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iPadOS 15 : we are stuck with 6x5 apps on home screen now?

junebug1 said:
I’m actually shocked Apple gave us back the 6x5 Home Screen and are even allowing it to stay that way with the Larger Icon option. I would love to have the Today View back but for now I’ll take this as a compromise and just move to having a second page made up purely of widgets.
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6 x 5 is awful on the 12.9. Masses of wasted space. Huge empty side bars you could drive a truck down. If we are getting 6 x 5, why not give us another option, 12 x 10 ? Seriously. Look at the icon sizes on the iPhone. Now bang them on the iPad. The screen real estate is huge! But I do like your idea of having a widget screen separate from an app screen as yet another enforced workaround. And for Dave’s sake, bring Today view back home!
 
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yabeweb said:
On iOS 15 the way widgets work is absolutely weird, and we lost lots of screen space (12.9 here) as the new layout allows us to see fewer icons.

It is a poor implementation of a feature people wanted (repositionable widgets), as said, it seems added because they had to, but it is not well thought out.

It might be a beta thing and get fixed going forward, it is a pain to see for what it is now.

People before were complaining about a "missing feature", now for a poorly implemented one.
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I’d rather it were missing.
 
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mrochester said:
But you have to think about how the widgets will work both in landscape and portrait. What’s a better way?
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App icons scaled to widgets, or widgets scaled to app icons. With a small widget, 2x2 app icons, like the iPhone. With a medium widget, 2x3. Etc. As it is, the app icons are floating around in nowhere land. Very poor.
 
Sadly still looks like we are stuck with the awful layout. Minor improvement over the betas from the earlier 6x4 versions, but 14.7 is still superior especially in potrait orientation. This will be the first iOS that I won’t want to install and will hold off on until I have no choice. For iPads it feels like 1 step forward and 3 back. Few of the new features are game-changers for me, and many appear like they won’t be ready for 15.0.
 
In iOS 14, you can lock the today view / widgets showing on the left of the first page of apps. Does iOS 15 get rid of this feature?
 
coffeeplease said:
In iOS 14, you can lock the today view / widgets showing on the left of the first page of apps. Does iOS 15 get rid of this feature?
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Yes.

I’ve abandoned widgets on first home screen now, all on the second.

I don’t subscribe to the whole Fisher Price OS nonsense, the iPad does what it does, and I use macOS/Windows for other stuff. However, the moment you put widgets on the home screen now, wow, I’m half expecting the iPad to start making farmyard animal noises when I press an icon.
 
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What I want is the same App icon density as iPadOS 14 (The time/date is out of alignment as this is a lazy overlay of iPadOS 14/15):

what-i-want.jpg


What I get (I had to add another widget to the top or the App icons start to wrap under the last widget):
what-i-get.jpg


Edit: iPadOS 14 allows you to have 30 app widgets on-screen (with the sidebar) while iPadOS 15 only allows for 16. That's a huge decrease in information density for no discernible reason. There's plenty of margin!
 
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ckoerner said:
What I want is the same App icon density as iPadOS 14 (The time/date is out of alignment as this is a lazy overlay of iPadOS 14/15):

View attachment 1826836

What I get (I had to add another widget to the top or the App icons start to wrap under the last widget):
View attachment 1826837

Edit: iPadOS 14 allows you to have 30 app widgets on-screen (with the sidebar) while iPadOS 15 only allows for 16. That's a huge decrease in information density for no discernible reason. There's plenty of margin!
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Totally agree. 12.9 screen is totally wasted, even with a packed dock. It’s absurd to waste so much real estate. Give us 12 x 8. Easy from 6 x 4. And why not give us a grid option in Settings, so we can set spaces where we like? And scale widgets to app icons. It’s all so easy for Apple to do. As this stands, it’s lousy.
 
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iOS 15 public release probably coming out in a little over a week and nothing has changed about this. Looks like we’re really stuck with this layout for the time being. Maybe they’ll improve it for iOS 15.1.
 
I for one won’t be updating to iOS15 for as long as I can hold off until they resolve this. Few of the other features are ‘killer app’ features for me, but messing with my carefully arranged screen layout and wasting my screen landscape is a major reason not to switch.
 
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ShadowBailey said:
I for one won’t be updating to iOS15 for as long as I can hold off until they resolve this. Few of the other features are ‘killer app’ features for me, but messing with my carefully arranged screen layout and wasting my screen landscape is a major reason not to switch.
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I will just change my layout in the GUI to go around this by using folders in the dock for example.
 
Frosties said:
I will just change my layout in the GUI to go around this by using folders in the dock for example.
Click to expand...

Would be interesting to see how it looks ! I’ve not found a way to deal with the unsightly waste of space especially on the vertical layout that the new 6x5 causes.

After so long with ipadOS being neglected as ios was seemingly aimed at phones and screens on phones, we made progress with ipadOS finally using the screen real estate properly, and ios15 seems to me like we have lost some of that again. Widgets were interesting but I honestly think the ios14 solution was better: if nothing else it would be great if ios15 give the choice of layouts -‘traditional’ ios14 style, or the new style widgets (most of which so far I have found to offer form over function).
 
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Just updated to the RC and iPadOS 15 for the first time and uh, the first thing I noticed was my home screen being all out of whack for this reason. WTF, Apple. All that wasted space on the sides in vertical orientation.
 
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steve62388 said:
Just been trying this out. Somewhat confusing interface setting it up, and I can’t figure out if some features aren’t working because I’m dumb, I need to pay for the premium features or there are issues with iOS 15.
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return2sendai said:
I tried the same “Launcher with Multiple Widgets” app for the same reason. But the free version only has a very limited number of apps you can add to a Launcher. I’m not going to pay for it until I know if I can add any of my apps to it. In the free version, I can’t even add Pages or Numbers, let alone more obscure apps I regularly use. So basically, Launcher is a very limited workaround to a very limited Home Screen design. No real gain.
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The TestFlight version (5.2 build #756) should also support iOS15 / iPadOS15 as can be read in the latest updates and has all features to test out do contact the developer via e-mail or Twitter for a link if there is any room to add new testers. He also indicated to add an additional size of widgets in an update for iOS15 / iPadOS15.

The current version in the App Store probably does not yet work as it should with iOS15 /iPadOS 15. I'm a user of Launcher since we had Today View widgets all the way back since iOS8 and love this app and it's widgets. I can really recommend buying the premium and no I'm not paid for this in any way. See also the Help/FAQ page on the developers website for more details on e.g. what you get with the Premium version.

I know that both 'Pages' and 'Numbers' by Apple can be opened by selecting 'App Store' and searching for the name and then it will be able to open it via Launcher through Apple Shortcuts app since there isn't an URL scheme known.

There are also other Launcher apps/widgets in the App Store that copied the concept but I think they don't do it as good as the first one that started it all which is Launcher by Cromulent Labs. Probably these other apps also still need to be updated to support iOS15 and also not all are still receiving updates.
 
BigBlur said:
This. The layout can be completely different in both orientations to your liking... You could have a widget be in the upper-right corner in portrait mode, but have it be in the upper-left corner in landscape mode (or in the lower-left, or in the middle, etc.)

This also applies to the app icons. They can have their own unique positions in both orientations as well.
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This is actually a huge deal that should be discussed more. Being able to do this could actually be a net positive.
 
But if you remove an app from one orientation, it's also gone from the other, correct? It's a neat feature, but it still doesn't completely solve for if you had dedicated themes for rows (photo editing, video, music etc) since they now flow differently when vertical.
 
I didn't try any of the betas and I am just now seeing my homepage on my 10.5 iPad Pro. Horrible. What IS this? So much wasted space on the sides. It looks horrible. I am trying to keep a clean layout. I appreciate added widgets support, but god, the amount of wasted space is unreal.
 
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The springboard when in vertical orientation looks ridiculous. Was not “fixed” in the release.
 
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