iPhone and iOS are not messy. Throughout their nearly 20-year lifespan, they have embodied precision and consistency, with no element of design left to chance. There is never a detail that is not explained or unexplained; and one thing you absolutely won’t find, either on the phone itself or in its operating system, is wasted space.
Because of this, I’m worried that iOS 18 could introduce, for lack of a better word, intentional sloppiness.
According to a fresh rumor from Bloomberg’s Apple prophet Mark Gurman, the expected iOS update, which we expect Apple to unveil in June at WWDC 2024, will remove the shackles of rigid compliance and allow iPhone owners to move app icons wherever they want — and even import empty seats.
This isn’t the first time Apple has messed with one of the essential living spaces on your best iPhone. Two years ago, Apple redesigned the lock screen, calling it “An Act of Love.” It was a good update because it brought 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 screen special.
Apple’s fantastic background lifting adds a sense of drama to even the most mundane family portrait by letting you pop a head or two on top of the iPhone’s clock readout. I also appreciated the introduction of customizable widgets, a feature found on the best Android phones that took far too long to make its way to iOS.
Deliberate sloppiness
These rumored iOS 18 changes don’t seem to offer any of those benefits. It’s more or less a matter of choice, although I’d argue that with customizable widgets on your iOS 17 home screen, you already have more than enough customization options.
If you’d rather not look at a gridded wall of icons, or even some kind of soothing organization, you could usher in vast swaths of empty space with the iOS 18 rumors. You might only place a few apps at the bottom of the screen (just above the dock), a few at the top, and one random floating element in the middle. That’s something you can now do with, say, the Samsung Galaxy S24. I just tried it on a Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, but I don’t really like the way it looks.
You know who else wouldn’t love it? Jony Ive. That’s right, the genius industrial designer responsible for most of Apple’s iconic product designs (iPod, iPhone, iMac, iPad, the original Apple Pencil—okay, they can’t all be winners), may not have much use for Apple other than ditching the iconic iPhone grilles.
Maybe I was a little obsessed with nets. Back in 2013, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber noticed that you could superimpose Apple’s then-new iOS 7 app icons designed by Ive on top of some Apple hardware products, including the Apple TV, the Mac Pro trash can, and the bottom of the Mac mini. The visuals he provided were incredible. I’ve never admitted it, but given his affinity for uniformity and clean design, such an approach wouldn’t be surprising. Even if it was by accident (it wasn’t), Jabuk’s secret sauce has been Iva’s eye for decades.
No space is a good space
No doubt the reason the iPhone’s apps aren’t littered on the home screen (or any other page on the device) is Ive’s strict adherence to the grid aesthetic. It’s not just about the elements that live online; it’s about filling in dead space. If you grab one app icon from the app page and move it to another screen, it never leaves any space behind. Instead, surrounding apps grab attention and step in to fill the void. The iPhone is the king of cleaning up after itself, at least when it comes to app placement.
Ives’ obsession with eliminating dead space could have been due to the late Steve Job taking up unnecessary space or air in any Apple product. Apple’s co-founder and former CEO reportedly once threw a prototype iPod into a fish tank 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 emitted telltale air bubbles.
Unnecessary space was the enemy of technology, and Jobs and Ive worked in tandem to eliminate it, along with any disorganization that might result from it.
Ive left Apple in 2019, and is said to have ended his consulting relationship with the company in 2022. Since then, whatever influence Ive had on Apple’s aesthetic has likely diminished. If I had to find one example, it would be the MacBook Air M3 Midnight’s nice braided gray MagSafe power cable, which somehow ends in white plastic on the side where it plugs into the white power adapter. It is, in my opinion, confused and very dissimilar.
To be fair, there’s been no confirmation from Apple that it plans to offer iPhone owners nearly unlimited control over the home screen in iOS 18, but I could see it happening.
Adaptation is not a bad thing; but for anyone rooting for Apple to catch up to where Android has been for years, I’d say this is a retrograde change that, while bringing the iPhone more in line with its Android competitors, will make it fall short of what we’ve come to expect from the best of iOS and Apple .
I also think Jony Ive would hate it.