iOS still doesn't let you place icons anywhere you want on the home screen, though. It's been fifteen years.
Desktops, and Android, have allowed you to do this for decades.
Desktops, and Android, have allowed you to do this for decades.
Icons are lined up left to right, in a row.
You need to insert icons inside a row and then all the other icons to its right will be pushed right and/or down.
Just talking about being able to grab an icon and position it anywhere I want on the screen (possibly snapped to a grid).
Right now, icons have to be aligned in rows anchored in the top left corner, so that whenever you insert a new one, all the ones after that get pushed right or down, messing up your entire layout.
We've had this ability on desktops since Windows 3 thirty years ago, and Android has had it since day one. As does macOS. Why not iOS?
Here is a thread on reddit describing it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/r2vs1x/why_cant_you_pu...
There are a few solutions around it, some require a jailbroken iPhone, others use empty widgets to create "fake space".
Do you have a screen shot that could illustrate what it is you want to be able to do?
They're not all stacked up starting at the left corner, are they?
Imagine that all I want is three icons on my home screen, all lined up on the right edge of the screen, where they are easy to reach by my thumb.
You can't do that on iOS.
But now that you finally gave a concrete example of what you want to do, I can at least picture it.
And, yes, it would be really nice if Apple had a system to install third-party launchers, there's no denying that.
I know this is really silly, but you can definitely workaround the issue and effectively have the same end result as Android if you really want it:
Overall, every individual omission from one platform to another is going to be a question of what is important to the buyer.
For some, it might seem ridiculous that, in fifteen years, Apple still doesn't offer a truly customizable home screen. That's a fair criticism. At the same time, it's a fair criticism that it took until 2021 for Google to release a phone that will get 5 years of security and feature updates (Apple never guaranteed this directly, but the iPhone 6S delivered that level of support from when it launched in 2015 until the release of iOS 16 this fall that will drop iPhone 6S support: 7 years of full feature and security updates).
Meanwhile, if you bought a Pixel 3 in 2018, you got your final update this year. I personally think that's downright unacceptable considering the maturity of smartphones when it was released.
The problem with me making comparisons like this is that they'll always seem like a cheap whataboutism, but that's generally how these feature-to-feature comparisons work. For me, in 2016, I saw a situation where Google was not delivering everything I needed in a smartphone, but I also recognize that other people have other needs.
For example, I put the apps that I use the most often on the right hand side of the screen, where my thumb can reach them faster. I can't do that on iOS (well, I can, but then any new app I put on the home screen will mess the entire arrangement and I will spend another ten minutes calculating what to insert and where to get all these icons back on the right side of the screen).
I just don't understand how Apple, a company that prides itself on great user experience, is still putting their users through this UX hell fifteen years after the release of the iPhone, and they don't seem to think it's an important feature to add.