Successes of 2022: iOS 16’s superb lock display screen customization

With iOS 16, now you can set issues in your lock display screen, like completely different clock fonts, lock display screen widgets, and new wallpapers, in only a few faucets. Anytime I need to give my iPhone a contemporary coat of paint, I can do it proper from the identical display screen I see each time I wake my telephone — with out having to dive into settings. And even higher, whenever you begin to make a brand new wallpaper, the web page accommodates a bunch of options and choices that can assist you determine what it’d seem like.

Want a lock display screen centered on the climate? Apple has a suggestion for that. Want a elaborate sample of emoji? There are a bunch of patterns to choose from, and Apple even enables you to function as much as six completely different emoji in your wallpaper. (Might I like to recommend the waffle or yawn emoji?) If you actually need to get fancy, you’ll be able to even make your iPhone’s wallpaper a rotating gallery of fine vibes.

Personally, I like Apple’s choices for wallpapers that fill the background with a shade or shade. My background is often a gradient shade of some form, and previously, I’ve resorted to scouring the net for handsome photographs that usually weren’t fairly proper. Now, I can decide from an enormous swath of colours proper from the wallpaper menu, tweak the depth of the gradient, and fiddle with completely different shades.

Even higher, now you can tie wallpapers to Focus modes to match completely different vibes. I’ve a chilled blue connected to my “Vacation” Focus to remind me to sit back out. My colleague Victoria Song set a picture of the “This is Fine” canine for her Focus mode when issues are usually not tremendous.

As my colleague Allison Johnson wrote, the brand new iOS 16 lock screens rule. But now that Apple has relinquished some management of the lock display screen, it’s time for Apple to present us extra personalization instruments for the homescreen.

What if we might simply customise app icons? Yes, it’s attainable to do this now, but it surely requires a good quantity of labor. While you’ll be able to observe our helpful information, I’d like one thing nearer to the straightforward theming choices you’ll be able to set on Android. I personally don’t have to set a dramatically completely different theme — I’m not trying to Windows-ify my iPhone — I’d similar to to make all the pieces have comparable colours to go with my gradient wallpapers.

I additionally need extra methods to arrange my icons. I usually maintain simply three or 4 rows of apps on my homescreen and relegate all the pieces else to the App Library. (No widgets for me — I don’t discover them very helpful.) But it might be superb if I might align my homescreen apps on the backside of the display screen as an alternative of on the high with out making further areas with special widgets or hacked-in invisible app icons. 

In 2020, my former colleague Chaim Gartenberg argued that Apple will in all probability by no means give us customized app icons. At the time, I utterly agreed with him. But now that Apple has opened the door with iOS 16 and its glorious lock display screen instruments, I imagine there’s a not-so-far future the place the corporate will make it rather a lot simpler to fiddle with the issues on our homescreens, too. Fingers crossed for iOS 17.