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.
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?”
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
I’d try to do it each time, hopefully won’t take too long to get it.
(On iOS 14, enable Siri - Siri Responses - Always show speech. On previous iOS, Siri is full screen and I think tap to edit is always available.)
Not sure about watch. However, I assume it should sync if you enable Siri to sync in iCloud. Settings - your name icon - iCloud - toggle Siri.
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...
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.
My motive is that I want to see my beautiful wallpaper, which in this case a picture of my daughter.
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.
*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
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".
Swipe down on the app library screen and you get the alphabetical list. Same gesture you used to do a search from any screen.
> 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.
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.