I hope it’s an option you can toggle. I like the existing system which is essentially a list view where it reflows when you remove an icon. My desktop icons are set to work like this too.
I wonder how they’ve implemented this for iPads since there the way the layout behaves (list vs 2D grid) actually makes a difference when you rotate the screen.
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?
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.
Lol. That was exactly my take as well. Which is why after a few months of battling my new Apple laptop, I went to buy a generic PC lappie, slapped KDE on it and never looked back (this was a while back).
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 historygarage.com/essential-evolution-handy-cup-h…e. 1980’s
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.
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.
Technically, Android does that, too, but the limit on that is a few years. If I’m not mistaken, the lowest version of Android that Google will allow a user to install through the Play Store is Android 12 (released in September 2020).
Yes, but 99% (give or take) of Android users won’t know or care how to install 3rd party apps. So most people would only care about the Google Play Store limitation.
The limitation is overcome the moment someone downloads and installs APK from web browser or some store. It is artificial, and for nerds that want to install apps older than those for Android 6, they can toggle that flag with ADB.
Apple on the other hand renders phones outside of its update cycle as junk devices, even if capable.
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?
You can tho? You can use arrow keys to move around the text, and hold down control to move by entire words in most apps. CMD + C to copy and CMD + V to paste (CMD is what they call the super key). But yeah, they’re trying to push a pointer-centric design that nobody really wants instead of putting the keyboard first.
That’s copy/paste. There is no cut command in Mac AFAIK. There’s only the move command, which requires an additional modifier when pasting. If there’s a key combo for that modifier, then I would like to know what it is. The only way I know how to do it is with the context menu from right clicking and the modifier key. But still, why do they do it differently than every other operating system?
Cut is just Command + X. You can swap in Command for most of the windows shortcuts that use control. Why didn’t Apple just use the Control button for Control things? That I do not know.
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.
Right? I gotta use an iPad at work now and where the FUCK is the back button!?!? I’m so tired of mashing the home button. It’s cool AF that my stylus will put text specifically where I write it though, and it translates my cursive!
It’s Apple, their entire business model is making their tech as restrictive as possible and stripping away as much freedom as they legally can. You can’t name a company more power-hungry.
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.
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.
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.
I know, right? It also took them years to improve their notifications to work like Android’s (still aren’t quite as good). And I STILL can’t do what this gif is showing because iOS 18 isn’t out.
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.
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?
Oh, so “Glad you guys are finally getting features we had over a decade ago” is “full hatred”, but “I’m sorry, did you just send me a green text? didn’t know you were broke” is fine?
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…
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