iOS 14 beta: It's complicated…TECH NEWS
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 bea public beta in July. So when you do get to install it, your iPhone is going tolook totally the same and it's gotta look the same 'cause Apple's not gonnamove your stuff around on your home screen butApple 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 widgetsthat you can put right in your home screen andthere 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 itso here's the question, why did Apple finally letthe iPhone home screen get a little complicated. Alright, so obviously thebig headline news is widgets.
You can put them whereveryou want on any home screen. They're not just trapped inthis 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 notthat well supported. And I don't know, I just have a sensethat these are all gonna just be a little bit nicer on the iPhone.
The other reason I don'tthink 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 intorectangles or squares which means that they fit into a grid that feels a lot more likea lifestyle home screen Windows Phone than anAndroid home screen does. Okay, so widgets how do you use them? Well, it's pretty simple. You can long press onthem on the today view and then drag them out to where you wanna putthem on the home screen and then you can putthem anywhere you want on your home screen. Except not because Applestill 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 screenlike you can on Android because Apple apparently hatespeople having their icons or they can reach them moreeasily with their thumb or, but hates people seeingyou know their wallpapers.
I don't get it. Anyway, there's one otherway to get at widgets and that's actually the more fun way and that's to go into jiggly mode. So we should talk aboutjiggly mode for just a second. You long press anywhere in the home screen to get into jiggly modeand I'm saying jiggly mode because that's officiallywhat it's called now in my opinion because Appleitself called it jiggly mode in the keynote and whenyou're in jiggly mode, you get the minus buttons as usual, and I'll get to those in a second but you also can tapthis 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 sizesfor that apps, widgets and then you can grab oneof them with a long press, drag it out and then moveit anywhere you want, anywhere you want on your home screen. But jiggly mode actually hasone 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 allof your pages on one screen and you can turn them on andoff so you can uncheck them and then they aren't therescrolling on your iPhone or you can go back into jiggling mode, go back into those pages and turn them on. So in theory, you couldhave a page that's like, specifically for work and you turn it on when you're at workand then you uncheck it to turn it off for the weekendso you don't get out there when you're scrolling through your iPhone. You can do the same thingwith social media apps, if you're afraid you'regonna look at them too often. It's really, really clever. The other thing I loveabout Apple's widgets is you can stack them.
You can have them all in astack and swipe through them with your thumb to getto 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 viewwon't automatically work on the home screen. And that's for battery life actually but it also brings upan interesting feature with these stacks. There's a smart stack so when the App Makerremakes their widget, they're able to put atimeline 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 stackwill look at all the widgets in the stack and see whichone thinks it's most important and then float that one to thetop which is really clever. I hope nobody abuses thepriority 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 havehistorically been two places where your apps could show up. There's the home screenwhere all you know, you rearrange all your apps and put them in folders andput widgets there and whatever. And then Android also has the app drawer which is usually justan 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'rebefore on the iPhone. Now the app library theway Apple implemented it, it's interesting. You can swipe down toget a alphabetical list of all of your apps if you just wanna find something that way or Apple puts them inthese 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 accuratethat is, often it's not. There's a recently addedbox for all the apps that you've just installed and then the rest are justcategories that Apple decided on.
I think they're based onlike the store categories. I don't love them. So for example, my WiFi utility app, eero is in the lifestylecategory for some reason, the Apple Store is inthe lifestyle category which I guess makes sense but the productivitycategory has my banking apps which I don't love and you can't actuallycustomize any of this. And so it's not so muchthat Apple stole this idea from Android as they kindof stole it from Samsung because Samsung has an app store but they kind of tryand 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'lllearn where your stuff is and if you can't rememberwhere your stuff is, well guess what, you canput it on your home screen. The interface is also interesting because it shows three big icons and then for little iconsand 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 folderit like opens the whole app which is like surprising. If you tap on the little icons, you get a listing ofeverything inside that category but there's no obviousway to get out of it. You have to know to sortof 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 isthis thing called App Clips and these are just likeinstant 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 littlebaby version of the app on the fly when you needit and then it sits there inside your app library, thelittle dotted line around it and eventually goes away or if you want the fullversion 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 isactually really clever. Sometimes you wanna do athing that only an app can do but you just don't want thewhole damn app sitting there on your phone forever. So a good example of this is if you're renting a smartscooter 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 forthat thing is really smart but I don't know howmuch use this thing is actually going to get becauseif you think about it, you've got webpages for stuffthat you just wanna look at and you want to go awaypretty much right away and you got apps for thingsthat you wanna be permanent and App Clips live inthe middle for things that can do things that webpages can but you don't want them tostick around like full apps and I just don't know howmany things live in that the middle zone like parkingmeters, renting scooters, maybe you know paying forlike certain things or like a, I don't know, amusementpark app or something but really that's about it.
You install them usingQR codes or NFC codes or maybe it'll be some custom URLs but we'll have to see just how much developers reallyadopt this kind of thing because on Android it's sortof been seen that many of them. Alright, so let's reviewthe ways that I think Apple has made the iPhone home screenmore complicated in iOS 14. There are widgets thatyou can put anywhere on the home screen and youcan scroll through them into little stacks thatmight algorithmically try and figure out whichone 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 oroff if you don't wanna have to see them at a certaintime of day or whatever.
There's the app library which means that your apps are potentiallyin two different places, the home screen or the app library and your home screen foldersin your app library folders work a little bit differentlyand last but not least there are App Clips whichis a whole new kind of app and you need to know what that means or what the dotted linearound an icon means. And that those appsmight go away in 30 days if you don't use them. Oh, and there's actuallyone more complication. There's now a setting for the home screen where you can go in anddecide whether app badges show up in the app libraryand whether new apps show up on your home screen. So that's a lot of complication and it probably soundslike I'm complaining about all that complicationbut I'm actually not and don't get me wrong, I can complain about complicationon Apple's platforms.
I think that Apple has madethe iPad way too complicated when it comes to selectingtext or knowing what's going on when there's multiple windowsespecially multiple windows from the same app. But on the iPhone, I think it's different and that's because thedefaults 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 eventhough it's over there. The defaults are still theclassic grid that you're used to and you can just keep usingyour 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, Applelets it get complicated. You get to do this newstuff 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 excitedto try a bunch of it out and make this thing justfeel a little bit more like it's mine and a littlebit 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 ofthe iOS 14 home screen stuff down in the comments and I know I said Iwouldn'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 tapthe back of the phone or triple tap it to do custom actions. So just for fun, I did whateverybody else is doing and I map double tap tolaunching the Google Assistant 'cause why not?
You can put them whereveryou want on any home screen. They're not just trapped inthis 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 notthat well supported. And I don't know, I just have a sensethat these are all gonna just be a little bit nicer on the iPhone.
The other reason I don'tthink 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 intorectangles or squares which means that they fit into a grid that feels a lot more likea lifestyle home screen Windows Phone than anAndroid home screen does. Okay, so widgets how do you use them? Well, it's pretty simple. You can long press onthem on the today view and then drag them out to where you wanna putthem on the home screen and then you can putthem anywhere you want on your home screen. Except not because Applestill 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 screenlike you can on Android because Apple apparently hatespeople having their icons or they can reach them moreeasily with their thumb or, but hates people seeingyou know their wallpapers.
I don't get it. Anyway, there's one otherway to get at widgets and that's actually the more fun way and that's to go into jiggly mode. So we should talk aboutjiggly mode for just a second. You long press anywhere in the home screen to get into jiggly modeand I'm saying jiggly mode because that's officiallywhat it's called now in my opinion because Appleitself called it jiggly mode in the keynote and whenyou're in jiggly mode, you get the minus buttons as usual, and I'll get to those in a second but you also can tapthis 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 sizesfor that apps, widgets and then you can grab oneof them with a long press, drag it out and then moveit anywhere you want, anywhere you want on your home screen. But jiggly mode actually hasone 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 allof your pages on one screen and you can turn them on andoff so you can uncheck them and then they aren't therescrolling on your iPhone or you can go back into jiggling mode, go back into those pages and turn them on. So in theory, you couldhave a page that's like, specifically for work and you turn it on when you're at workand then you uncheck it to turn it off for the weekendso you don't get out there when you're scrolling through your iPhone. You can do the same thingwith social media apps, if you're afraid you'regonna look at them too often. It's really, really clever. The other thing I loveabout Apple's widgets is you can stack them.
You can have them all in astack and swipe through them with your thumb to getto 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 viewwon't automatically work on the home screen. And that's for battery life actually but it also brings upan interesting feature with these stacks. There's a smart stack so when the App Makerremakes their widget, they're able to put atimeline 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 stackwill look at all the widgets in the stack and see whichone thinks it's most important and then float that one to thetop which is really clever. I hope nobody abuses thepriority 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 havehistorically been two places where your apps could show up. There's the home screenwhere all you know, you rearrange all your apps and put them in folders andput widgets there and whatever. And then Android also has the app drawer which is usually justan 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'rebefore on the iPhone. Now the app library theway Apple implemented it, it's interesting. You can swipe down toget a alphabetical list of all of your apps if you just wanna find something that way or Apple puts them inthese 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 accuratethat is, often it's not. There's a recently addedbox for all the apps that you've just installed and then the rest are justcategories that Apple decided on.
I think they're based onlike the store categories. I don't love them. So for example, my WiFi utility app, eero is in the lifestylecategory for some reason, the Apple Store is inthe lifestyle category which I guess makes sense but the productivitycategory has my banking apps which I don't love and you can't actuallycustomize any of this. And so it's not so muchthat Apple stole this idea from Android as they kindof stole it from Samsung because Samsung has an app store but they kind of tryand 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'lllearn where your stuff is and if you can't rememberwhere your stuff is, well guess what, you canput it on your home screen. The interface is also interesting because it shows three big icons and then for little iconsand 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 folderit like opens the whole app which is like surprising. If you tap on the little icons, you get a listing ofeverything inside that category but there's no obviousway to get out of it. You have to know to sortof 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 isthis thing called App Clips and these are just likeinstant 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 littlebaby version of the app on the fly when you needit and then it sits there inside your app library, thelittle dotted line around it and eventually goes away or if you want the fullversion 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 isactually really clever. Sometimes you wanna do athing that only an app can do but you just don't want thewhole damn app sitting there on your phone forever. So a good example of this is if you're renting a smartscooter 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 forthat thing is really smart but I don't know howmuch use this thing is actually going to get becauseif you think about it, you've got webpages for stuffthat you just wanna look at and you want to go awaypretty much right away and you got apps for thingsthat you wanna be permanent and App Clips live inthe middle for things that can do things that webpages can but you don't want them tostick around like full apps and I just don't know howmany things live in that the middle zone like parkingmeters, renting scooters, maybe you know paying forlike certain things or like a, I don't know, amusementpark app or something but really that's about it.
You install them usingQR codes or NFC codes or maybe it'll be some custom URLs but we'll have to see just how much developers reallyadopt this kind of thing because on Android it's sortof been seen that many of them. Alright, so let's reviewthe ways that I think Apple has made the iPhone home screenmore complicated in iOS 14. There are widgets thatyou can put anywhere on the home screen and youcan scroll through them into little stacks thatmight algorithmically try and figure out whichone 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 oroff if you don't wanna have to see them at a certaintime of day or whatever.
There's the app library which means that your apps are potentiallyin two different places, the home screen or the app library and your home screen foldersin your app library folders work a little bit differentlyand last but not least there are App Clips whichis a whole new kind of app and you need to know what that means or what the dotted linearound an icon means. And that those appsmight go away in 30 days if you don't use them. Oh, and there's actuallyone more complication. There's now a setting for the home screen where you can go in anddecide whether app badges show up in the app libraryand whether new apps show up on your home screen. So that's a lot of complication and it probably soundslike I'm complaining about all that complicationbut I'm actually not and don't get me wrong, I can complain about complicationon Apple's platforms.
I think that Apple has madethe iPad way too complicated when it comes to selectingtext or knowing what's going on when there's multiple windowsespecially multiple windows from the same app. But on the iPhone, I think it's different and that's because thedefaults 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 eventhough it's over there. The defaults are still theclassic grid that you're used to and you can just keep usingyour 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, Applelets it get complicated. You get to do this newstuff 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 excitedto try a bunch of it out and make this thing justfeel a little bit more like it's mine and a littlebit 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 ofthe iOS 14 home screen stuff down in the comments and I know I said Iwouldn'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 tapthe back of the phone or triple tap it to do custom actions. So just for fun, I did whateverybody else is doing and I map double tap tolaunching the Google Assistant 'cause why not?
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