Laura Rosenberg
Apple doesnât offer truly individualized customization of its products or
interfaces to its users, and if anyone wants to customize the look of their
Apple products â specifically their home screens â theyâre in for A Time.
With iOS 16 coming in September, thereâs an opportunity for Apple to give
consumers needed autonomy.
The only cell phones Iâve ever owned have been a Nokia (shoutout to Snake, my
first love), a Blackberry, and an iPhone, none of which Iâve ever fully
customized.
Iâm currently on my seventh iPhone, and Iâve always accepted that my
phoneâs home screen simply looks how it looks. Sure, I can âeditâ the
home screenâs layout with apps, widgets, and folders for organization, but
Iâve never been able to make it more me â you know, how Android users can
make their phones more them. That all changed this week when I tried my hand at
customizing my phoneâs home screen using two icon packs I purchased from Etsy.
Using this article as my reference â and also its author, my colleague
Michael Potuck â I slowly became familiar with the Shortcuts app,
Widgetsmith, and everything in between that is required to create a custom home
screen aesthetic on my iPhone. Hereâs what I had to do, which I will never do
again, because it took far too long.
Choose an icon pack
First of all, the sheer number of icon packs available online is overwhelming.
Itâs fun for a minute to browse through options, but I quickly lost interest
and patience; itâs kind of like the difference in shopping at the mall versus
one independently-owned boutique.
You can find free icon packs, grab icon packs from Etsy, or create your own
icon pack (though I hear this is difficult), and there are, quite literally,
tens of thousands of packs to choose from. I spent about five minutes online
before deciding on this icon pack for $6, and I got to work.
Download multiple zip files and PDFs
This step was where things started to hurt, even if at first, it was only a
little. Using instructions from the Etsy seller, I had to download zip files
and PDFs, drag them to my desktop, open them, and then open the folders that
the zip file created, all of which was extremely tedious. Once I had access to
the icon and widget folders, I of course had to choose which icons and widgets
I wanted out of the hundreds available in the icon pack â I genuinely had no
idea how bad it would get.
Copy and paste icons into Photos
I didnât anticipate this step being so laborious, but wow was it ever. You
have to cross-reference the apps you already have on your phone with the
matching icons from the downloaded zip folders, and then you have to copy and
paste those icons into Photos. Make sure you have iCloud syncing on, or you
wonât be able to access the icons you chose on your phone.
Use Shortcuts to re-design apps
Enter: the absolute epicenter of my frustration with Apple home screen
customization.
Never have I ever become so familiarized with an app in the way I have become
with Shortcuts during this process, and I am certain that Iâve barely
scratched the surface of everything Shortcuts can actually do.
I donât even know where to begin.
Basically, I had to open Shortcuts, hit the + sign in the upper right-hand
corner, tap âAdd Action,â type âopen appâ in the search bar, then tap
âOpen Appâ under âScripting,â THEN choose from a list of apps I have on
my phone in order to customize one of them.
Letâs say I wanted to customize the Instagram app.
Once Iâve chosen Instagram, I had to tap three little blue lines in the upper
right corner, choose âAdd to Home Screen,â rename the app, pick the photo
that synced from iCloud to accompany the app, and, finally, tap âAdd.â
GOODNESS. Honestly this is all far too much as Iâm reliving it, and I hate
that I feel so compelled to write about it, but here we are.
At this point in the process, I had the app in hand using the icon pack I
purchased, downloaded, copied and pasted into Photos, and then effectively
re-designed in Shortcuts to do with what I pleased. I then had to repeat the
re-design via Shortcuts with every app I wanted on my home screen, which took
me no less than two hours. Now, the fun part?
Aesthetics over everything
If youâre like me â someone who likes things to look even and aligned â
this part of customizing your home screen could take hours. You have your
re-designed apps-turned-shortcuts! Theyâre the right color palette, you
think! Youâve renamed each app in all lowercase (with the exception of
WhatsApp) for reasons you canât eloquently explain!
Even if youâre not like me, and youâre more creative in the way that you
use space, deciding how you want to use your clean home screen with your vibey
new app icons can also take hours. An important note here, which takes
additional time: When arranging your home screen, you need to long-press the
original apps to âRemove from Home Screenâ to alleviate clutter and make
room for your shortcuts, while being careful to not actually delete the
original app â otherwise your shortcuts wonât work.
I genuinely love how my phone now looks after an entire morning of customizing
my home screen, but there are still issues.
The gray widget calendar at the top, for example, doesnât actually sync to my
iCal, but rather, opens the app Widgetsmith â something I had to download to
create that particular widget in the first place; there is no workaround for
this, lest I download a third-party calendar app, which I am certainly not
doing. This means that I either have to swipe right on my home screen to access
my actual calendar or search for it in the pull-down menu. When I mentioned
this to my coworker Kyle â an Android user â his only response was,
âomg.â Oh my god, indeed.
Additionally, every time I open any of my newly-created, earthy apps (re:
shortcuts), I see this little swoopdy-woop that comes and goes â which can be
dismissed with a swipe â but will appear every time I open a shortcut,
forever, in perpetuity:
Last but not least, now that Iâve re-designed all of my apps to look exactly
how I want them to with the help of my icon pack on my home screen, I am left
with a clutter of icons, widgets, and wallpapers in my photo album(s) in
addition to zip files and folders on my desktop that now need to be cleaned up.
iOS 16 to the rescue?
After chatting with some of my colleagues over at 9to5Google, I learned some
things that Appleâs forthcoming iOS 16 could do to improve this process.
To start, iOS 16 could simply include any available themes for our home
screens, let alone customizable ones. Did you know that what took me four hours
would take someone about a minute and a half on an Android? Iâve seen a video
of it being done. Android users have loads of built-in themes to choose from,
and that barely scratches the surface.
More specifically, did you know that when you pick a color theme on an Android
for your home screen, apps that are native to the phone automatically update to
that specific color palette? Imagine not having to individually create and
customize each and every one of your apps into a shortcut, whether or not
theyâre from a third party. If iOS 16 at the very least allowed us to
customize native apps and widgets with pre-chosen themes, that would be a huge
step in the right direction.
Final thoughts
I want to say here for the record, that on a scale of tech-savviness â 10
being extremely tech-savvy, and 1 being not at all â Iâm likeâ¦a 7,
probably, at least in comparison to your average person (not in comparison to
literally any of my coworkers). That said, this process was nothing short of
hellacious, even with help from my coworkers, even as someone who knows and
understands very niche information about very specific technology. In total, I
spent about four hours creating my home screen aesthetic, from start to finish.
What did we do to Apple, except be wildly â and for me, inexplicably â
loyal customers to whom they withhold the ability to customize our own devices?
Now that Iâve seen what my home screen can look like â while also
understanding on a level that I wish I didnât â what it takes to get a home
screen that you love, I want everyone to have icons, widgets, and themes that
reflect their personality. Why does Apple refuse to give us any autonomy as
consumers?
As I was lamenting to my coworkers at 9to5Google about my customization ordeal,
Ben Schoon said, rather joyously, âCome to Android â itâs so much easier
ð
..â I wonât, again for reasons I canât explain, but thatâs not the
point.
The point is this: for Apple to gatekeep customization from its user base is,
at this stage, an antiquated, frustrating, and frankly outlandish approach for
a company that touts creativity, inspiration, and innovation in each of its
individual products. If I want to be inspired by my device, to be creative with
my device, to innovate on my device, why canât I make it my own?
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