At WWDC20 , when Apple showed offwidgets and the App Library in iOS 14 , my first chemical reaction was , “ This would be well on the iPad . ” At WWDC21 , when Apple showed offwidgets and the App Library in iPadOS 15 , my first reaction was , “ This should be effective on the iPad . ”
The conception is respectable . In iPadOS 15 , Apple is giving iPad users the ability to remove Home Screen pages and get up their apps into “ helpful categories ” that are only visible when you call for them to be . It makes the iPad Home Screen find a turn more like a desktop — specially when you hide the other Home Screens — and lets you find apps and locate icon much quicker and more well .
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With a ready to hand icon in the dock , it feels a mountain like Launchpad on the Mac with one defect — you ca n’t customize it . On the Mac , you ’re able to move icons around and create folders to create a personalized blank , but on the iPad , it ’s the same as it is on the iPhone . Apple ’s machine teach railway locomotive automatically slides apps into folders based on use and there ’s no way to change anything .
deed over , Apple ’s algorithm does a pretty good business , but it still feels very static and strict . Like the Mac , the iPad is more of a productivity gimmick than the iPhone , and not knowing where an app will shoot down each prison term you launch the App Library is a limitation that slows down your workflow . It ’s the same as it is on the iPhone , but where it ’s a bare annoyance there , it ’s a downright hindrance on the iPad .
Widgets, wayward and wanting
Another iOS 14 feature film that made it to the iPad a year late — for reasons I do n’t quite understand — is right Home Screen widgets . Apple has brought all of the widgets from iOS plus a few large ones available only on the iPad , and they look and act just like iPhone widgets , sliding in between the icon on the Home Screen without disrupting the exist storage-battery grid . Widgets in iPadOS 15 are supposed to do the same for the iPad that they did for the iPhone , but it does n’t feel quite right-hand . gizmo follow a exchangeable concept to iOS but are n’t intimately as raw .
On the iPhone Home Screen , widgets raise the experience and blend in seamlessly with the live icon grid . Icons and widgets are the same height and they all fit well together . lowly widgets look cracking alongside tumid ones , icon replete in the gap nicely , and it all feed perfectly .
On the iPad , gubbins look off . Since there ’s more vertical and horizontal space around the widgets , they look like they ’re floating between the grid rather than part of it . It feels like two system running side by side rather than in unison . While it ’s an betterment over the late method acting , which moved convenience out of the Notification Center and onto the Home Screen in a somewhat slipshod way , widgets somehow still look out of position . In iOS 14 , the Today screen was fundamentally plop onto the leftover side of the first Home Screen in a scrollable tower of iOS - style contraption , but in iPadOS 15 they ’re more integrated but still not really part of the whole .
you’re able to see it in Apple ’s trailer images . I enquire why Apple ’s iPadOS 15 screenshots showed contraption at the top of the silver screen and ikon at the bottom , and it ’s clearly because that ’s how they look good . But even if you follow that example , it still does n’t sense like a fluent Home Screen . Widgets are simultaneously cramp and scattered , and even the large - data formatting ones , which take up four column and two quarrel and are quite grown , are mere extension phone of the iPhone variation rather than iPad - specific version . There ’s too much blank , not enough information , and finger like a missed chance .
While the App Library and Home Screen widgets bring the iPad a fiddling closer to the Mac , it ’s still frustratingly tie to Io in far too many ways . I wanted a new iPadOS Home Screen experience that took the iOS 14 concept and reimagined it for a larger screen . rather , I got iPhone contrivance on the iPad .
Some of the issues have to do with the unique nature of the iPad ’s display . Unlike the iPhone and Mac , it needs to fluidly exchange between portrayal and landscape painting modes , and Apple deal that well in iPadOS 15 . But that ’s also something of an excuse for letting the iPad Home Screen stagnate . wait a year for the same widget and App Library on the iPhone is a disappointment , and there ’s nothing transformative or transcendent about using it .
Even setting aside the iPad Pro ’s M1 central processing unit and XDR display , Apple ’s tablet has a ton of untapped potential that ’s been an update away from immensity for far too many years . iPadOS 15 brought some of the part we ’ve been missing . Not we just need iPadOS 16 to put them in the good places .
