Apple has announced iOS 14 onstage at WWDC 2020, giving the first (official) look at the latest version of its software for the iPhone, and it’s bringing the biggest change to the iOS home screen in years: widgets.
Widgets come in a variety of sizes and can still be viewed in the Today view, but in iOS 14, Apple allows widgets to be added to the main Home screen to live right alongside your apps. To add them, there’s a new “widget gallery” where users can easily add and customize widgets. There’s also a new “Smart Stack” widget that automatically shows relevant apps based on the time of day.
iOS 14 will be a big update, but a lot of it is catching up to features other platforms have had for a decade now, such as the above-mentioned widgets, which look virtually identical to live tiles on Windows Phone. It also comes with an application drawer (like Android), divided into various application categories (like the Palm OS launcher), and the ability to set your own default browser and email application (like every other operating system since the dawn of time).
There’s more, of course, such as picture-in-picture support, something called App Clips where parts of applications can be displayed for quick access (Android has had a similar features for a few years now), and a number of other, smaller things.
All in all, it seems like a decent update, bringing a number of features to iOS that most of the world’s smartphone users have been enjoying for a decade or more now. Good news for iOS users, I suppose, but nothing groundbreaking.
You forgot the most important feature again Thom. It will also make iphone 8 series unbearably slow, and force their users to buy new iphones.
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Well, it’s worth watching. Everyone should be recording their benchmarks for before & after evidence of performance reducing updates. However I wonder if apple learned their lesson after being caught red handed and suffering all the bad press. I haven’t heard about this happening since the performance anomalies first uncovered by geekbench and I’m not aware of any discoveries since then.
There’s no shortage of tricks a company like apple could pull here if it wanted to covertly try it again, but would it be worth the risk of getting caught? I wouldn’t think so, but who knows… Obviously they could do a better job hiding the slowdowns, like disabling it when geekbench and other known benchmarks are running or when a device is in developer mode. This would make if more difficult for researchers to gather data, like sneaking past the IOS store gatekeepers and getting lots of people to submit benchmarks.