6/25
That was a good one. The pace of this year's WWDC was breakneck. Without the need to wait for applause and with full creative control over every single moment and transition, Apple ushered us into their software future and didn't pause to take a breath. It's unlikely they'll reuse this format if they can pack people into an event hall this time next year but I think it's worth considering making parts of this the new normal. For an event focused on developers it certainly had mainstream appeal.
I'm not going to talk about everything they announced—there's plenty of good roundups you can turn to—but I do want to generally weigh in on a few key items and more specifically call out some of what I've observed while using iOS 14.
Home screen widgets caught me off guard. I know there were shaky rumors about them but it still felt like a feature Apple could happily ignore for another year. I'm happy to have been wrong. While they've kept the top alignment of the home screen grid, widgets will still allow users to push app icons down the screen and closer to where they can be reached. It's not as free as Android's home screen grid but it opens the door for much more personalization.
Allowing for widgets to be sized differently is also a much needed improvement, though it's very Apple to prescribe what those sizes are. There's a couple of odd omissions here, however: there's neither a 2x1 nor 4x1 widget size. Apple likes to ease into the pool rather than cannonball, so I suspect we'll see these options eventually.
The smart stack was truly a surprise. It feels indulgent that users get widgets and a way to combine multiple widgets into one element with the same release. I'm still putting these through their paces but they give the home screens extra life. And, yes, they're very much like Windows Phone live tiles.
While Apple has a handful of widgets already in 14, this feature is going to shine as developers extend their app experiences to the home screen. I'm excited to see what we get here.
The fact that more home screens—eventually folders, too—were iOS users' only choice for organization for 13 software releases is tragic. Maybe it's because I started with Android but separating the concept of "all apps" from "apps I want easy access to" felt like the only sensible and obvious approach to the home screen paradigm.
To see Apple announce the App Library felt blasphemous. I love it. Well, I love that they did it. From a user experience perspective I'm not completely sold on the execution yet. The way the overflow apps are handled feels a little off to me and the smart categories feel a bit limiting (and sometimes arbitrary). Additionally, the full app list is only available when you perform a search on that specific screen. It's only been a few days so my opinion could change here but my initial reaction has been lukewarm.
Why does the leftmost home screen page still exist as a widget only space? Its purpose was mostly undermined by allowing widgets to be placed on any home screen. I'm guessing the reason is it would be jarring to remove since its been around for a few iOS versions and users are used to it. It also behaves differently than home screens since it's a vertical scrolling view. I think we're going to see this one slowly fade away like the Dashboard did in OS X. Remember that?
I'm in love with the way autocomplete works in search now. You can type and then hit go on the keyboard to launch the matched result without reaching up to tap anything directly. It's small but it makes the act of searching on iOS feel much more fluid. I've always been a search-first user when it comes to interacting with phones and this addition brings me great joy.
In general, search feels more like a destination now. There's a lot of info that's presented and there are new ways to navigate and drill down within this space before choosing where you want to go next.
iOS 14 has further embraced the z-index as a solution to adding complexity and "power user" interactions without bogging down the base experience. Many, if not all, of Apple's more advanced interactions/features are presented in a space that appears to exist above the context you're in—long press menus, the App Library, Search, Control Center, Notification Center, etc.
There's so much crammed into this "upper level" that I'm losing track of the rules that govern it. Why does the App Library exist above the entire home screen UI when I can only access it by swiping from the rightmost home screen? Same for the widget page on the leftmost one. The Control Center apparently lives in this space, too, but is accessible regardless of where I am.
There seem to be 3ish levels in iOS's z-index but the levels above the first tend to share the same appearance. The first level is your original context, be that your home screen or an app. Above that first level can be a long press menu, the left- and rightmost home screen pages and other context specific actions/features. Above that, are the globally accessible functions—notifications, control center, app switcher. There might be an overall logic here but I don't understand why Control Center is presented the same way as a long press item, by pushing all other content back and applying a blur.
I haven't even mentioned the stacked card modal views that Apple started using in iOS 13. They don't do any of the above things like blur the background and can be stacked above parent views arbitrarily high. Google's got a good foundation for how to treat dimensionality in Android. I think Apple needs to take a second look at this area with their consistency hat on.
You can finally watch YouTube videos in a PiP window. It's not straightforward and requires Safari, just like on macOS, but it's possible and that's what matters most.
About damn time. I refuse to celebrate the arrival of these features because it's insane they took this long, especially the incoming call UI. Glad they're here but was it necessary to wait until iOS 14 to introduce them?
All welcome changes and frankly additions that Apple needed to make in order to stay competitive in the group chat landscape. I have a theory that Apple will eventually support RCS in Messages (assuming RCS gains traction) and so they need to introduce more iMessage-specific features to ensure that gap remains when RCS is supported. Blue bubbles will never go away even if green bubbles can eventually do more.
This one is a big deal. It's a feature I've been longing for since Android introduced Instant Apps a couple of years ago. Think about how many apps you only use occasionally and only for a specific feature within it. You want access to that feature when you need it but for the majority of the time, the app sits on your phone waiting for that one perfect moment. The entire airline app category fits into this use case for me. I want my airline app right before I'm about to fly, so I know when to check in. I want it in the airport, so I don't have to print a boarding pass. When I return from my trip, I don't need the app until my next flight. If this sounds like any category of apps that you use, App Clips will seemingly solve this problem by offering narrow app-quality functionality with a quick download that only lives on your phone for 30 days. The 10MB max download size is snappy on 4G and will be even better on 5G. Once app developers start building this into their apps, don't be surprised if the amount of apps you actually keep installed on your phone slowly declines. These Clips also seem like they'll be rather useful when you have Apple's AR glasses on your face and want to avoid the friction of pulling your phone out and accessing the entire App Store.
iPadOS 14 got the updated widgets but for some reason didn't get the ability to place those newer widgets on any home screen. This is both confusing and so Apple.
Scribble looks great and is another one of the overdue features users are finally getting. The Apple Pencil went 5 years without true OS level handwriting-as-an-input-method support. That seems too long, especially considering how important a costar to the iPad the Pencil has become.
The text selection controls are very impressive and so are the "data descriptors" that allow iPadOS to make written phone numbers and addresses as interactive as their text counterparts.
Another big finally. The existing Bedtime features on iPhone are already quite nice—alerting you when you should get to bed, dimming your phone during bedtime, silencing notifications, and, of course, waking you up in the morning (with an alarm that isn't usable outside of the Bedtime functionality—go figure). It even assumes the amount of sleep you got based on when the phone was put on the charger... but that's only so good. Actual sleep tracking was the clear missing piece to the Bedtime feature set and something many users have turned to third parties apps or hardware to get. This addition continues to reinforce the Apple Watch's focus as an essential health tool.
...but no custom faces yet. We're obviously on the path to custom faces now but 2020 just isn't the year. The better sharing and customization options are nice but they're still not quite enough.
After 19 years of OS X releases, we're finally getting a major version bump. I don't have a strong opinion about the UI changes. It looks a lot like using an iPad with freely placeable windows. I'll weigh in as a designer briefly, however: many of the icons shown so far do not look good to me. Have you seen the battery icon in the System Preference panel? Woof. My fingers are crossed that we see some serious refinements to the icons before release.
Stop trying to make me use Safari, Apple. In all seriousness, I like the idea of using Safari but every time I try to use it as my primary browser I give up on it after a few days or weeks. It's fast and well integrated if you're in Apple's ecosystem but it lacks so much in terms of third party integrations. The newest version of Safari looks to be addressing some of this but I'm remaining cautious here. Developers will have to be convinced that busting out Xcode is worth their effort just to get an extension working.
Considering this was a developer conference, this was the biggest announcement of them all. While this won't mean much to the average consumer, this is a huge shift and evolution for Apple's hardware. The A-series chips' march to dominance has been steady and clear. It was simply a matter of time before the rest of their hardware fell in line. In the long run, this is going to be great for Apple. It gives them more vertical integration, which may be the thing they crave most as a business.
I'm still a bit weary, especially when it comes to the Pro machines. What is using a terminal on a future ARM Mac going to be like vs the x86 servers just about everyone is pushing their code up to? I'm remaining optimistic, however; Apple has experience with platform transitions. The way Cook announced this one was eerily similar to the way Jobs announced the last one, so maybe the transition itself will also be a replay. I do look forward to the day I can get a Pro Mac laptop that has better battery life, better sleep/wake up, great performance, more integrated and cross-platform app experiences, and doesn't threaten to sterilize me when I decide to use it on my lap. And maybe a touch screen?
There were a few large themes for the improvements we saw: parity, consistency, personalization, and of course privacy. Many of the headlining features check more than one of these boxes. For example, widgets and the App Library bring some much needed parity to the iOS home screen experience for those migrating from Android. Widgets also bring lots of personalization to users. The watch face improvements also bring personalization and sleep tracking brings parity with non-Apple smartwatches and wrist-worn devices. Big Sur is almost entirely about making macOS play more nicely and work more similarly to iOS and iPadOS. Woven throughout all of the above is Apple's extremely public stance on protecting their users' privacy—a selling point that's becoming increasingly unique for the kind of tech company Apple is.
Media coverage has enjoyed going on about how much of Android we saw come to iOS and how grim software support will get when ARM-powered machines are all Apple offers, but I'm not interested in those criticisms at the moment. Android and iOS have long been borrowing features from one another. At this stage of maturity it's actually good for both platforms to have a similar user experience and shared features. It makes the barrier to entry from the opposing platform easier for users who want to switch. On the ARM side, we'll see. We have examples from Apple's past that turned out well, so I don't think there's reason to be alarmed just yet. Keep your eyes on Twitter as software developers get their DTKs, though.
Overall, the event gave me the feeling that Apple is committed to moving forward rather than playing it safe. They added a bunch of features to iOS and iPadOS even after their buggy iOS 13 release. There was lots of speculation that their focus this year would be on a stable release rather than pushing new features. Any time I read articles like that I wondered "why not both?" I'm glad Apple's thinking was the same. When the time comes, users will get a lot of much desired and asked for features across all Apple platforms and that's objectively a good thing. Yes, it took a while for most of them but this is Apple and they haven't behaved any differently in decades. Additionally, they're prepped for a future where they completely control their own destiny and the similarities between the experiences on their hardware outweigh the differences.