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In 10 years, this is the first time I installed a beta version. It suffered a couple of issues, but they’ve been ironed out in my case. I really love the new a

In 10 years, this is the first time I installed a beta version. It suffered a couple of issues, but they’ve been ironed out in my case. I really love the new app drawer. My hundred barely-used apps are now neatly stowed there while I keep a single (Yes, one) Home Screen. Widgets are nice but from what I understand they’re updated only once every 5 minutes, which makes them a lot less useful.

vxNsr 6y ago
I've always arranged my homescreen to be a single screen with folders for each category of app. makes it much easier to find things. I'm always befuddled when I see ppl with 30 pages of apps.
- filleokus 6y ago
  I just swipe down for Spotlight and use that as an app launcher, so I'll probably love the app drawer. I'm equally baffled by people doing it any other way :-) Do you organise your applications on your computer by category as well?
  - frosted-flakes 6y ago
    Sometimes, yes, but most of the time I launch them from the taskbar or the "frequently used" list in the start menu. The difference between a phone and a computer is that one has a keyboard, and the other doesn't. Ever since the end of the BlackBerry era, typing on my phone is a slow, error-prone activity, so searching takes longer than the two taps it takes to just select it manually (typing on a BlackBerry was slow too, but at least it was error-free). I have all my apps categorized in folders in my app drawer (I use Nova Launcher, which lets you create folders there). Then I have two home screen pages, one with all my most-used applications, and the other with all my media players: podcasts, music, Kindle, Libby, YouTube, etc. I use large icons (4x5 per page), so it makes it both easy to find and select any app.
  - oarsinsync 6y ago
    I definitely used to back in Windows 95-2000 days. It was one of those things people like me who cared too much and wanted to share screenshots of their beautiful desktop / wallpaper / skins / etc used to do. I don’t anymore. Eventually the regular reinstalls became too much effort re-setting all of my endless customisations. Trained me well for the modern era of “photos app not working right? Have you tried erasing all contents and settings and not restoring from backup?”
  - wayneftw 6y ago
    I organize them by category and I can tap twice faster than you can swipe, type, tap. This way is easily faster if you have a reasonable number of apps. Typing to find things would only be faster if you had more than say 220 apps. Even if I have to tap, swipe, tap - that would be faster than swipe, type, tap.
    - vxNsr 6y ago
      Also this encourages you not to have more than 9 apps in a single category. I break this rule often, but I do try pretty hard not to.
      - willis936 6y ago
        Then you need multiple pages of apps. I keep 15 top apps in thumb hotspots and 11 folders in (mostly) more tucked away spots. One page, all apps. The apps in each folder are alphabetized. The folders definitely go into 3+ pages in some categories, but I often search if it feels like hunting down an app in a folder is more work.
  - tzs 6y ago
    You can also do it by voice. Tell Siri to "open AppName" and it opens the app named AppName. It does have trouble with some apps, though. Authy does not work at all when pronounced the way I expect it to be pronounced ("auth" as in "authorize"). Siri just says that there is no app named "Offie". And no, I do not pronounce "th" anything at all like "ff". If I try pronouncing Authy as "oathy" is works maybe 1/4 to 1/3 of the time. For nearly everything else I've tried, though, it is fine.
    - sixstringtheory 6y ago
      This post, parent and GP basically describe my evolution for organizing and launching apps. Taking the time to manually organize all my apps just isn't worth it any more, especially after a few updates/restores exploded it all. Now, I keep the first home page clean with only the essential apps, and everything else is pushed off into the memory hole on the right with spotlight/siri wrangling it all for me. Excited to see how this might improve with widgets and app library!
    - antipaul 6y ago
      Did you try training Siri? (Enable siri text) and then tap it when it says this app not found, and change "offy" to "Authie". After a few times, it should recognize your prompt
      - tzs 6y ago
        I'm not sure what setting that is. I've tried hitting the "tap to edit" thingy to edit the command it head from "open Offie" to "open Authy" several times, and it doesn't seem to really help much. It's not that much of a problem on my phone or iPad, because I can just ask it to open Authenticator (Microsoft's authentication app). When I set up TOTP for a site, I scan the QR code in both. It's on my Apple Watch that it is annoying. Microsoft Authenticator on the watch doesn't do TOTP. It's just for authenticating with Microsoft sites. So on the watch I need to use Authy if I need a TOTP code for a site. On the watch, I don't see any option to edit a command that Siri gets wrong.
        6y ago
  - jasonv 6y ago
    A use case: all the apps I use for Instagram photo editing in a folder. I don’t always remember what some of them are, or what they’re named, so keeping them together is helpful. Don’t trust App Library to organize those the same way.
  - zimpenfish 6y ago
    That's how I did things but something somewhere during the iOS 14 has broken Spotlight search for me - I can't search for apps any more (well, I can, but it gives me the app store page or a website.) It is most aggravating and utterly perplexing. Whilst I like the app library for hiding all the stuff I don't use, it's a massive pain to use for finding apps...
- mumblerino 6y ago
  I gave up on folders altogether. I found that my most used apps are still prominently visible either in the drawer or in spotlight’s suggested apps. Before iOS 14 I had more than 14 folders.
- jedberg 6y ago
  For me, the first page of the home screen are the apps I use the most, with the most used apps in the middle. That way I can get to them in one click quickly with muscle memory. So is the second page, again for quicker access. I used to keep the third and beyond pages in folders, but on my last phone I got lazy and just use spotlight search as an app launcher.
- ghaff 6y ago
  My homescreen is my frequently used apps and then a few subsequent screens are basically like (the now mythical) travel that include a folder for less frequently used apps in the category.
  - ryantgtg 6y ago
    I dislike how you can't (or couldn't - I haven't installed iOS 14 yet) arrange home screen icons like you can on Android. On Android, I would put my four most used icons in each corner, and leave the rest of the screen empty. So, on iOS, I only use the top row for icons, and all the rest are on a second screen. My motive is that I want to see my beautiful wallpaper, which in this case a picture of my daughter.
    - reificator 6y ago
      Still not an option, Apple knows better than you.
- dunnevens 6y ago
  I'm one of those page-flipping people. I alternate between using Spotlight to launch and just flipping pages. For me, it's a form of spatial navigation. I couldn't tell you the exact number of pages I flip to get to a specific app, or the row&column of where an app's icon lives, but my sub-conscious somehow remembers. It's about as quick to launch, for me, as any other method.
bzb5 6y ago
I’ve installed most betas and this was the most stable ever.
cactus2093 6y ago
> updated only once every 5 minutes, which makes them a lot less useful That's weird, I would expect them to be able to get updates via push notifications. Even so that seems like a pretty minimal limitation. For almost anything other than messaging a 5 minute resolution is probably fine.
reificator 6y ago
> I really love the new app drawer. My hundred barely-used apps are now neatly stowed there while I keep a single (Yes, one) Home Screen. I hop between Android and iOS every few years and was quite excited for iOS to check this basic functionality box right as I came back. Shame they had to ruin it by forcing the absolutely nonsensical categories on you with no option for a plain alphabetical list. Just give me the UI that shows up when you tap the app drawer search button, but as soon as I swipe to the drawer and without showing the keyboard. It's right there, the functionality I want is available, but as usual Apple screws it up for power users. In fact: do regular users like searching their app drawer for a possibly relevant category and hoping it has what they want? It doesn't help that the available categories and their ordering change every few days and/or whenever you install a new app. And worse yet is that the same application can show up in 3-4 different categories crowding out the one app you're looking for that only exists in one.
- antipaul 6y ago
  I think it's fine. You get default categories which have advantages* or alphabetical order - which you can also get by swiping down in the app drawer. tap and hold scrollbar to get to the position you need. *in default view, I can tap on the larger icons to open the app right away. Or I can tap on the smaller ones to get all the apps in that category. Then, there aren't that many categories and the predictiveness actually seems quite good
  - reificator 6y ago
    > You get default categories which have advantages [snip] in default view, I can tap on the larger icons to open the app right away. Sure, I've heard of homescreen icons before. > or alphabetical order - which you can also get by swiping down in the app drawer. Which means three gestures to get to the alphabetical one including hiding the keyboard. > tap and hold scrollbar to get to the position you need. Yep, that's a positive. Just wish I could get straight there. The app drawer is for the apps I use infrequently. Which means I'm less likely to have internalized their app icons, and I can't view the text in the default view so I have no idea what I'm looking for. The only text I get is the category name, like Other for Phillips Hue or Creativity for Twitch. YouTube? Entertainment. Twitch? Creativity. And Podcasts goes under Entertainment despite the fact that I have an Education category already. The categories make no sense to me and I have no way to rectify that, I already use homescreen folders for categorization, and without text it's a pain to find what I'm after, especially if it's hidden inside the "fourth slot".
envolt 6y ago
I had screentime widget on my home page. I doubt if it's even 5 minute. I had to tap and open the screentime to force update it every time. This was in Beta though, I hope this will work fine in normal update.
sanketskasar 6y ago
I've used the public beta version ever since Apple has started releasing it. Don't remember the exact version, but have used it with iPhone 5s, iPhone SE(the older one) and iPhone XR. Mind you, all these were/are my sole phones. Except for a few resprings and a camera app crash(resolved by a restart), I haven't had any issue. I have been doing the same for my MacBook and things have worked quite well in general. I am a heavy user and a software developer using it as my main machine. Seeing all other people complain about beta and even general releases, I count myself among the lucky who haven't had any issue (app compatibility aside) with the general release or the public beta.

vxNsr 6y ago

I've always arranged my homescreen to be a single screen with folders for each category of app. makes it much easier to find things. I'm always befuddled when I see ppl with 30 pages of apps.

filleokus 6y ago
I just swipe down for Spotlight and use that as an app launcher, so I'll probably love the app drawer. I'm equally baffled by people doing it any other way :-) Do you organise your applications on your computer by category as well?
- frosted-flakes 6y ago
  Sometimes, yes, but most of the time I launch them from the taskbar or the "frequently used" list in the start menu. The difference between a phone and a computer is that one has a keyboard, and the other doesn't. Ever since the end of the BlackBerry era, typing on my phone is a slow, error-prone activity, so searching takes longer than the two taps it takes to just select it manually (typing on a BlackBerry was slow too, but at least it was error-free). I have all my apps categorized in folders in my app drawer (I use Nova Launcher, which lets you create folders there). Then I have two home screen pages, one with all my most-used applications, and the other with all my media players: podcasts, music, Kindle, Libby, YouTube, etc. I use large icons (4x5 per page), so it makes it both easy to find and select any app.
- oarsinsync 6y ago
  I definitely used to back in Windows 95-2000 days. It was one of those things people like me who cared too much and wanted to share screenshots of their beautiful desktop / wallpaper / skins / etc used to do. I don’t anymore. Eventually the regular reinstalls became too much effort re-setting all of my endless customisations. Trained me well for the modern era of “photos app not working right? Have you tried erasing all contents and settings and not restoring from backup?”
- wayneftw 6y ago
  I organize them by category and I can tap twice faster than you can swipe, type, tap. This way is easily faster if you have a reasonable number of apps. Typing to find things would only be faster if you had more than say 220 apps. Even if I have to tap, swipe, tap - that would be faster than swipe, type, tap.
  - vxNsr 6y ago
    Also this encourages you not to have more than 9 apps in a single category. I break this rule often, but I do try pretty hard not to.
    - willis936 6y ago
      Then you need multiple pages of apps. I keep 15 top apps in thumb hotspots and 11 folders in (mostly) more tucked away spots. One page, all apps. The apps in each folder are alphabetized. The folders definitely go into 3+ pages in some categories, but I often search if it feels like hunting down an app in a folder is more work.
- tzs 6y ago
  You can also do it by voice. Tell Siri to "open AppName" and it opens the app named AppName. It does have trouble with some apps, though. Authy does not work at all when pronounced the way I expect it to be pronounced ("auth" as in "authorize"). Siri just says that there is no app named "Offie". And no, I do not pronounce "th" anything at all like "ff". If I try pronouncing Authy as "oathy" is works maybe 1/4 to 1/3 of the time. For nearly everything else I've tried, though, it is fine.
  - sixstringtheory 6y ago
    This post, parent and GP basically describe my evolution for organizing and launching apps. Taking the time to manually organize all my apps just isn't worth it any more, especially after a few updates/restores exploded it all. Now, I keep the first home page clean with only the essential apps, and everything else is pushed off into the memory hole on the right with spotlight/siri wrangling it all for me. Excited to see how this might improve with widgets and app library!
  - antipaul 6y ago
    Did you try training Siri? (Enable siri text) and then tap it when it says this app not found, and change "offy" to "Authie". After a few times, it should recognize your prompt
    - tzs 6y ago
      I'm not sure what setting that is. I've tried hitting the "tap to edit" thingy to edit the command it head from "open Offie" to "open Authy" several times, and it doesn't seem to really help much. It's not that much of a problem on my phone or iPad, because I can just ask it to open Authenticator (Microsoft's authentication app). When I set up TOTP for a site, I scan the QR code in both. It's on my Apple Watch that it is annoying. Microsoft Authenticator on the watch doesn't do TOTP. It's just for authenticating with Microsoft sites. So on the watch I need to use Authy if I need a TOTP code for a site. On the watch, I don't see any option to edit a command that Siri gets wrong.
      - 6y ago
- jasonv 6y ago
  A use case: all the apps I use for Instagram photo editing in a folder. I don’t always remember what some of them are, or what they’re named, so keeping them together is helpful. Don’t trust App Library to organize those the same way.
- zimpenfish 6y ago
  That's how I did things but something somewhere during the iOS 14 has broken Spotlight search for me - I can't search for apps any more (well, I can, but it gives me the app store page or a website.) It is most aggravating and utterly perplexing. Whilst I like the app library for hiding all the stuff I don't use, it's a massive pain to use for finding apps...
mumblerino 6y ago
I gave up on folders altogether. I found that my most used apps are still prominently visible either in the drawer or in spotlight’s suggested apps. Before iOS 14 I had more than 14 folders.
jedberg 6y ago
For me, the first page of the home screen are the apps I use the most, with the most used apps in the middle. That way I can get to them in one click quickly with muscle memory. So is the second page, again for quicker access. I used to keep the third and beyond pages in folders, but on my last phone I got lazy and just use spotlight search as an app launcher.
ghaff 6y ago
My homescreen is my frequently used apps and then a few subsequent screens are basically like (the now mythical) travel that include a folder for less frequently used apps in the category.
- ryantgtg 6y ago
  I dislike how you can't (or couldn't - I haven't installed iOS 14 yet) arrange home screen icons like you can on Android. On Android, I would put my four most used icons in each corner, and leave the rest of the screen empty. So, on iOS, I only use the top row for icons, and all the rest are on a second screen. My motive is that I want to see my beautiful wallpaper, which in this case a picture of my daughter.
  - reificator 6y ago
    Still not an option, Apple knows better than you.
dunnevens 6y ago
I'm one of those page-flipping people. I alternate between using Spotlight to launch and just flipping pages. For me, it's a form of spatial navigation. I couldn't tell you the exact number of pages I flip to get to a specific app, or the row&column of where an app's icon lives, but my sub-conscious somehow remembers. It's about as quick to launch, for me, as any other method.

bzb5 6y ago

I’ve installed most betas and this was the most stable ever.

cactus2093 6y ago

> updated only once every 5 minutes, which makes them a lot less useful That's weird, I would expect them to be able to get updates via push notifications. Even so that seems like a pretty minimal limitation. For almost anything other than messaging a 5 minute resolution is probably fine.

reificator 6y ago

> I really love the new app drawer. My hundred barely-used apps are now neatly stowed there while I keep a single (Yes, one) Home Screen. I hop between Android and iOS every few years and was quite excited for iOS to check this basic functionality box right as I came back. Shame they had to ruin it by forcing the absolutely nonsensical categories on you with no option for a plain alphabetical list. Just give me the UI that shows up when you tap the app drawer search button, but as soon as I swipe to the drawer and without showing the keyboard. It's right there, the functionality I want is available, but as usual Apple screws it up for power users. In fact: do regular users like searching their app drawer for a possibly relevant category and hoping it has what they want? It doesn't help that the available categories and their ordering change every few days and/or whenever you install a new app. And worse yet is that the same application can show up in 3-4 different categories crowding out the one app you're looking for that only exists in one.

antipaul 6y ago
I think it's fine. You get default categories which have advantages* or alphabetical order - which you can also get by swiping down in the app drawer. tap and hold scrollbar to get to the position you need. *in default view, I can tap on the larger icons to open the app right away. Or I can tap on the smaller ones to get all the apps in that category. Then, there aren't that many categories and the predictiveness actually seems quite good
- reificator 6y ago
  > You get default categories which have advantages [snip] in default view, I can tap on the larger icons to open the app right away. Sure, I've heard of homescreen icons before. > or alphabetical order - which you can also get by swiping down in the app drawer. Which means three gestures to get to the alphabetical one including hiding the keyboard. > tap and hold scrollbar to get to the position you need. Yep, that's a positive. Just wish I could get straight there. The app drawer is for the apps I use infrequently. Which means I'm less likely to have internalized their app icons, and I can't view the text in the default view so I have no idea what I'm looking for. The only text I get is the category name, like Other for Phillips Hue or Creativity for Twitch. YouTube? Entertainment. Twitch? Creativity. And Podcasts goes under Entertainment despite the fact that I have an Education category already. The categories make no sense to me and I have no way to rectify that, I already use homescreen folders for categorization, and without text it's a pain to find what I'm after, especially if it's hidden inside the "fourth slot".

envolt 6y ago

I had screentime widget on my home page. I doubt if it's even 5 minute. I had to tap and open the screentime to force update it every time. This was in Beta though, I hope this will work fine in normal update.

sanketskasar 6y ago

I've used the public beta version ever since Apple has started releasing it. Don't remember the exact version, but have used it with iPhone 5s, iPhone SE(the older one) and iPhone XR. Mind you, all these were/are my sole phones. Except for a few resprings and a camera app crash(resolved by a restart), I haven't had any issue. I have been doing the same for my MacBook and things have worked quite well in general. I am a heavy user and a software developer using it as my main machine. Seeing all other people complain about beta and even general releases, I count myself among the lucky who haven't had any issue (app compatibility aside) with the general release or the public beta.