Apple makes biggest update ever to iPhone Home Screen

Apple has announced the biggest update ever to the iPhone’s Home Screen with iOS 14, introducing new display widgets that are shown directly on the device’s main screen, as well as a new App Library which groups apps by category and shows them to users in a list format.

The new widgets show information at a glance, such as updates from the Weather app, reminders for upcoming events saved in the Calendar and album artwork from songs playing through Apple Music. Users can create a Smart Stack of widgets, which uses on-device intelligence to surface the right widget based on time, location, and activity.

Home Screen pages can display widgets that are customized for work, travel, sports, entertainment, and other areas of interest. At the end of the Home Screen pages is the App Library, a new space that automatically organizes all of a user’s apps into one simple view, and intelligently surfaces apps that may be helpful in the moment. Users can choose how many Home Screen pages to display and easily hide pages for quicker access to the App Library.

Unlike similar functionality part of Android’s app drawer, iOS 14 can automatically pull your Apple Arcade games, for example, into one App Library folder, making them more easily accessible.