weird unlabelled app with a bunch of squigglies in it - I genuinely don’t know what that is, and it took me aback because I was expecting the app switcher. Then there’s a bunch of random flickering. One app is “censored” and it shows my wallpaper instead, which is a bit odd but that’s fine. When dismissing the drawer, it remains briefly above the homescreen before just vanishing out of existence.
On iOS all the animations are smooth, nothing pops, flickers, or jerks. Even the padding in the widget drawer is eased in and out of existence.
Does it matter? That’s subjective. Both are solid phones, and for the price I paid for the 15 Pro Max it fucking better be. With Android you have a lot more freedom, of course. It’s not really something I value in my daily driver as my iPhone does all I want from it with zero hassle.
This interaction is so indicative of the reality of device fandom.
The Android user isn’t storing information about the iPhone in their brain.
The iPhone user is responding like everybody knows everything about iPhone features and it was dumb of the android user to not know this thing.
My first Android was an HTC Hero, which was released in ~ October of 2009.
One of the first things I did was swap the location of the Maps and Store icons to make it easier to reach on the edge of the phone.
I recall people complaining that same year that the iPhone 1 couldn’t copy or paste text.
:)
Shit - my first Android phone had widgets, customizable homescreen (not just icons - but the entire layout an launcher), and anything else custom you wanted back in 2009.
15 years late to the game in an industry that’s effectively 17 years old…
This is an April Fools, right?
No way a fancy top end smartphone in 2024 doesn’t have this extremely basic feature from over a decade ago that everything has…
iPhone just feels so unintuitive after using Android. Their UI absolutely sucks in my opinion.
Try Mac OS next lol. “Here, hold down alt, smack your left ass cheek, and tap dance around your computer to run this unsigned executable”. It really feels like they’re deliberately violating the principle of discoverability to stop your from doing things that they don’t like.
They already just prevent you from doing things that they don’t like.
Try installing an older app, it just gives the error that the app is too old.
You can’t even cut/paste in Mac OS without using your mouse and modifier keys. Like, seriously? Also, it’s 2024 and they still don’t have window snapping. Like what the fuck, Tim Apple?
I’m a Windows user, but my church uses a Mac to run its projection and video recording. I’ll admit it works pretty well for what we typically need it to do, but it recently took me like five minutes to figure out how to crop a picture because you apparently can’t do that by simply opening the file and clicking the crop icon.
Mac’s filesystem is an absolute mess, too. This might just be my own inexperience, but I’ve saved things like PowerPoints and videos in order to upload them, and then I’ll go to the website to upload them, and I won’t be able to find them because they’re not in a specific folder or something.
I picked up an iPhone several years ago, I think a 6 or 6s? Anyways, I tried to use it for a while, because I work in IT and sometimes need to support people on their iPhone, and being an Android person, I had no idea what I was doing.
I could not stand it. Everything took so much more effort. I never got rid of my android, I just tried to use the iPhone whenever possible to familiarize myself with the apple way of doing things. I hated some of the layouts, I missed the back button… Even something as simple as copy/paste just seemed a lot more cumbersome for no good reason.
I learned a lot about it and where options and such were located (which is what I primarily needed) then I simply used it a bit less and less all the time until I finally stopped using it entirely. I have no idea where it is at this point, but I’m sure it still works and I’m sure I would still hate it. I’ve wanted to retry the experiment with a newer device like the X or 11 or something, but anytime I consider it, I just think back on my experience and unless I can pick up a relatively modern iPhone for next to nothing, I’m pretty uninterested in trying again. I know iOS has had a lot of updates in the past few years since I used one and maybe it sucks less? But I’m not willing to sacrifice my sanity to figure it out.
I don’t mean to hate on iOS or iPhones. I certainly don’t like them, but if that’s what works for you, then go ham. I find it cumbersome and restrictive, and you’re free to disagree and use whatever you like; don’t let me stop you.
You would think that. But as a person having an iPhone… No it is not. At least the part of iPhones currently not having that option. App-Icons on your “desktop” will always align in dense rows from top left to bottom right, with no free spaces allowed.
It is a bit weird, and I don’t really see why, since you can change the order of icons in this dense row-grid. I am glad Apple warms up to the fact that people might actually want some kind of customization on their devices and not everything “the way Apple decrees it”.
But to be really honest… I did not even notice prior to this post, and I had all Android before switching to my current iPhone. So at least for me this is a really small non-issue, and maybe a nice-to-have feature.
I had an iPad for a while and it definitely bothered me. Really just about everything did. It felt like I had to fight with it to do just about anything I wanted to do.
Well, the issue is just that you’re not thinking with the Apple mindset. If you’re having difficulty doing something through an Apple product, it really just means you were trying to do the wrong thing in the first place. Where Apple products really excel is in their integration, both between software and hardware, and between separate devices through iCloud servihahahaha I’m just messing with you but can you imagine some fanboy actually typing out shit like this?
I was going to mention this. You can move them around; but you can’t move them anywhere you want. The icons will always be, as you say, in a dense grid of rows with no “blank” spaces between the icons.
I don’t know if the OP is true or satire or some kind of April fools thing, but it’s still accurate.
This remind me when in the 1980’s Cup Holders were introduced in Dodge Caravans, but most cars they expected you to buy this and clip it onto the inside window the story https://historygarage.com/essential-evolution-handy-cup-holder/ e. 1980’s
This is what my homescreen looks like and apple’s struggling with placement of icons?
Edit: for those asking for theme, below is the video with instructions and apps used. https://youtu.be/UQKIUycDfQg Can’t guarantee if it’ll work for you.
Total launcher. Had to design whole thing though. The theme is based on nier: automata game ui.
I used to work with an Apple fanboy that knew next to nothing about how computers actually work, but he knew that Apple was the best at everything. Any time someone brought up something about a device or service from any other company or with any other OS, his stock answer was always “switch to Apple”. Any time someone pointed out that their device offered a feature or functionality they appreciated that Apple did not offer in a convenient way, his stock answer was always “You don’t need that.” Sometimes he’d add “why would you want to do that? Do X instead”.
Fast forward to today, I ended up killing him and am writing this from jail.
This is really my problem with Apple.
They make great hardware, and they make great software…but their answer to an XY problem is always W. You do things their way, or you don’t do them.
And what they are really best at is marketing and simplicity. They market their simplicity. That attracts a lot of people who don’t care to know any way of doing things other than the Apple way. Even if another way is objectively better in any or every way.
They make great computers if you are into music production or photo/video editing.
Actually their computers are better than windows 11 at this point…
Their phones, on the other hand, should all be thrown into a volcano.
RIP in peace Windows Phone 10. Still the best home screen setup ever.
Say what you will about Microsoft, lemmys, but Windows Phone 10 had great performance and battery life. It’s a shame that it was nuked because MS couldn’t bring themselves to go all the way on the Android bridge.
I’m a mobile developer and back around 2011 I was hoping like hell that Windows Phone would make it big. When you look at Xcode (for iOS), Eclipse (for Android and Blackberry) and MS Visual Studio (for Windows Mobile and Windows Phone) for mobile development, there was absolutely no comparison - it was Visual Studio all the fucking way. But Microsoft just decided to completely shit the bed and give up on mobile altogether. I still don’t get it.
Around that time WebOS (under Palm) had the Mojo SDK, it was pretty slick.
They also messed up Nokia before killing Windows Phone. Nokia’s Symbian used to be a serious competition to android.
Symbian was a fantastic OS, but it never competed with Android in any meaningful way. Nokia was already circling the drain when Microsoft bought them and first Windows phones (Lumias) were fucking awesome. And then fucking moron Nadella killed Windows Phone.
Nokia’s Symbian was shit and you’re the only person I’ve ever heard saying anything positive about it. To be a serious competitor to Android or IOS you need to have as much apps on the store and Symbian had very few.
Honestly windows phone was sabotaged by both 3rd party developers who refused to port their apps to the platform, despite how easy it became AND did things like kill their own APIs to stop other developers from developing ports themselves, as well as by Google by not allowing their services on the platform.
The hardware was honestly top notch, even compared to my current S21 ultra. They were fairly pro consumer, having removable batteries, SD card slots and a 3.5mm jack right up until the end, even after the other big manufacturers removed them. And after the major update (the WP 8.1 update iirc) the software was really nice, intutive and pretty. I miss arranging and resising tiles, I miss having my pictures or album artworks showing up on the homescreen and I still use the Microsoft launcher on android to get the app drawer like I had on my WP.
Windows Phone was mostly sabotaged by first-party developers. Microsoft has a history of abandoning their mobile phone OSes after very short periods of time and nobody trusted them not to do it again. As a result few app developers bought into the ecosystem and smartphone enthusiasts told their friends not to get Windows phones, causing modest sales, causing Microsoft to immediately drop the platform.
As everyone expected them to.
Yes, it was a shame, and it only died mainly due to the lack of available apps in the store and bad management. MS took too long to release it with Android and iOS already well established in the market… It was also the OS that resisted the longest in the Pwn2Own Hacking Contest in these years. While Android and iOS went down in less than a minute, before the hackers could access the data, on WindowsPhone they hit their teeth on a rock, after half an hour they could only access the cookies.
Microsoft fucked up in the smartphone market so many different ways. The misunderstood the UX paradigms that would work, refused to change when Apple had obviously stolen their lunch money, stayed the bad course they were on when Android stole Apple’s lunch money and then didn’t even notice it has slammed Microsoft into some lockers because that’s how little windows phone mattered. By the time Microsoft did like… Actual good market research and focus testing to build an actual good mobile os (maximally ironically based on their Zune UX which had failed previously because Microsoft was infinitely too slow to the mobile audio market) it was exactly as you said. The perfect mobile OS just 5 years too late to matter. More than anything what they needed to do was prove the apps you actually needed were present on their store and pay OEMs money to make windows phones to establish market share to make up for having a lower count of apps. They failed to do so. Now their actually genuinely brilliant mobile os only exists as a series of android apps that no one really gives a shit about.
You can still get it with android launchers. Was toying with them the other day. Launcher 10 I believe is pretty close.
There’s a few android launchers that emulate the metro ui. I use the Square Home one and I have no complaints.
I’ve got Launcher 10. It’s my favorite of the WP10 likes I’ve seen and used. And I’ve used a ton lol
Looks pretty clean, and with a proper search in the app drawer. If I wasn’t so lazy and set in my ways, I’d switch :)
Sorry about making a repeat post earlier, I hadn’t seen the other posts that suggested using launchers. I think my sync might be a bit slow with syncing posts.
If I try it out and don’t like it, will my Nova Launcher screen go back to how it is now, or will I need to set it all up again?
You can use launcher10 or any other launcher that looks like windows phone home screen.
Different people have different tastes. I use Trebuchet 8. But person I replied to was asking about Windown Phone experience on android.
