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After a few days, I have to say it is a really underwhelming release. App Library feels like something from a different OS. It doesn’t feel or look like iOS and the way it is accessed feels bizarre. Like an afterthought.

Allowing apps to only have access to certain photos sounds like a great idea but the way it is a one time choice makes it completely useless in many apps.

I’m not that interested in widgets on my primary Home Screen. I like my arrangement and know where things are. So widgets aren’t really any more use than they used to be: to the left of the main home screen.

The most useful new feature seems to be the back tap thing. A feature that would have been entirely appropriate as a point release in any of the more major iOS 13 updates.

Most of the headline features in the update seem like style over substance.

One thing I REALLY don’t like: the huge gap between the dock and the bottom row of Home Screen icons. Why has this been done? It’s really an aesthetic abomination and a waste of space.
Thanks for your honest opinion, something we need more of around here. I’m sticking with 13.7 for my 6s. I feel like I’ve finally got an iOS that works really well for my 6s.
 
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App Library fine for those who haven't organized their phone icons, but for those who have, it is a bit redundant.

I’ve found spotlight search works fine for finding apps in my very disorganised pages 3-7 of my Home Screen. I can see that just hiding those pages and relying on search is preferable. What I can’t understand is why the App Library looks so alien and why it is the right most page rather than shown when bringing up the spotlight search function (swipe down) from the home screen.

A bit of control over how the library organises apps wouldn’t be a bad thing either. Perhaps having an option to default to the alphabetical list.
 
I’ve found spotlight search works fine for finding apps in my very disorganised pages 3-7 of my Home Screen. I can see that just hiding those pages and relying on search is preferable. What I can’t understand is why the App Library looks so alien and why it is the right most page rather than shown when bringing up the spotlight search function (swipe down) from the home screen.

A bit of control over how the library organises apps wouldn’t be a bad thing either. Perhaps having an option to default to the alphabetical list.
I like the idea to default to the alpha, an option for that. I think the idea with the search redundancy is that Home Screen widgets might get in the way of mid-screen down swipes? This would create a reliable way to access the search, essentially.

I think we can give the App Library some time to improve. It’s a brand new thing after all. There’s obviously plenty of opinion on it.
 
App Library fine for those who haven't organized their phone icons, but for those who have, it is a bit redundant.
App library on iOS is simply awful..needs a lot of work..widgets need work too but got to give developers time to adjust
 
Not sure which bit of them thanking me for an honest opinion is supposed to be harsh?
It just felt like a swipe at most commenters. Lots and lots of opinions on here, felt like you were suggesting they were not honest (paid for).

if that’s not what you meant please accept my apology.

EDIT: Oops, got my pronouns mixed up. S/he was suggesting, not you.
 
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Does the Home Screen and App Library configuration work the same across all iPhones? I am seeing no way to hide pages on my iPhone SE (2020)
 
Does the Home Screen and App Library configuration work the same across all iPhones? I am seeing no way to hide pages on my iPhone SE (2020)
I’m able to on my SE2020. Go into jiggly mode, and then just above the dock you’ll see a series of dots (at least 2) that represent the home screens. Tap on that and you’ll get images of the various screens that you can toggle on or off. That’s how it worked on mine.

But note that if you only have one screen, you won’t be able to hide it. That process I just outlined is there, but if you try to hide just the one screen it will not let you.
 
Really wish the App Library was accessed by swiping down like with using spotlight. It seems to me that the two are both ways of getting to any app you need. Having it at the far right of the Home Screen pages is really clunky. Feels very unnatural.

Agreed, and to go further, I’m not seeing the point of App Library at all. I mean, I guess it might help certain people with many, many apps (at a stretch)—but I can cope pretty well with my meagre four pages.

But it’s the auto categorisation that’s the most annoying thing. If I want to categorise or create groups like those in the App Library page, I’d rather do it myself! But you can’t create groups with the same look and functionality as the auto-generated App Library ones, or even move those pre-generated ones around or amongst the regular “Springboard” app pages. It’s bizarre!

Honestly, if I could turn off the App Library I would, but they don’t let you do that either. They’ve had so much time to work on iOS app viewing, launching and management and this is what they came up with? I agree completely that it’s clunky, ill-conceived and ill-executed.

The entire OS is becoming increasingly clunky. I wonder what is the point of the separate widget-only page (accessible when swiping left from the first page of apps) now that widgets can be incorporated into app pages? They should’ve taken the opportunity to combine the two, and App Library functionality as well; that way maybe they could make it so swiping left lets you access the Notifications page, rather than the impossible-with-one-hand swipe-down from-left-of-the-notch that’s required currently. I mean, you could always access any app by swiping down and searching for it by name. The App Library view with its lack of customisation is just pointless to me. It’s classic Clippy Mentality.

Apple is a $2 T company and this is the best their geniuses in OS design can come up with? Quite frankly that’s shameful considering how much they’re (no doubt) paid. There is some good stuff: if they just incorporated the App Library-style grouping into the regular view and/or let you create/edit/delete App Library groups, that would help. Why they didn’t let you do that is beyond me.
 
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Agreed, and to go further, I’m not seeing the point of App Library at all. I mean, I guess it might help certain people with many, many apps
Sounds like you do see a point.

But it’s the auto categorisation that’s the most annoying thing. If I want to categorise or create groups like those in the App Library page, I’d rather do it myself!
You still can.

But you can’t create groups with the same look and functionality as the auto-generated App Library ones, or even move those pre-generated ones around or amongst the regular “Springboard” app pages.
I agree that would be cool: some middle ground where there is a lot of grunt work by the system with fine tuning by the user. Perhaps we will get there.

The entire OS is becoming increasingly clunky. I wonder what is the point of the separate widget-only page (accessible when swiping left from the first page of apps) now that widgets can be incorporated into app pages?
Lots of third-party widgets are not yet updated for Home Screen; they still need somewhere to live.


They should have taken the opportunity to combine the two, and App Library functionality as well. I mean, you could always access any app by swiping down and searching for it by name. The App Library view with its lack of customisation is just pointless to me.
I’m not sure about this, but perhaps the Home Screen widgets might interfere with the Spotlight gesture, especially if you’ve got lots of them on a screen. Having the App Library with search would be a reliable way to access that function. I don’t know if that’s the reason, but I’ve got a couple of widget stacks on my Home Screen and when I swipe down on those areas, it swipes among widgets instead of invoking Spotlight. Perhaps that had something to do with it.

I agree that the default App Library view hasn’t made a good impression on me. I’ve seen lots of comments around about poor grouping, but that appears to be on developers, who get to categorize their apps how they like.

It will be interesting to see how it evolves.
 
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I’m able to on my SE2020. Go into jiggly mode, and then just above the dock you’ll see a series of dots (at least 2) that represent the home screens. Tap on that and you’ll get images of the various screens that you can toggle on or off. That’s how it worked on mine.

But note that if you only have one screen, you won’t be able to hide it. That process I just outlined is there, but if you try to hide just the one screen it will not let you.
Thanks. It seems like the small screen size of the SE is not helping me. I was able to do it by following your instructions, but I had to touch it “just right” to invoke it.
 
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Interesting claim, what’s your source?
Beta-ish street releases. People complaining here that actually admitted to not reporting the issues to Apple. People here who have stated that they thought the developers would report issues. People here who constantly think that as long as they are having the issue they are complaining about here that everyone else is too, so they expected someone else to report the issues. That's all I'm offering you because your post came across as being snarky.
 
Yes, and you may not like what I'm about to say but I hold the beta testing consumers at least 50% at fault for when Apple's OS's hit the streets for install. Nearly 100% of the time people just want to "play" with the betas but never report issues, and leave it to Apple to fix issues that are never reported. Then they come here and rant when they are actually part of the problem.

And Apple can't hire professionals to check this, rather than making it the end-consumers responsibility? It's not as bad as when Apple released a product whose primary upgrade (Siri) was laughably released as a Beta product, but Apple needs to do better. Apple chooses who they release the alpha's and beta's to and whose advice they listen to, but this is ultimately their choice. Beta users profit zero and are just testing for free. Apple's making billions. Apple is far more than half the problem. Beta users might be an issue, but it's Apple that chooses who are the beta users and is to blame, not the volunteers.
 
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Which is why folders still exist...

And that's been the scourge of Apple for about ten years at this point, bloatware. Some/most don't want it, but we're going to add it in forcefully. Whether it was iTunes losing the ability to reliably control music by adding so much nonsense, not being able to uninstall default programs, this is just another step in that same direction.
 
Translate seems to hang up if the text is more than two sentences requiring you to crash out and start over again snd again - experienced on several different iphone models. googles translate does nit have this problem
 
And that's been the scourge of Apple for about ten years at this point, bloatware. Some/most don't want it, but we're going to add it in forcefully. Whether it was iTunes losing the ability to reliably control music by adding so much nonsense, not being able to uninstall default programs, this is just another step in that same direction.
Not sure how that sort of thing applies in this case.
 
And Apple can't hire professionals to check this, rather than making it the end-consumers responsibility? It's not as bad as when Apple released a product whose primary upgrade (Siri) was laughably released as a Beta product, but Apple needs to do better. Apple chooses who they release the alpha's and beta's to and whose advice they listen to, but this is ultimately their choice. Beta users profit zero and are just testing for free. Apple's making billions. Apple is far more than half the problem. Beta users might be an issue, but it's Apple that chooses who are the beta users and is to blame, not the volunteers.

For real. I found enough bugs within 30min of installing that I reverted to 13.7 and won't be even trying iOS14 again for 6 months probably. I don't participate in betas because I don't want to deal with this ****. My Mac running Catalina has a glitch with the wallpaper that goes back TEN YEARS according to support forums and still hasn't been fixed. They don't do much in the way of testing in any of their software departments it seems. For a 2 trillion dollar company this seems like a poor area to be cutting costs.
 
And that's been the scourge of Apple for about ten years at this point, bloatware. Some/most don't want it, but we're going to add it in forcefully. Whether it was iTunes losing the ability to reliably control music by adding so much nonsense, not being able to uninstall default programs, this is just another step in that same direction.

How exactly is giving people different ways to organize their apps bloatware?

And where do you get the “some/most” don’t want the App Library feature statistics? If you’re basing it off these forums, well most people here are hardly representative of your typical Apple user. I can confidently say that everyone I know that has an iPhone is really liking the App Library (and widgets), and have drastically cleaned up their home screens.
 
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How exactly is giving people different ways to organize their apps bloatware?

And where do you get the “some/most” don’t want the App Library feature statistics? If you’re basing it off these forums, well most people here are hardly representative of your typical Apple user. I can confidently say that everyone I know that has an iPhone is really liking the App Library (and widgets), and have drastically cleaned up their home screens.

Yes, adding extra space and resources for a feature that cannot be removed and is preinstalled is basically the definition of bloatware.

And do you know what "some" means? It's a word meaning "an unspecified number or amount of people or things." I don't have a stat that has an objective measure. But I do see three people in this thread that don't want it, so it's applicable. The very reason I included the word "some" was to avoid arguments like this one, where a bigger metric would be applicable. So, yes, some people don't want the App Library taking up space on their phone using resources for something they don't want.

Now, since you're into being needlessly pedantic (and wrong), I want you to forward me your stats and study for "everyone I know that has an iPhone" who told you they are "really liking the App Library." Somehow, I think you didn't poll everyone you know. That's exactly the type of hyperbole I avoided by saying "some/most."
 
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Yes, adding extra space and resources for a feature that cannot be removed and is preinstalled is basically the definition of bloatware.

And do you know what "some" means? It's a word meaning "an unspecified number or amount of people or things." I don't have a stat that has an objective measure. But I do see three people in this thread that don't want it, so it's applicable. The very reason I included the word "some" was to avoid arguments like this one, where a bigger metric would be applicable. So, yes, some people don't want the App Library taking up space on their phone using resources for something they don't want.

Now, since you're into being needlessly pedantic (and wrong), I want you to forward me your stats and study for "everyone I know that has an iPhone" who told you they are "really liking the App Library." Somehow, I think you didn't poll everyone you know. That's exactly the type of hyperbole I avoided by saying "some/most."
App Library information is already part of what has been in iOS all along. The page itself is just visual representation of that information.

(On a different note, realistically speaking, "most" can be seen as hyperbolic without details that really support that.)
 
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I "upgraded" this morning. So far, I am not impressed. I would give the "upgrade" maybe a 6. I don't care for the App Library. Its organization is wacky. I can organize my apps better than either Apple or the developer(s). What happened to the Widgets? There is one thing that I like about the "upgrade" is that I can remove/delete apps that I previously was unable to such as the Health app. Never had much use for it before.

I have decided to downgrade my rating for iOS 14. My new rating is a 3.
 
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