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Comment by mhomde | Hacker News Reader

iOS is in a tough position, the road of incremental changes is coming to an end. The icon-based home screen is showing it's age and will need a revolution rather than an evolution. You can kinda see Apple dipping it toes into the widget arena with the notifications area, yet they're probably hesitant to remake the whole home screen and risk alienating their current users. Tech savvy people won't mind a new home screen concept but for the "dad's and mom's out" there it might be a tough sell.

Apple's leadership in UI design the last couple of years has been a little lackluster. While they seem to be able to iterate, with a few missteps, I'm less sure about their capability to get a whole revamp done right.

The talent is surely there but the question is whether the leadership and willing to take the right risks is. It's going to be interesting going forward, I'm guessing they will have to introduce something widget/tile -ish in the next phone

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> The icon-based home screen is showing it's age and will need a revolution rather than an evolution.

Why? It is easy, intuitive, and used by millions of people.

Change for changes sake?

Glanceable information on the home screen is useful so users don't have to open every app, it also changes the home screen from being just "an launcher" to potentially provide useful information that you might need rather then being "just a launcher". It's just "one step less" in some scenarios.

Notifications are great for things that need your attention but the home screen becomes a little more of a seredipious view of app information that can increase the usefulness and engagement with an app

I think right now using the notifications screen for this 'at a glance' info and using the home screen for launching full apps, accomplishes the goal you are seeking.

I would love to see the iPad interface evolve a bit and not look so much like my phone. I don't feel like they are using all that space as elegantly as they could be.

It's getting there, but it's not ideal yet. At a glance means I don't have to do anything but glance. To see the widgets now, you have to wake up the phone and then swipe right.

On recent iPhones, waking up the phone just means picking it up. The swipe right is still an issue, though; it'd be nice if they could get rid of that. (Maybe default to the widgets view if there are no notifications?)

You are spot on. IIRC correctly there are built in hacks to make at least the clock and calendar icons show correct information, but for example the weather icon never tells you it rains. IMHO the Microsoft Live Tiles on Windows phone do make iOS look dated. Luckily for Apple, no one is buying those phones.

It seems very telling to me that the Standard Windows Desktop is generally considered a wasteland of discarded program and file icons, basically where you throw your digital trash...yet iOS decided that this was the design they wanted for the main start page of their OS.

No wonder there is such a divide among users. I don't think age has anything to do with it though.

The huge difference here is that on iOS you don't have random files lying around your home screen. The springboard is for apps, with a dock for the most common ones to persist between screens.

On Windows (and macOS) the desktop is fundamentally different, used differently, and is often obscured by your windowed content.

No, instead you had unremovable "useful" apps like "Apple Watch" instead.

Luckly they managed to at least let users hide that in iOS10, but it's still a cesspool of rarely used apps.

If by cesspool you mean a single folder on a hidden home page containing unused default apps, then yes, I suppose you're correct.

If by "single folder on a hidden home page containing unused default apps" you mean "App draw", then you've described Androids (arguably superior) default UX.

Put another way.. You're manually 'fixing' the iOS UX to operate like the Android "default"?

Age is not a sign that's something is broken. Apples main lead is they need much less hardware to get good preformance which means smaller and longer lasting battery's and better profit margins. Giving that up for a useless status screen is a terrace idea that would cost them 10's if not 100's of billions of dollars.

Nothing wrong with the age of an UI per se, but I think the notion of App's as silos which need to be individually opened get its information is rather old fashioned, and not ideal from an UX POV. Being able to quickly glance information from weather, email, social media does do quite a lot to lessen unnecessary UI excise.

I don't think it has anything to do with hardware, they can be engineered in such a way they don't needlessly drain the battery, nor do I think most people would feel it was useless. Then again, people sometimes don't miss something before they have it :)

iOS does have a widget screen.

This kind of thinking is the one of them forces that drive initially good-enough designs into complete bullshit by spiral "aging" and "revolution" of even simple things. Thanks for all software that I dumped because of that.

The problems I have with the iPhone are 1) lack of a back button, so I have to learn every single screen of every single application and 2) the app store.

I had to help a friend to find a qrcode app on Sunday. Look for qrcode in the store, 842 found. Wow... None of them has a review or stars. How do you trust them? We kept scrolling for a while, nothing. Compare that with the Google store. It doesn't tell me how many qrcode apps are there but it gives me a rating for every single one. Then it's the usual hunt for the app with no ads and least permissions, but that's the same on the iPhone.

A back button would make no sense to me. There are situations in apps when you can't "go back" -- wait, do you mean some physical back button?! Otherwise, there's the "Return to..." feature, the fact that the back button in most iOS apps is always the top left button of the navigation bar, and there's always the left edge swipe. If you can't figure out how to go back in an app, then it's the app's fault, not the phone's. "I have to learn every single screen of every single app" -- come on, bro, that's a bit much.

As for the store, well, the App Store actually has standards and minimums for apps and reviews. I would think a google search for "best qrcode app ios" would yield better results than your strange method, but, hey, to each his own.

Samsung phones have physical back buttons. Other Androids have them on screen, which I find very annoying. In my limited experience not every iOS app has a way to go back to the previous screen. Maybe it doesn't make sense there but Android apps and web pages are built around that concept of history. I couldn't find a way to go back from an app detail page to the search results page in the App Store. My friend, which uses iOS since a long time, couldn't too. I guess she's not very expert at navigating iOS apps. Maybe that left edge swype would do, I'm learning it now, she seemed not to know it.

She was as clueless as me about the lack of stars. We looked for qrcode in the App store. This is what I would have done on my Android. She didn't suggest an alternative. A very basic iOS user?

> Wow... None of them has a review or stars. How do you trust them?

The top result for me has over 800 reviews and ratings. The vast majority of them have at least some reviews.

> The icon-based home screen is showing it's age and will need a revolution rather than an evolution.

Well, perhaps they can license Live Tiles from Microsoft. There are definitely things to like there, and Microsoft's certainly not using them on phones anymore - at least not as far as real-world usage can show.

> The icon-based home screen is showing it's age and will need a revolution rather than an evolution.

Right. Anything can be accessed so quickly a home screen should be more contextual than static app icons.

Well, they're half way there with the "force"-push shortcut actions on icons. It's a good idea even if discovery is a little bad. That was easier to add however since it really doesn't interfere with existing users. Changing how the home screen looks for everyone might be perceived as risky.

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