iOS 18 could break the iPhone’s iconic app grid, and it’s a change no one asked for
The iPhone and iOS are not messy. Throughout their nearly 20-year lifespan, they have embodied precision and consistency, with no design element left to chance. There is never a detail left unexplained or unaccounted for; and one thing you definitely won’t find, either on the phone itself or in the operating system, is wasted space.
This is why I worry that iOS 18 will introduce, for lack of a better word, intentional sloppiness.
According to new rumors from Apple fortune teller Mark Gurman of Bloomberg, the expected iOS update, which we expect Apple to unveil in June at WWDC 2024, will remove the shackles of rigid conformity and allow iPhone owners to move app icons wherever they want – and even introduce spaces.
This isn’t the first time Apple has messed with one of the most important living areas on your best iPhone. Two years ago, Apple redesigned the lock screen and called it an “act of love.” It was a good update because it introduced information, innovation and flexibility to the first thing you see when you pick up your iPhone, but without breaking the mold that makes the iPhone display so special.
Apple’s fantastic background subject adds a sense of drama to even the most mundane family portrait by allowing you to place a head or two on top of the iPhone’s clock. I also appreciated the introduction of customizable widgets, a feature found on the best Android phones that took far too long to arrive on iOS.
Intentional sloppiness
These rumored iOS 18 changes don’t seem to offer any of these benefits. It’s more or less about choice, although I’d say customizable widgets on the iOS 17 home screen already give you more than enough customization options.
If you’d rather not look at a diamond-shaped wall of icons, or even some kind of soothing organization, the rumored iOS 18 could introduce huge swathes of empty space. Maybe you just place a few apps at the bottom of the screen (just above the dock), a few at the top, and a random floater in the middle. It’s something you can now do with the Samsung Galaxy S24, for example. I just tried it on a Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, but I don’t really like the way it looks.
You know who might not like it either? Jony Ive. That’s right, the genius industrial designer responsible for most of Apple’s iconic product designs (iPod, iPhone, iMac, iPad, original Apple Pencil – okay, they can’t all be winners), may not be of much use to Apple other than ditching the iconic iPhone grid.
I may be a little obsessed with grids. In 2013, John Gruber of Daring Fireball noticed that you could overlay Apple’s then-new Ive-designed iOS 7 app icons on top of some Apple hardware products, including the Apple TV, the Mac Pro trash can, and the bottom of the Mac mini. The images he provided were eerie. I have never admitted that, but given his affinity with uniformity and sleek design, such an approach would not be surprising. Even if it was coincidental (it wasn’t), Apple’s secret sauce was Ive’s eye for decades.
No space is good space
There’s little doubt that the reason the iPhone’s apps aren’t knowingly thrown onto the home screen (nor any other page on the device) is because Ive adheres strictly to the grid aesthetic. It’s not just about elements living on a grid; the point is that they fill the dead space. If you grab an app icon from an app page and move it to another screen, there’s never any space left behind. Instead, the surrounding apps grab attention and march in to fill the gap. The iPhone is the king of cleaning up after itself, at least when it comes to app placement.
Ives’ obsession with eliminating dead space may have been inspired by the late Steve Jobs’ view of unnecessary space or air in any Apple product. Co-founder and former CEO of Apple he once reportedly threw an iPod prototype into an aquarium to show his designers that there was still too much space and too much air in the device; Although the music player didn’t float, it did release telltale bubbles.
Unnecessary space was the enemy of technology, and Jobs and Ive worked together to eliminate it, along with any disorganization that resulted.
Ive left Apple in 2019 and reportedly ended his consulting relationship with the company in 2022. Since then, the influence I’ve had on Apple’s aesthetic will likely diminish. If I had to find one example, it would be the MacBook Air M3 Midnight’s lovely woven gray MagSafe power cord, which somehow ends in white plastic on the side where it plugs into a white power adapter. I find that messy and very different.
To be fair, there’s no confirmation from Apple that it plans to offer iPhone owners nearly unlimited home screen control in iOS 18, but I could see it happening.
Customization is not a bad thing; but for anyone cheering that Apple is catching up to where Android has been for years, I would suggest that this is a retrograde change that, while it may bring the iPhone more in line with its Android competitors, will will make slightly less than what we expect from the best of iOS and Apple.
I also think Jony Ive would hate it.