iOS and iPadOS 14: The MacStories Review

How do you prepare a major new version of an operating system that now spans two separate platforms, which will be installed on millions of devices within a few hours of its release, amid a global pandemic? If you’re Apple, the answer is fairly straightforward: you mitigate the crisis by focusing on a narrower set of features, perhaps prioritizing bug fixes and stability improvements, but then you just have to do the work.

In my time as an iOS (then iOS and iPadOS) reviewer, I never thought I’d have to evaluate an OS update with the social and political backdrop of iOS 14. Let’s face it: when the COVID-19 outbreak started fundamentally changing our lives earlier this year, at some point many of us – including yours truly – thought that, among more serious and severe repercussions, our tiny corner of the Internet would see no new phones, OS updates, videogame consoles, or other events over the course of 2020. Or that, at the very least, changes in hardware and software would be so minor, they’d barely register in the grand scheme of things as tech companies and their employees were – rightfully so – adjusting to a new, work-from-home, socially distant life. Yet here we are, over a year after the debut of iOS and iPadOS 13, with brand new versions of both operating systems that were announced, as per tradition, at WWDC a few months ago. Remove all surrounding context, and you wouldn’t guess anything has changed from 2019.

Context is, however, key to understanding Apple’s background and goals with iOS and iPadOS 14, in a couple notable ways.

Supported By

MacStadium

MacStadium: Cloud-hosted iOS build machines.

First, I think it’s safe to assume slowing down to reassess the state of the platform and focus on quality-of-life enhancements and performance gains would have worked out in Apple’s favor regardless of the pandemic. In last year’s review, I noted how the first version of iOS 13.0 launching to the public wasn’t “as polished or stable as the first version of iOS 12”; in a somewhat unpredictable twist of events, managing the iOS 13 release narrative only got more challenging for Apple after launch.

Late in the beta cycle last year, the company announced certain iOS 13 features – including automations in Shortcuts and ETA sharing in Maps – would be delayed until iOS 13.1, originally scheduled for September 30th. Following widespread criticism about bugs, various visual glitches, and stability issues in iOS 13.0, Apple moved up the release of iOS 13.1 and iPadOS (which never saw a proper 13.0 public release) by a week. Despite the release of a substantial .1 update, the company still had to ship two additional patches (13.1.1 and 13.1.2) before the end of September. Before the end of 2019, all while the general public was lamenting the poor state of iOS 13’s performance (just Google “iOS 13 buggy”, and you’ll get the idea), Apple went on to ship a total of eight software updates to iOS 13 (compared to iOS 12’s four updates before the end of 2018). The record pace, plus the mysterious removal of features that were originally announced at WWDC ‘19, suggested something had gone awry in the late stages of iOS 13’s development; it wasn’t long before a report covered Apple’s plans to overhaul its software testing methodology for iOS 14 and 2020. The pandemic may have forced Apple to scale back some functionalities and deeper design changes this year, but it’s likely that a decision had been made long before lockdowns and work-from-home orders.

Second, context is necessary because despite the pandemic and rocky rollout of iOS 13 and its many updates, Apple was still able to infuse iOS and iPadOS 14 with fresh, bold ideas that are tracing a path for both platforms to follow over the next few years.

On the surface, iOS 14 will be widely regarded as the update that brought a redesigned Home Screen and a plethora of useful quality-of-life additions to the iPhone. For the first time since the iPhone’s inception, Apple is moving past the grid of icons and letting users freely place data-rich, customizable widgets on the Home Screen – a major course correction that has opened the floodgates for new categories of utilities on the App Store. In addition to the upgraded Home Screen, iOS 14 also offers welcome improvements to long-standing limitations: phone calls can now come in as unobtrusive banners; Messages borrows some of WhatsApp’s best features and now lets you reply to specific messages as well as mention users; Siri doesn’t take over the entire screen anymore. There are hundreds of smaller additions to the system and built-in apps in iOS 14, which suggests Apple spent a long time trying to understand what wasn’t working and what customers were requesting.

iOS and iPadOS 14 aren’t just reactionary updates to criticisms and feature requests though: upon further examination, both OSes reveal underlying threads that will shape the evolution of Apple’s platforms. With compact UI, the company is revisiting a principle introduced in iOS 7 – clarity and content first – with fresh eyes: the UI is receding and becoming more glanceable, but the elements that are left are as inviting to the touch as ever – quite the departure from Jony Ive’s overly minimalistic, typography-based approach. We see this trend everywhere in iOS 14, from phone calls and Siri to widgets, new toolbar menus, and Picture in Picture. Intents, the existing technology behind SiriKit, Shortcuts, and intelligent Siri suggestions, is also at the center of widget personalization. Intents already was one of Apple’s most important frameworks given its ties to Siri and on-device intelligence; iOS 14 proves we haven’t seen all the possible permutations and applications of Intents yet.

Then, of course, there’s iPad. In iPadOS 14, we see the logical continuation of pointer and trackpad support introduced earlier this year in iPadOS 13.4: now that users can control an iPad without ever touching the screen, Apple is advising third-party developers to move away from iPhone-inspired designs with apps that are truly made for iPad…and somewhat reminiscent of their macOS counterparts. We can see the results of this initiative in modernized system apps that take advantage of the iPad’s display with a sidebar, multiple columns, and deeper trackpad integration – new options that every iPad app developer could (and, according to Apple, should) consider going forward. Although some of the iPad’s oft-mentioned ongoing struggles remain unaddressed in iPadOS 14 (see: multitasking and window management), Apple is embracing the iPad’s nature as a modular computer this year, and they feel comfortable leaning into lessons learned with the Mac decades ago.

The context of 2020 is what makes iOS and iPadOS 14 so fascinating and, to a certain extent, fun to review. On one hand, we have two major OS updates that may or may not have been impacted by the global pandemic in their focus on fewer groundbreaking additions and more consistent improvements across built-in apps; on the other, just like any other year, we have a suite of overarching themes and potential implications to dissect.

But for all those users still pausing over that ‘Install’ button, pondering whether updating their most important communication and work-from-home devices is worth it, there’s only one consideration that matters:

Will this go any better than last year?

Exclusive Extras

eBooks, Wallpapers, Shortcuts, Podcast, and Making Of

By subscribing to Club MacStories, you’ll gain exclusive access to a selection of extra perks related to this review:

eBook version. Available today, the eBook version is the best way to read this review offline using any EPUB reader. The book is fully interactive with all of the images, videos, and links to shortcuts that you’ll find on MacStories, and it looks great in Apple’s Books app. The eBook version can be downloaded in the members-only Downloads area here.

Extra eBook: 40 Tips for iOS and iPadOS 14. For the first time this year, we’ve collected over 40 of the most interesting tips and hidden features from my iOS and iPadOS 14 review and released them as a standalone eBook for Club MacStories members. This book is the best way to discover iOS 14’s most fascinating details quickly, and it’s also available in the members-only Downloads area here.

Exclusive wallpapers. This year, we’re offering Club MacStories members a set of iPhone wallpapers optimized for widgets on the iOS 14 Home Screen. The wallpapers are available in five color variations for the iPhone 11, 11 Pro, and 11 Pro Max, and they’ll help you craft great-looking custom Home Screen setups. You can find several examples throughout this review.

Advanced shortcuts. Exclusively for Club members, I’ve created a series of advanced shortcuts that take advantage of the new Shortcuts features for iOS 14. The shortcuts will be released in a special issue of our newsletter, MacStories Weekly, later this week.

An exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the making of the review. Later this week in MacStories Weekly, Club members will get access to an exclusive Making Of about the review. In the article, I will describe my process for putting together this story, from mind-mapping to my writing workflow, scripts, and more. Additionally, Brian King, the animator who brought the review to life, will detail how 3D assets for the review were created.

A special episode of our podcast, MacStories Unplugged. We’ll also be releasing a special episode of our members-only podcast. In the episode out this Saturday, we’ll discuss the making of this review more in depth, with additional details on the apps I used and the process for writing and editing the review over the past four months.

A third eBook with additional iOS and iPadOS 14 coverage. The third eBook features a compilation of the iOS and iPadOS 14 previews that the MacStories team published this summer, updated to account for changes made to both OSes since publication. The third eBook is also available today.

You can unlock all of these perks with a Club MacStories subscription, starting at $5/month. And in doing so, you’ll also get access to the complete archive of Club MacStories with over five years worth of exclusive content.

We also recorded a special episode of our main podcast AppStories all about the review. In the episode, John and I provide a (spoiler-free) overview of the major themes of the review.

You can listen to the episode below.

https://www.macstories.net/podcasts/appstories/episodes/188/embed/

Compatibility and Performance

Over the past few years, the second chapter of my iOS and iPadOS reviews has usually covered setup and performance. Things are slightly different this year: there are no meaningful changes to the setup and onboarding process of iOS and iPadOS with the exception of redesigned buttons and new glyphs. Those are welcome visual updates – especially since they clarify what is a tappable button and what isn’t – but they bring no functional improvements to setting up a new iPhone or iPad for iOS and iPadOS 14. For this reason, I’m going to focus on compatibility and the performance issues I’ve noticed while testing both versions 14.0 and the 14.2 beta of iOS and iPadOS.

A Note on This Review

This review was written while testing every beta of iOS and iPadOS 14 on a variety of devices, including an iPhone XS Max, two iPhone 11 Pro Max units, two 2018 iPad Pros, and an iPad mini. Most of the story was written and edited while using iOS and iPadOS 14.0 between July and September; other parts were written while testing beta versions of iOS and iPadOS 14.2. The entire review was edited between late August and early October.

Screenshots throughout the story were captured on an iPhone 11 Pro Max and iPad Pro 12.9” running iOS and iPadOS 14.2, respectively. In most cases, from a design standpoint, there are no meaningful differences between iOS 14.0 and iOS 14.2; where appropriate, I’ve detailed which features or fixes will be coming in iOS 14.2.

Let’s start with compatibility. iOS and iPadOS 14 support the same list of devices as iOS and iPadOS 13 with the only additions being new devices Apple released in 2020. This means that iOS 14 can be installed on all iPhones released over the past five years starting with the iPhone 6s and 2016’s first-generation iPhone SE, while iPadOS 14 can be installed on all iPad models released since 2014, including the iPad Air 2. iOS and iPadOS 14 are compatible with 33 different Apple devices in total, and here’s the full list:

iPhone | iPad | iPod touch
iPhone SE (2nd generation) | iPad Pro 12.9-inch (all generations) | iPod touch (7th generation)
iPhone 11 Pro | iPad Pro 11-inch (all generations) |
iPhone 11 Pro Max | iPad Pro 10.5-inch |
iPhone 11 | iPad Pro 9.7-inch |
iPhone XS | iPad (5th to 8th generation) |
iPhone XS Max | iPad mini (4th and 5th generations) |
iPhone XR | iPad Air (2nd to 5th generations) |
iPhone X | |
iPhone 8 | |
iPhone 8 Plus | |
iPhone 7 | |
iPhone 7 Plus | |
iPhone 6s | |
iPhone 6s Plus | |
iPhone SE (1st generation) | |

As I wrote last year, it’s remarkable that Apple is still delivering software updates to devices like the iPad Air 2 (which was released in 2014) and the iPhone 6s line, proving once again that it’s always in the company’s best interest to keep existing customers happy without forcing them to purchase a new iPhone if they want to get access to new iOS features. As always, there are some functionalities that require newer iPhone generations than the ones technically compatible with iOS 14: for instance, Spatial Audio requires AirPods Pro, which are only supported on the iPhone 7 and later; digital car keys in CarPlay are only available on the iPhone XR, XS, and later. You can find the full list of supported features on Apple’s website here and here; where necessary, I will note in this review which features are available on which iPhone and iPad models.

Earlier this year in iOS and iPadOS 13.6, Apple added the ability to automatically download software updates in addition to automatically installing them. If you enabled this option in Settings ⇾ General ⇾ Software Updates, your devices should have automatically downloaded iOS and iPadOS 14 for you.

The performance story of iOS and iPadOS 14 is a bit different. The short version: after last year’s unmitigated release disaster, I was hoping – based on rumors – for a return to iOS 12 levels of polish and stability. In my experience, iOS and iPadOS 14 haven’t been as buggy and rough as iOS and iPadOS 13 were at launch last year; however, I’ve encountered my fair share of bugs, crashes, and glitches in iOS and iPadOS 14.0, which haven’t met the high bar set by iOS 12 two years ago.

In an unprecedented move, Apple released iOS and iPadOS 14 with a 24-hour notice to developers, who were only able to test the Golden Master version of both OSes for less than a day before they launched to the public. Before the (also surprising) release of the developer beta of iOS and iPadOS 14.2, I left the public version of 14.0 on my iPhone 11 Pro Max and 2018 iPad Pro for a few days and annotated some of the issues I encountered, which were consistent with bugs I’d seen over the summer with the developer betas of iOS and iPadOS 14.

iPadOS 14.0 has been the most problematic release of the two for me from a performance standpoint. While on the first public release of iPadOS 14, I experienced several SpringBoard crashes on a daily basis; the Magic Keyboard occasionally stopped “accepting” three-finger gestures, forcing me to reboot my iPad Pro to get them working again; perhaps even more oddly, my iPad would outright stop responding to pointer input on the Home Screen whenever I installed or updated apps from the App Store or TestFlight. One day, I found squished icons on my iPad Pro; they only returned to their normal shape after a device reboot.

Feeling a little shy, Music and Mail?

By contrast, iOS 14.0 has performed better on my iPhone and I’ve noticed gradual performance improvements over the summer beta cycle. One of my concerns going into iOS 14 was that widgets would often “get stuck” when updating data from their apps; while that happened often during the beta as I was testing TestFlight apps with WidgetKit support, widgets performed relatively well for me on the public release of iOS 14.0 and I haven’t run into cases of widgets not loading, displaying old data, or showing placeholder content. Your mileage, of course, may vary; I’ve heard from a few MacStories readers who have been experiencing these sorts of issues with widgets on their iPhones.

There’s one particularly problematic aspect of iOS 14.0 I want to point out though: rearranging icons and widgets on the iPhone Home Screen is often the cause of needless frustration and wasted time. Whenever I try to move from one page to another, or if I try to grab an app icon and drag it to a different page, it appears that iOS 14 gets a little too excited and randomly scrambles my carefully curated widget layout in ways I don’t expect. This issue is still occurring on the developer beta of iOS 14.2, and it’s hard to describe since Home Screen layouts can vary wildly from page to page, but I hope Apple can make jiggle mode more reliable and less…surprising in future updates.

As for iOS and iPadOS 14.2, I’m happy to report that this new version has fixed all the issues I was seeing with pointer control on the iPad Home Screen. I also haven’t experienced any SpringBoard crashes so far. The only problem I’ve encountered over the past couple weeks is sync delays in Shortcuts, which sometimes created conflicted copies between the iPhone and iPad when I made changes to complex shortcuts (such as MusicBot) on one device.

My overall take on the performance of iOS and iPadOS 14 is that this year’s releases haven’t been nearly as controversial as iOS 13, which is an achievement in and of itself considering the pandemic and everything else going on this year. If we evaluate iOS 14 in a vacuum, however, we know Apple can do better. At this point, I’m starting to wonder if iOS 12 will eventually be remembered as the “Snow Leopard release” in iOS history.

Home Screen

For as long as we’ve had the iPhone, there’s been one common denominator for novice and power users alike: when you unlock the device, you see a grid of icons on the Home Screen.

The iconic (pun intended) grid has been a staple of the iPhone experience since its introduction in 2007; when Apple announced the iPad in 2010, they also used the Home Screen as its default app launcher. Later, when the company sought to bring popular interaction methods from iPhone and iPad to OS X with the “Back to the Mac” initiative, they also traced a direct line from the classic Home Screen to Launchpad. Arguably, few interface paradigms have had the same impact on the way we use computers today as the Home Screen did.

For the first time in over a decade, the Home Screen is fundamentally changing in iOS 14. With the addition of widgets, Apple is bringing deeper personalization to the Home Screen, allowing developers to elevate their app’s content and users to find information they need more quickly. The result is a more lively, dynamic Home Screen that makes any pre-iOS 14 icon grid feel instantly obsolete.

Apple’s efforts this year aren’t devoid of issues – as we’ll see later, the company is only telling one side of the Home Screen story, oddly excluding iPad – but what’s here today is thoughtfully executed nonetheless. And with the addition of the App Library, a new feature that automatically sorts apps for you, the company seems to ask: what if you didn’t even need a grid of icons in the first place?

Widgets

The headline feature of iOS 14 – the one that is instantly recognizable and has likely pushed millions of users to update already – is, by far, the ability to add widgets to the iPhone’s Home Screen as rich, semi-interactive tiles sitting in between app icons.

Clearly reminiscent of Android but deeply different from a visual and technical standpoint, iOS 14’s reimagined widget experience has been designed to look bold and rich, with widgets serving as gateways into app content that let users preview important, timely data on the Home Screen without opening the associated app. The new widget framework, used by Apple for its own apps and available to third-party developers as WidgetKit, is powered by SwiftUI and leverages lessons Apple learned designing complications for watchOS to deliver updates from apps with minimal impact on battery life – all while supporting modern technologies such as dark mode and dynamic type.

Widgets on the Home Screen in iOS 14.

Before digging deeper into the design principles and overall aesthetic of iOS 14 widgets, it’s important to frame this discussion around the three goals Apple sought to attain with this feature.

First, Apple stressed at WWDC how widgets were created to provide glanceable updates rather than app-like interactions on the Home Screen. The company succinctly presented this with the “widgets are not mini apps” line in one of their technical sessions, and the description couldn’t fit iOS 14’s widgets and WidgetKit framework any better. Rather than offering a subset of functionalities found inside apps on the Home Screen in the form of interactive elements such as, say, music playback controls or scroll bars, widgets are panels that preview pieces of data at a glance. Instead of following in Android’s footsteps and building a music widget that lets you play and skip songs, Apple’s Music widget in iOS 14 shows you music you’ve recently played; contrary to the company’s old Reminders widget in iOS 13 (which aggregated all upcoming tasks from all lists), the Reminders widget in iOS 14 lets you glance at items from a specific list (including the app’s smart ones) along with a task count.

The updated Reminders widget can be configured to display items and task count from a specific list.

This approach is a drastic departure from the previous way of designing widgets for iOS 13 and encapsulates Apple’s visual direction1 with widgets in iOS 14. According to stats shared by the company at WWDC, the average iPhone user sees the Home Screen around 90 times each day; most people’s interactions with the Home Screen are transient and goal-oriented – users typically return to the Home Screen to tap an icon and open another app. Therefore, in redesigning the Home Screen to accommodate widgets, Apple prioritized the option of only having to take a quick peek at a widget to get some value out of it. As a result, the widgets Apple built – and the framework the company created for developers – share roughly the same objectives as complications on a watch face: presenting content as quickly as possible is paramount, so refresh times have to be minimal and invisible to the user; widgets should always be “ready”, avoiding loading indicators; widgets have been designed with a bold aesthetic that omits interactive elements or other controls that require fine precision.

By saying that iOS 14 widgets shouldn’t be considered “mini apps” anymore, Apple is effectively positioning them as something in between icons and full apps – dynamic tiles that are richer and more useful than icons, ultimately acting as optional jumping points into full apps. They’re like “super complications” with a wider degree of customization.

The second goal to consider is the idea of relevancy and timely updates, which Apple is trying to accomplish in a couple different ways. Without delving into the technical minutiae of the framework, what you should know about WidgetKit is that it’s built upon a timeline-based approach where widgets are views rendered by the system in SwiftUI in a separate process from the main app. Even if a widget is displayed onscreen, each app’s widget extension is not continually active; instead, it only receives data updates (and thus refreshes its contents) at specific times (i.e. the aforementioned timeline); these times can be “suggested” by apps, but the OS ultimately has final say. If this reminds you of complications and the Siri face for watchOS, it’s because it is, in broad strokes, the same system.

As is often the case with Apple’s operating systems in recent history, when we say “the system”, on-device intelligence is really the conductor of this entire performance. This is most apparent in the stacking functionality for widgets Apple built in iOS 14. As I’ll explain more in depth later, iOS 14 lets you combine multiple widgets in the same slot on the Home Screen (or in the Today page, which is still available) and flip through them manually with a vertical swipe. However, the system can also automatically cycle through multiple widgets in a stack on your behalf thanks to a ‘smart rotate’ option, which takes into consideration the time of day, your location, and other signals captured on-device to present the most relevant widget. But that’s not all: in addition to regular, user-created stacks, iOS 14 also offers a Smart Stack feature that automatically rotates through several available widgets without you having to worry about creating the stack to begin with. I have some reservations about the Smart Stack and the true effectiveness of automatic widget rotation for power users, but I think it’s an ingenious solution to remove friction from the widget experience nonetheless.

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The Smart Stack in iOS 14.

Apple’s third and final goal for widgets (and perhaps the most important one if you’re reading this review) is personalization. Besides the ability to customize your Home Screen with widgets and design interesting layouts by mixing and matching widgets of different sizes, widgets in iOS 14 support configuration options that let you decide the kind of data that should be presented on the Home Screen.

Configuring widgets in iOS 14.

Widget configuration options are based on Intents, the same technology behind SiriKit and actions in the Shortcuts app. These settings (which you can access by long-pressing a widget and entering edit mode on the Home Screen) can take many shapes and forms: you can, for instance, choose from a list of notes to display in a widget, pick contacts, enter numbers and dates, or choose a location. By making widgets configurable, Apple has moved past the limitations of the old widget framework: it’s thanks to this system that you can add multiple widgets from the same app to the Home Screen in iOS 14 instead of being limited to a single, immutable widget per app.2 Because of this approach, Apple is also banking on third-party developers to build rich and versatile widget integrations for their apps in iOS 14, allowing different parts of an app experience to become something that can be glanced at and intelligently suggested on the Home Screen. And the best part is: if those developers already put in the work to craft rich Shortcuts actions for their apps, they can reuse the same Intents technology for widget configuration in iOS and iPadOS 14.

With these principles in mind, it’s easy to see what Apple’s trying to achieve in iOS 14: the company is laying the groundwork for a future where app content can be projected elsewhere in the system, with relevant updates delivered in a power-efficient, personalized fashion. The company has taken some of the most important lessons they learned building complications for watchOS and they’re bringing them to iOS and iPadOS, where larger screens let them flex their design muscles and more powerful SoCs can support rich Home Screens featuring multiple widgets of varying sizes. In practice, this approach feels like a 1.0 version of a bigger vision in a few places, but the results are already fundamentally changing the Home Screen as we know it.

The Design of Widgets

Before getting into the experience of using and configuring widgets in iOS 14, I want to cover the look and feel of Apple’s new widgets along with some examples from third-party developers.

At a high level, widgets in iOS 14 differ from iOS 13 in two key areas: they support three different size options and they showcase a diverse set of UI styles that are no longer limited by a default “container” design.

Starting with iOS 10, widgets supported two size modes – compact and expanded – that could be toggled by tapping a chevron in the upper right corner of the widget. Furthermore, the widget panel itself was always presented as a layer of frosted glass on top of which apps could overlay their UI elements. No matter the kind of visual customization developers opted for, widgets always displayed each app’s icon and name in the upper left corner of the panel; apps could only fill the widget panel with their contents within specific bounds, resulting in a homogenous appearance where every widget had the same color and shape.

Old widgets in iOS 13.

With iOS 14 and WidgetKit, Apple has thrown these conventions out the window and replaced them with a system that lets apps bring their personality to the Home Screen. The default background color for each widget tile is gone; now, developers can fill the entire panel with custom UI and colors that match their apps’ aesthetic and brand. As a result, while widgets may not behave like “mini apps” technically speaking, they sure can look like smaller versions of apps that use the same UI themes and visual flairs that were previously impossible to embed into widget panels.

The difference between widgets in iOS 13 and 14 is striking.

Widgets in iOS 14 can use more complex layouts thanks to SwiftUI.

It only takes a few comparisons between iOS 13 and 14 to see that the difference is striking. While widgets could feature custom graphics and colors inside the panel before, their appearance was always dictated by a static background color. In iOS 14, as you can see in the shots above, the Notes widget is immediately recognizable since it employs the same yellow padding and stitching found on the app’s icon; the Weather widget features the same edge-to-edge color gradient for a sunny sky found inside the app (when the weather is nice); it’s impossible to miss the widgets for Music and Podcasts, which have colorful backgrounds that match the primary colors of their respective brands. By getting rid of the old translucent background and its default boundaries, Apple has lifted a giant lid on UI customization on the Home Screen, allowing developers to show off their apps’ aesthetic in a way that goes beyond icons.

In addition to the design freedom granted by a widget framework based on SwiftUI, the other upside of iOS 14’s revamped widget system is support for multiple sizes that can be picked by the user upon installing a widget (but not tweaked after the fact). Widgets in iOS 14 come in three sizes:

The small size is a small square tile, roughly equivalent to the space occupied by a grid of 2x2 icons:

The medium size is a rectangle, the equivalent of two rows of icons on the Home Screen (4x2):

Lastly, the large size is a bigger square, matching the space taken by 16 app icons on the Home Screen in a 4x4 grid:

While it is not mandatory for third-party developers to support all the default sizes offered by widgets in iOS 14, Apple is strongly advising they do so to ensure maximum flexibility for users.3 iOS 14 supports installing multiple widgets of multiple sizes for the same app, even in the same Home Screen page or within the same stack; only widgets of the same size can be combined in a stack; unlike iOS 13, there is no longer a way to switch between “compact” and “expanded” layouts for the same widget.

Apple itself has fully embraced widgets in iOS 14 and built modernized versions for all the apps that previously offered widgets in iOS 13, leaving room for some new entries as well. By default, iOS 14 comes with pre-installed widgets for the following apps and system features:

Batteries

Available as ‘Status’ in 3 sizes

Calendar

Available as ‘Up Next’ in 3 sizes

Clock

World Clock (small and medium sizes)

City (small size only)

Files

Available as ‘Recents’ in medium and large

Fitness

Available as ‘Activity’ in small and medium

Maps (3 sizes)

Music

Available as ‘Recently Played’ in 3 sizes

News

Available as ‘Topic’ (3 sizes)

Available as ‘Today’ (4 sizes)4

Notes

Available as ‘Note’ (small size only)

Available as ‘Folder’ (3 sizes)

Photos

Available as ‘For You’ (3 sizes)

Podcasts

Available as ‘Up Next’ (3 sizes)

Reminders

Available as ‘List’ (3 sizes)

Screen Time

Available as ‘Daily Activity’ (3 sizes)

Shortcuts

Available as ‘Shortcut’ (small size only)

Available as ‘Shortcuts Folder’ in medium and large

Siri Suggestions

Available as ‘App Suggestions’ (medium size only)

Available as ‘Shortcut Suggestions’ (3 sizes)

Stocks

Available as ‘Watchlist’ (3 sizes)

Available as ‘Symbol’ (small size only)

Tips (3 sizes)

TV

Available as ‘Up Next’ (3 sizes)

Weather

Available as ‘Forecast’ (3 sizes)

If you sum it all together, Apple created widgets for 19 apps/features for a total of 61 differently sized versions. Such widespread adoption confirms how strongly Apple believes in widgets as the marquee addition to iOS this year; more than numbers alone, however, Apple is leading by example here with some fascinating implementations of WidgetKit – both visually and functionally speaking – that should serve as the North Star for third-party developers designing widgets for their apps in iOS 14.

Music and Weather are, in my opinion, the most visually impressive widgets of Apple’s default collection. Music uses the same coral tone seen in the app’s updated icon as the widget’s background color; your most recently played item is listed in the widget’s top half alongside text labels, followed by a compact grid of other recently played albums; in the small size, a single item is shown instead. While album covers dominate the Music widget, the Weather one is packed full of glyphs and text labels: in the medium and large layouts, Weather shows current conditions for the selected location plus a forecast for the next few hours and, in the large version, the next five days.

Music and Weather are Apple’s most visually impressive widgets in iOS 14.

The Weather widget is the perfect example of the idea of “gateways into apps” I mentioned above: besides giving the feeling that a part of the Weather app has been embedded on the Home Screen, moving from the widget to the full app by tapping the widget reveals a seamless transition from widget to app UI that was impossible to pull off before iOS 14. Just look at the following transition from Home Screen to app and vice versa to get the idea:

The transition from widget to app and vice versa.

Weather is uniquely positioned for this kind of visual effect due to sharing a consistent UI layout with the full app; however, even when widgets don’t look like sections of apps that were pulled out of them and put on the Home Screen, Apple’s animations for going back and forth between a widget and app are tastefully executed. I particularly appreciate the morphing animations seen when transitioning from the Calendar, Files, and Notes widgets into the respective apps:

More transitions from widgets to apps.

As you can tell, these widgets blur the lines between UI seen on the Home Screen and inside apps, which I don’t think is an accident. Going forward, and as you’ll see in some of the third-party examples later, I fully expect this design approach to become commonplace, particularly on iOS where apps always open in full-screen and widgets feel like they’re “expanding” to fill the display and turn into apps.

The Music and Calendar widgets also highlight the use of touch targets – the only interaction available for widgets in iOS 14. As I’ll further elaborate upon later, one of the drawbacks of WidgetKit in iOS 14 is its lack of support for interactions that directly affect the content displayed in the widget (think: a calculator widget where you can press digits in the widget itself, a la PCalc in iOS 13). The only user interaction available for widgets in iOS 14 is tapping the widget or an area of the widget to launch the full app into a specific view or mode.

Each item in these widgets is a tappable area.

The Music widget supports this by letting you tap individual albums to reopen them; in the Calendar widget, individual events are tappable elements; in Shortcuts and Files, you can tap specific shortcuts and documents, respectively, to open them in those apps.

Using Widgets

Allow me to start from the very basics of using widgets: in iOS 14, widgets can live in the Today page (which is still available on the left side of the first Home Screen as an area solely dedicated to widgets), or they can be placed on any Home Screen in between app icons. When you update to iOS 14, existing Apple-made widgets you’ve kept in the Today page are automatically upgraded to their new iOS 14 counterparts; just like app icons, you can long-press a widget, wait for a haptic tap, and drag it away to move it elsewhere. Starting with iOS 14, you can drag widgets out of the Today page and onto any Home Screen; in doing so, app icons will instantly reflow around the widget, allowing you to drop it wherever you want.

Dragging widgets around.

For the sake of historical context (and because I would upset my friend Stephen Hackett if I didn’t mention this), I have to point out how the ripple effect displayed on the iOS 14 Home Screen when you drop a widget is highly reminiscent of the old Mac OS X Dashboard.5

Dragging existing widgets out of the Today view is fun, but there’s a lot more to installing widgets in iOS 14: Apple built an entirely new system for discovering and adding widgets to the Home Screen called the widget gallery. The widget gallery is the central hub for browsing and installing widgets, which you can access by entering jiggle mode on the Home Screen and tapping the new ‘+’ button that appears in the top left corner of the screen.

Opening the widget gallery.

Here’s a fun fact about jiggle mode in iOS 14: you can activate it the old fashioned way by long-pressing icons and holding until they start shaking; alternatively, you can now long-press anywhere on any empty space on the Home Screen to quickly activate jiggle mode. The easiest way to do this is, by far, pressing the empty space around the page indicators at the bottom of any Home Screen.

The widget gallery is a card that pops up from the bottom of the screen (a familiar old friend) with two separate sections: featured widgets and a list of all installed apps that offer widgets. You can also search for specific apps with a search bar at the top of the gallery. If you like one of the widgets you see in the featured area, you can long-press it to drag it directly to the Home Screen; otherwise, tapping the widget once (or selecting one of the apps listed further down in the gallery) will open a secondary page with a list of all the widget sizes and types supported by that app.

You can tap a featured widget to see all the widget types offered by the associated app.

The widget gallery also comes with a list of all apps that offer widgets currently installed on your device.

In the three months I’ve used iOS 14 on my iPhone, I’ve grown to appreciate the design and interactions of the widget gallery. The featured section at the top looks great, and I’ve found the system does, as Apple suggested, intelligently rotate suggestions based on usage and recently installed apps, which makes it easier to get started adding new widgets to the Home Screen.

What’s truly remarkable about the gallery, however, is the fact that, thanks to WidgetKit and SwiftUI, every widget you see in here is a live preview containing actual data from the source app. Because these aren’t static previews based on templates, you can effectively try a widget in the gallery without installing it to get a sense of what it can do for you beforehand. This is vastly superior to the old way of installing widgets in iOS 13, which only provided you with a list of compatible apps with no widget previews whatsoever.

Installing widgets in iOS 14 is a much more visual, contextual experience since widgets contain real data and can be previewed in multiple sizes.

Legacy Widgets

Speaking of installing widgets the old way: iOS 14 maintains compatibility with legacy widgets that haven’t been updated for WidgetKit and iOS 14. You cannot add these widgets to the Home Screen; however you can continue using them in the Today view.

You can still install and use legacy widgets in iOS 14.

To configure old widgets, scroll to the bottom of the Today view and tap the ‘Edit’ button. Doing this will activate regular jiggle mode, but you’ll also notice that legacy widgets will be contained in a standalone section of the Today view within a dark, translucent container. Press the ‘Customize’ button there and you’ll be taken into the old ‘Add Widgets’ configuration screen, where you’ll find all widgets that haven’t been updated for iOS 14.

Once widgets have been added to the Home Screen, you can rearrange or delete them just like you would app icons: enter jiggle mode again, grab a widget, drag it around, and icons will move around it. There are some key differences to consider here though. First, unlike app icons, you can’t grab multiple widgets at once by creating a stack of them: you can only move one widget at a time. Second, despite the increased flexibility of the Home Screen in iOS 14, the underlying icon grid still strictly adheres to a basic structure where the smallest unit has to be a 2x2 grid of icons.

Let me show you what this means in practice. Consider the following scenario: you have a large widget followed by a small one and a group of four icons. However, you want the small widget to sit in between the icons – you want a row of icons on the left, the small widget in the middle, and another row on the right side of the screen. Unfortunately, due to iOS 14’s grid structure, you can’t break a group of four icons down to smaller components; no matter how precisely you try to rearrange the widget, the four icons will always end up together next to it.

These limitations also apply to medium-size widgets. As you can see in the example below, you can’t place a medium widget in between two rows of icons:

I believe the reasoning behind this decision is simple: in order to maintain visual balance on the Home Screen, Apple only allowed widgets to be rearranged around clusters of icons of an equivalent size – four icons for small widgets, and eight icons for medium widgets. While I understand the principle behind it, I can’t help but wish for some added flexibility here; after all, if one of the core ideas behind Home Screen widgets is personalization, I should be able to rearrange icons on my Home Screen however I want.

Stacks

iOS 14 lets you stack (i.e. combine) multiple widgets of the same size in the same slot either on the Home Screen or the Today page. As I mentioned before, there are two ways of stacking widgets: you can let the system take care of it for you with the Smart Stack, or you can create your own stack by manually grouping widgets of the same size together. While there are some differences between the two features, the underlying basics of widget stacks are the same.

From a visual perspective, there is no obvious sign a widget is actually a stack when you’re just staring at a static Home Screen. There’s only one way to tell a widget from a stack without interacting with it: when scrolling pages on the Home Screen, a series of faint vertical dots will appear for a second next to the stack to indicate it is not a single widget, but a group of multiples.

Surprise! It’s a stack.

I don’t like this approach, and I wish there was either a stronger indicator for stacks or, at the very least, an option to always show the dots next to them. Too often I’ve found myself forgetting a widget was actually a stack because I didn’t catch the dots briefly flashing next to it; it’s an unforgiving design that is also not good enough for accessibility.

The vertical dots displayed next to stacks – Smart or otherwise – are meant to suggest you can vertically scroll inside a stack to flip between widgets. When doing so, you’ll notice how stacked widgets are contained within a translucent box and animate with a delightful 3D transition as you scroll. This animation is very nicely done, and I’ve had fun scrolling quickly inside stacks just to flip between widgets like a deck of virtual cards.

Scrolling a stack.

The differences between Smart and regular stacks come into play when configuring the rotation of widgets contained inside them. As far as the Smart Stack is concerned, you can’t modify its contents upon installing it from the widget gallery; once it is on the Home Screen, you can long-press it to reveal an ‘Edit Stack’ button that lets you adjust the widgets offered in the Smart Stack. You can also add more widgets to the Smart Stack after it’s been installed by dropping a widget on top of it; when hovering with a widget over another one of the same size, a translucent outline appears next to it suggesting you’re creating a stack, similarly to when you drag an app icon onto another to create a folder.

Configuring the Smart Stack.

By default, the Smart Stack uses a ‘Smart Rotate’ setting to automatically rotate through widgets during the day based on signals captured by on-device intelligence such as time, location, and user activity. You can, of course, flip through widgets manually any time you want, but if you don’t want the Smart Stack to rotate widgets at all to begin with, you can disable smart rotation and turn it into a regular stack. You can also rearrange the order of widgets suggested in the Smart Stack as well as delete specific ones by swiping across them. The Siri Suggestions widget, which is usually included in the Smart Stack, can also be trained to surface specific shortcuts less by long-pressing it and selecting ‘Suggest Shortcut Less’.

You can train suggestions shown in the Siri Suggestions widget.

My take on the Smart Stack for iOS 14 is more or less consistent with my experience using other ‘intelligence-based’ features in older OSes such as Siri suggestions, suggested shortcuts, or sharing suggestions: the Smart Stack can be hit or miss, and I’ve found its suggestions generic at best, and downright useless most of the time. Perhaps on-device intelligence always had a hard time suggesting useful shortcuts and content on my device because I have too many apps and shortcuts and there’s only so much the Neural Engine can figure out for people like me; whatever the case, while the Smart Stack sounds like a fun idea on paper, I haven’t gotten much utility from it since June.

On the other hand, regular stacks have grown on me over the past few months. As with the Smart Stack, you can add widgets to a stack with drag and drop. You can put up to 10 widgets in the same stack, and you can also enable smart rotation for regular stacks, meaning you can make your own Smart Stack without using Apple’s default suggestions.

I like using stacks in small doses for similar widgets that I think belong to the same place on the Home Screen. For instance: I find myself often opening two specific notes in Apple Notes; rather than creating separate widgets to reopen each note, I created a stack of two small widgets so it only takes up one slot on my Home Screen. Because the stack is only comprised of four widgets, flipping through them is quick enough and I don’t mind the additional tap required.

Flipping through my Notes stack on the Home Screen.

Similarly, I’ve allotted a medium slot at the top of my Home Screen to music widgets (based on Soor, Apple Music, and MusicHarbor); as soon as my favorite podcast player Castro adds widget support, I plan to create a “media stack” in that slot so I can flip through music and podcasts.

My music stack.

The small Shortcuts widget is also an ideal candidate for stacks since you can flip through multiple shortcuts (perhaps from different folders in the app) and run them directly from the Home Screen. I’ve created a stack with three of my most used shortcuts on a daily basis and placed it on one of my Home Screens; this way, in exchange for giving up the space usually allotted to four app icons, I can now access three shortcuts that run inline within the Home Screen (more on this later).

Broadly speaking, I feel like stacking works better for “launcher” style widgets (e.g. widgets that run specific actions or open apps into specific views or functions): a stack defeats the whole purpose of glanceability since stacked widgets are hidden from view, but it works quite nicely as a way to group related actions together. Personally, I’m not a fan of stacks that contain more than four widgets since scrolling to find the right one becomes somewhat tedious; I do appreciate, however, that Apple put a relatively high cap on the maximum number of widgets in a stack, as I’m sure there will be folks who are going to take advantage of this in their Home Screen setups.

Configuring Widgets

Unlike old widgets in iOS 13, widgets in iOS 14 can be configured inline – directly from the Home Screen – with a consistent UI based on multiple options. To make this configuration possible, Apple turned to a technology that already allowed users to tweak various parameters: Intents, previously used by Siri and Shortcuts. Specifically, widgets in iOS 14 can be configured by adjusting parameters (introduced in last year’s Shortcuts app) that let you change a widget’s displayed content, appearance, and behavior.

You don’t need to know all the technicalities behind this approach, but here’s the gist of it: developers can build widget extensions with the same Intents framework that’s been around for years now, and they can leverage the same parameter API previously seen in Shortcuts to provide users with visual options to tweak widgets from a built-in configuration screen.

Here’s how this works: when a widget supports configuration, you can long-press it and you’ll find an ‘Edit Widget’ button6; tap it and the widget will flip around7, revealing a configuration page where you can tweak parameters pertaining to the widget.

Configuring the Notes widget in iOS 14.

WidgetKit supports all kinds of parameter types, from lists and text fields to switches, sliders, steppers, currency amounts, and even contact pickers. Related parameters can be grouped together into sections, and developers can even provide default values, which users can later tweak to their liking.

There are some interesting implementations of user configuration in Apple’s own widgets: Notes, for example, lets you pick and search for a note or folder you want to reopen; Calendar has a toggle to mirror settings from the main app, which you can disable to pick different calendars to show in the widget; the Clock widget lets you rearrange cities as well as pick different ones from a list.

Widget configuration options for Notes, Clock, and Calendar.

If Apple has demonstrated how SwiftUI and WidgetKit can enable the creation of widgets that look and feel like full app components, third-party developers have gone well beyond my expectations in the three months they’ve been able to design widgets for iOS 14, proving how – to abuse an old, but fitting expression – widgets powered by SwiftUI will be the next design playground for a new generation of app makers.

You may now be familiar with the design of iOS 14 widgets: in the weeks since iOS 14 launched with a 24-hour notice, Apple highlighted hundreds of widget-enabled apps on the App Store and we’ve been busy covering our favorites at MacStories. What I want to do here, however, is put the spotlight on my favorite examples of widget configuration in iOS 14 based on Intents and parameters. Consider these the crème de la crème of iOS 14 widgets.

Todoist, the popular cross-platform task manager, added a variety of widgets for iOS 14 to let you visualize your upcoming tasks as well as your productivity levels. I’d like to bring your attention to Todoist’s ‘Add Task’ widget though: this widget lets you open Todoist’s task composer, which in itself isn’t a revolutionary idea, you might observe. But here’s the magic trick: thanks to widget configuration, you can customize each instance of this widget so that the task composer is launched with specific details about the task already filled in. You can, for instance, put in a default title and due date, give the task a default project or section, and even assign labels and priorities from the widget itself. You can interact with all these parameters using aforementioned UI elements such as text fields, buttons, and lists.

Configuration options for Todoist’s ‘Add Task’ widget.

Because in iOS 14 you can install multiple copies of the same widget and configure each one independently from the other, you can effectively use Todoist’s new widgets as task templates that live on the Home Screen. Press one, and you’re taken to the app’s task creation screen, where the options you configured will be already set and you’ll just have to finish entering the rest of the task’s details.

Multiple Todoist widgets to create tasks inside different projects.

I saved the best detail for last: because Apple based WidgetKit’s configuration on the same technology behind Shortcuts, the ‘Add Task’ widget is based on the same code that powers the ‘Create Task’ action in Shortcuts. In both cases, Todoist relies on a task intent to create a new todo inside the app, and it’s using the same parameters to do so from either a widget or a Shortcuts action. It’s literally the same feature presented differently in two different areas of iOS.

Corporate needs you to find the differences between this picture and this picture.

This consistency is great for developers (if you’ve already put in the work to support rich shortcuts with parameters in iOS 13, you’re halfway there in terms of having a configurable widget), and it’s great for users, who may already be familiar with options they’ve seen elsewhere before.

Consider now Timery, Joe Hribar’s outstanding time tracking utility for iPhone and iPad based on the Toggl web service. Timery’s widgets are some of my absolute favorites for iOS 14, and I’m using several variations of them on my Home Screens: on the first page, I have a small widget to start a time entry; on the second one, I have a stack featuring a widget that reports total time tracked this week grouped by project, plus another chart that only shows me a specific project; in the Today view, I have another Timery widget with a grid of saved timers I can start with a single tap. Timery is the leading example of the freedom granted by multiple widget types and sizes, and developer Joe Hribar has done a terrific job in going all-in with WidgetKit.

The excellent Timery widgets for iOS 14.

All the Timery widgets that deal with presenting reports about tracked time are configurable so you can tweak different properties for workspaces, clients, projects, and more. I think you know where this is going. The parameters behind Timery’s ‘Time Tracked’ widget are the same ones found in Timery’s ‘Check Total Time Tracked’ action in Shortcuts; they use the same combination of switches, segmented controls, and lists to let you filter timers, and they’re one of the best implementations of parameters you can find on the App Store at the moment.

The only difference between the Timery widget and Shortcuts action is the time ranges available for filtering purposes.

Even when there’s no 1:1 match between a widget’s parameters and its related Shortcuts action, widget configuration is still a powerful enhancement to iOS 14’s widget framework compared to iOS 13. Lire, my favorite RSS reader for iOS and iPadOS 14, offers an ‘Articles’ widget that presents you with a list of headlines from the publications you follow. What I love about this widget is that you can make it your own and customize it to fetch articles from specific blogs or folders, return unread or starred posts, and even search for specific keywords in titles (without having to make a saved search for those beforehand). Want to install a Lire widget for high-volume tech feeds, plus another one for calm feeds restricted to posts with “iOS 14” in the title? You can do this thanks to Lire’s adoption of widget configuration.

Lire offers a vast array of configuration options for its ‘Articles’ widget.

A few other notable examples of widget configuration: GoodTask, the powerful Reminders client, has fantastic widgets to create new tasks based on templates (similar to Todoist) as well as configurable task lists; Fantastical features multiple widgets that can be tweaked to mirror the app’s settings or use specific calendars and calendar sets instead; CARROT Weather now comes with an avalanche of widgets that can be configured with dozens of different data points.

More configuration options for third-party widgets in iOS 14.

Hopefully, these examples have given you a sense of the possibilities opened by the WidgetKit framework and parameters, which should allow developers to craft rich, information-dense widget experiences for the Home Screen that match the same functionalities previously seen in Shortcuts.

Just like I argued last year that all developers looking to integrate with Shortcuts actions should support parameters, I similarly believe the best widgets for iOS 14 are the ones with deep configuration options that let users adjust them to their needs. The ability to customize widgets inline is one of the greatest advantages over the old widget system of iOS 13, and I hope it’s not overlooked by most developers.

Limitations of Widgets

In case it wasn’t clear, I’ll say this upfront: I’m a fan of iOS 14’s new widgets and I think a clean break from the past with the WidgetKit framework was a necessary step for the Home Screen to evolve in a different direction. The richness of new widgets and flexibility available to developers eclipse the few benefits exclusive to the older widget technology. That said, it’s important to point out the limitations of WidgetKit today and consider where Apple may be heading next.

The main drawback of WidgetKit is that it’s a read-only framework that doesn’t allow widgets to feature interactive elements such as switches, scroll bars, or keypads. As we’ve seen in the examples above, the only “interaction” available in iOS 14 widgets is the ability to tap different areas inside a widget to launch an app. Since WidgetKit is based on SwiftUI snapshots, iOS 14 widgets essentially retrieve data from an app, render it as a static image inside their container, and all you can do is tap a touch target within the widget to launch a URL scheme.

WidgetKit’s approach could be considered a “regression” by developers who built widgets that supported complex inline interactions in iOS 13. Before WidgetKit, it was fairly common, for instance, to find widgets that featured inline calculators, a clipboard manager with scroll bars, music playback controls, or the ability to check off items from a task manager without actually opening the app; all these categories of widgets aren’t supported by WidgetKit at the moment. This means that apps such as PCalc, Anybuffer, or OmniFocus will have to keep their existing widgets around in legacy mode (but users won’t be able to add them to the Home Screen) or offer new widgets with fewer/different functionalities. Furthermore, widgets that updated their contents inline following a user’s tap (such as Timery, which started an inline timer after a selection inside the widget) won’t be able to offer the same functionality with WidgetKit – whenever the user taps a widget, the associated app opens, and there’s nothing developers can do to prevent it.

This is where we have to go back to Apple’s initial presentation of widgets for iOS 14: they’re not meant to be “mini apps” (even though some of them look like it) and they were designed with glanceability in mind. As a user, I can accept the trade-off: after all, we’re getting widgets that are vastly richer, and more customizable, than ever before, and we can finally place them anywhere we want on the Home Screen. I’d rather have these options than interactive widgets stuck in the Today view forever. As a reviewer though, I have to wonder: was Apple’s stance dictated more by current technical limitations than strong internal opinions on the matter? By which I mean: is WidgetKit read-only for now because SwiftUI snapshots rendered on a timeline were the easiest first step8 to bring widgets to the Home Screen, with a deeper, fully interactive mode coming within the next couple years?

I can’t answer these questions right now, nor do I feel like assuming the answer is “yes” should absolve WidgetKit of its de-facto limitations today. Read-only widgets are a compromise I’m willing to accept because I like what they offer today, but I’m also disappointed developers like James Thomson and Joe Hribar can’t build highly interactive experiences with WidgetKit right now. The two statements aren’t mutually exclusive.

My other complaints about widgets are more circumstantial and concern Apple’s implementation in their own widgets rather than the framework itself. Here are some that stood out to me during the beta cycle:

Music: The Music widget is limited to showing items you’ve recently played. Due to technical limitations of WidgetKit, it can’t be an actual Now Playing widget with interactive playback controls, as you may have seen on Android. However, third-party apps like Soor have shown that it’s possible to offer a non-interactive Now Playing widget that updates in near real-time. I’m also surprised by the lack of configuration options: you can’t customize the widget to, say, open specific albums, playlists, or sections in Apple Music. Just like the Notes widget supports multiple modes that let you choose whether you want to see recently modified items or open specific notes, I hope Music will be updated with similar configuration options in the future.

Files: Same as above: the Files widget is limited to displaying files you’ve recently opened. There’s a real missed opportunity here for widgets that let you reopen specific files or folders inside the Files app with a single tap from the Home Screen.

Shortcuts: While there’s lots to like in Shortcuts’ updated widget (as we’ll see later, it’s been updated for compact UI, making widget shortcuts considerably faster to run from the Home Screen), I have an issue with its information density. In the medium size, the Shortcuts widget can only display four shortcuts at a time, and I feel like it could fit twice the amount and still remain comfortable to use. The large widget fares even worse: it only displays eight shortcuts in the same space where 16 app icons would normally fit on the Home Screen. Here’s hoping the compact UI ideology eventually finds its way to the Shortcuts widget as well.

Clock: I once tweeted that I wished the World Clock widget supported a digital mode because I can’t quickly glance at the time with analog clocks, and multiple Twitter users made fun of my education background. Those users are gone from my timeline thanks to Twitter’s block feature; my disappointment with Apple’s analog-only widget remains.

Regardless of my criticisms around WidgetKit and Apple’s built-in widgets, I genuinely believe the ability to customize the Home Screen with widgets is one of the most exciting changes to the iPhone experience for all kinds of users in years.

In the four months I’ve been using iOS 14 on my iPhone, I’ve gotten used to the idea that the Home Screen isn’t just a grid of app icons anymore. Which is also where iOS 14’s other major change to the Home Screen experience – the brand new App Library – comes in.

App Library

There’s a recurring gag on AppStories, the app-focused podcast I co-host with John Voorhees, in which I poke fun at the large number of apps installed on John’s iPhone. At some point, I believe the Home Screen pages on his iPhone even reached double digits. The App Library, a new feature of the iPhone Home Screen introduced in iOS 14, was designed for people like John: folks who use their iPhones a lot, have a lot of installed apps and download new ones on a regular basis, but who also fundamentally dislike organizing them. The App Library was designed to fix all this with a simple, elegant interface powered by on-device intelligence.

The App Library in iOS 14.

The App Library sits at the opposite end of the Today view on the Home Screen: it’s the very last page of the Home Screen, which you can reach by swiping left on your iPhone until you see a collection of app “folders” organized in a grid dubbed the App Library. Here’s what the iPhone Home Screen’s horizontal hierarchy looks like with the addition of the App Library:

The Home Screen’s new horizontal structure.

The easiest way to describe the App Library is the following: it’s a new space that organizes all of your apps in a single view; the App Library automatically sorts your apps into categories, allows you to remove app icons from the Home Screen without actually deleting apps, and surfaces relevant apps that may be helpful in the moment thanks to on-device intelligence. Let’s break these ideas down step by step.

There’s nothing you need to do to get started with the App Library: it is created by default by iOS 14 and there’s no way to turn it off. When you swipe over to the App Library, you’ll notice it automatically sorts apps into (what Apple refers to as) “intelligently curated categories” that look like traditional Home Screen folders, with some key differences. First, these categories are decided by iOS 14 and they appear to be based on the category each app is listed under on the App Store, such as ‘Lifestyle’ or ‘Productivity’; you cannot rename the App Library’s categories, which are also automatically reordered for you based on app use – the idea being that you may find Productivity apps higher in the grid during the day, replaced by Games or Entertainment at night.

Additionally, unlike regular folders, App Library categories support multiple ways of opening apps contained inside them. You can tap a large app icon in a category to instantly open it as if it were an icon on the Home Screen, or you can tap the smaller grid of icons in the lower right corner of a category to expand it and view all apps sorted into that category. I wish it was more obvious, but to go back to the App Library once you’re into a category, you need to tap an empty area of the screen.

Using the App Library.

You can also long-press app icons in the App Library to see quick actions (like on the Home Screen) as well as drag icons out of the App Library to add them back to the Home Screen.

Besides “regular” categories for apps based on their purpose, you’ll also find two top-level intelligent categories in the App Library: Suggestions and Recently Added. The first one is a compact version of the existing Siri Suggestions widget and Search feature, which surfaces apps based on signals such as usage, time of day, location, and activity; Recently Added – one of my favorite details about the App Library – is a handy way to see all apps you’ve recently downloaded on your iPhone. In a nice touch for anyone living the beta lifestyle, TestFlight is another automatic category for the App Library, but that’s only available by scrolling further down the grid.

The App Library comes with special categories for Recently Added and TestFlight apps.

The App Library also supports a search mode: tap into the search field and you’ll be presented with a vertical list of all apps installed on your iPhone. You can search the list by name, move quickly through the list with the alphabetical scrubber on the right, and drag app icons out of the list to add them back to the Home Screen.

You can search and long-press app icons in the App Library.

I’m not sure why the App Library needs a search mode: the basic, alphabetical list of apps is a nice addition, but would you really search for apps inside the App Library when you can always swipe down on any Home Screen page and find apps via Search? The only explanation I was able to come up with is that search in the App Library is restricted to apps only, and nothing else.

There’s one key principle to understand regarding the App Library’s relationship with the Home Screen: the App Library is a layer superseding the Home Screen, and it “exists” regardless of whether you decide to show app icons on the Home Screen or not. However, the Home Screen is still considered the primary app launcher in iOS 14: no matter how much you want to use the App Library, you need to keep at least one Home Screen page on your iPhone; you can’t go all-in on the App Library and stop using the Home Screen altogether. The App Library is an accessory to the Home Screen, and the two are linked to each other in terms of how you can manage installed apps and their visibility. Which is why I feel like the integration between Home Screen and App Library is even more interesting than the design of the App Library itself.

With the arrival of the App Library, for instance, the way you can delete apps in iOS 14 has changed. The ‘Delete App’ button that appeared in the context menu on the Home Screen when long-pressing an app icon has turned into ‘Remove App’ in iOS 14: pressing it now reveals an additional menu that lets you delete the app and all its data or only remove it from the Home Screen and add it to the App Library instead.

iOS 14’s new option for moving apps to the App Library from the Home Screen.

This is an ingenious decision on Apple’s part: if you’re on a spring-cleaning spree and decided to get rid of several icons from your Home Screen, iOS now gives you an easier way to clean up your pages without the “guilt” typically associated with deleting apps. I find this a fantastic addition to the Home Screen experience, and something I’ve done myself dozens of times already over the past few months for all those apps I don’t want to see all the time, but which I don’t want to delete either.

But iOS 14 enables something even more radical than hiding icons from the Home Screen: hiding entire Home Screen pages with just a couple taps. Once again, let’s turn to John: he likely ended up with 300 different apps on his iPhone and dozens of pages where everything’s messy and scattered around after the summer. He doesn’t want to manually create folders for those apps, nor does he feel like hitting the ‘Remove App’ button for each of those 300 apps. If you’re anything like John, you’d be happy to know there’s a much easier way to do this in iOS 14: enter jiggle mode on the Home Screen and tap the page indicators (dots) at the bottom to open the new ‘Edit Pages’ screen. Here, by simply pressing on checkboxes underneath each page, you can hide entire Home Screen pages and rest assured you’ll still be able to launch every app via Search or the App Library.

You can disable Home Screen pages by entering jiggle mode and tapping the page indicators.

If you feel like your iPhone Home Screen has grown out of control after years of unabated downloads from the App Store, page editing is going to be an amazing time saver to get started with the App Library and hit the reset button on your Home Screen experience. It’s also interesting to consider how this feature could help form new habits such as, say, disabling a “work Home Screen” filled with work-related apps for the weekend, or turning on a “fitness Home Screen” only when you’re heading to the gym. There are lots of possibilities here, and I’m keen to see how the public adopts this feature.9

The integration between Home Screen and App Library extends to the App Store as well. In Settings ⇾ Home Screen, you’ll find an option to choose whether new app downloads from the App Store should be added to the Home Screen (the old default behavior) or only to the App Library, without showing an icon on the Home Screen by default anymore. Offering this kind of control makes sense: if you’re trying to clean up your Home Screen but don’t want to give up on downloading new apps and games from the App Store, this option is the perfect middle ground; furthermore, the Recently Added section of the App Library makes it easy to find and launch newly downloaded apps. This Settings page is also where you’ll find an option to show notification badges in the App Library; personally, because I only care about notifications for apps on my two Home Screen pages, I decided to leave badges off for everything else.

App Clips (more here) that you recently launched will also appear in the Recently Added section of the App Library.

As it stands today, the App Library is a feature of the Home Screen, which remains the primary app launcher of iOS. The App Library isn’t a replacement for the Home Screen (although some users will try to treat it as such): it’s an extra tool designed to remove the burden of organizing apps and pages, using on-device intelligence to sort apps based on criteria we may not normally consider – or perhaps just wouldn’t have the time to manage.

Even though I’m still struggling to leave my old Home Screen habits behind, I believe the App Library largely succeeds in its goal of providing an effortless app launcher and sorting tool. Some of the automatic app categories have…questionable labels (why should a weather app be listed under Reference & Reading?), but they’re usually fairly accurate; the built-in categories for suggestions, recently added apps, and TestFlight betas are great additions, and it’s because of them I find myself using the App Library more each week.

I believe the App Library’s biggest issue at the moment is its placement: in the same year Apple is launching Home Screen widgets and encouraging you to add widgets to multiple pages on your Home Screen, they’re also introducing the App Library, which requires you to swipe all the way to the end of those pages. I’m genuinely surprised the company didn’t come up with a universal gesture to invoke the App Library from anywhere on the Home Screen; had they done that, I think they would have a much stronger case in positioning the App Library as a new kind of dynamic, intelligent app launcher, with the Home Screen becoming a richer area dedicated to glanceable widgets, quick actions, and other compact UI elements.

Is today’s App Library a first step towards such a future? Or is it set to remain a feature of the Home Screen – an optional mode that doesn’t quite replace iOS’ primary app launcher? I don’t know what Apple’s long-term plans for the coexistence of the Home Screen and App Library are. For now, what I do know is that I’m enjoying the ability to clean up my Home Screens, and I hope the App Library continues to evolve.

iPad Home Screen

Consider everything we’ve seen regarding the updated Home Screen so far: for the first time in over a decade, Apple is rethinking one of its most iconic features; they’re bringing glanceable, configurable, multi-size widgets to the Home Screen; they’re using intelligence to power the App Library, which organizes apps for you and lets you find them more quickly.

Can you think of a single reason why these features should not exist on iPad?

Unfortunately for us, Apple can.

I’m going to cut right to the chase: iPadOS 14 does not offer the ability to place widgets anywhere on the Home Screen in between app icons, nor does it have the App Library. You can install modern widgets on iPad, and you can choose their size and configure them just like on iPhone, but you’ll still be forced to leave them in the left column on the Home Screen. As for the App Library, it’s nowhere to be found in iPadOS 14.

My iPadOS 14 Home Screen.

I’ve been trying to reconcile Apple’s muddy explanation of these decisions and my thoughts on the matter for the past few months, and I could only come up with a personal theory that doesn’t really solve anything. The company’s official reasoning for the lack of Home Screen widgets and App Library on iPadOS 14 essentially boils down to the fact that iPad has a dock, a larger Home Screen, and a different design from the iPhone – observations that should, somehow, explain why widgets can only live in a single column on iPad.

Taken at face value, these comments make little sense with regard to the ability to intermix widgets and app icons on the Home Screen. If anything, the opposite is true: because iPad has a larger dock and bigger screen, users would have even more space to place widgets on the Home Screen given that app icons can go elsewhere. One could even make the case that widgets are better suited for the iPad’s larger display than the iPhone, where you can only fit a handful onscreen at a time. On iPad – and especially on bigger iPad Pro models – you could easily assemble a Home Screen dominated by widgets, with your most used apps in the dock, and everything else in the App Library. It makes perfect sense, so why not?

The only reasonable explanation I can think of is, quite simply, time and priorities. It would be perfectly understandable if Home Screen widgets and the App Library came to iPhone first because, due to everything going on this year, Apple had to prioritize one platform over the other and make a decision dictated by time and technical constraints. As much as I dislike seeing iPad in the backseat again, getting new features years after the iPhone did (a story we’ve heard far too many times in the past), it would be acceptable given the circumstances.

The reason why I and other iPad-first users are critical of these omissions from the iPadOS 14 Home Screen is that Apple tried to convince us that there’s a bigger, inscrutable design decision we can’t see behind the lack of changes to the iPad Home Screen this year. It’s the company’s usual secrecy, combined with the disappointment of a wasted opportunity given the iPad’s large display, that stings here. Let me be clear: with this, I don’t mean to imply iPad users are entitled to be let in on every decision Apple makes behind the scenes; but to go on the record and say that “the larger iPad screen lends itself better” to keep pinned widgets in a column feels a bit disingenuous.

There’s nothing much to say about the iPadOS 14 Home Screen then. Everything I’ve written so far about new widgets applies here as well, only they cannot be moved out of the Today column. Developers can create glanceable widgets of multiple sizes, which you can install from the widget gallery by entering jiggle mode and configure by long-pressing (or right-clicking) them. You can use the Smart Stack or create stacks of widgets manually. These are the same interactions seen on the iPhone, and modern widgets designed with WidgetKit and SwiftUI look fantastic on the iPad’s large display too.

The only difference from the iPhone is, of course, the Today column and the ability (introduced in iPadOS 13) to keep widgets permanently pinned to the Home Screen next to app icons. When entering jiggle mode in iPadOS 14, you’ll see three sections in the Today column: pinned widgets, other widgets, and legacy widgets.

Configuring widgets in iPadOS 14.

The widget gallery on iPad.

In iPadOS 14, you can install up to four small widgets (or two medium ones, or a single large one) in the pinned area; if pinned mode is enabled, these widgets will always be displayed next to icons on the Home Screen. As with iPadOS 13, you can view other installed widgets by swiping with your finger or trackpad over the Today column.

I use the iPad Pro as my primary computer every day, and I would have loved the ability to place and configure widgets across multiple Home Screens, leaving my most used apps in the dock and everything else in the App Library. Unlike Apple (or at least their public comments), I strongly believe the iPad’s large screen is uniquely positioned to make the most out of a hybrid Home Screen setup where icons and widgets coexist. I hope the company changes its mind on this with iPadOS 15 next year.

A Home for the Future

In one fell swoop, the iPhone Home Screen has evolved from an anachronistic app launcher reluctant to change into a fascinating, modern lens through which we can infer where Apple’s software may be headed next.

There are several trends at play in the iOS 14 Home Screen, no one less important or relevant than the other. With the new widgets, Apple is showing us that lessons learned on watchOS, combined with the performance of SwiftUI, can power energy-efficient, glanceable interfaces that work well on an iPhone and iPad today, but which could easily fit other (much smaller) form factors in the future. On-device intelligence plays an important role in the new Home Screen as well: your device can now intelligently rotate widgets during the day and sort apps for you in the App Library; Intents, the same technology behind SiriKit and Shortcuts, has been used as the foundation for widget configuration; with iOS 14, you can ignore the classic Home Screen experience and let the App Library perform intelligent app sorting for you.

In my iOS 10 review from 2016, I noted how we were moving away from the traditional app-centric model, with iOS apps becoming “atomic units” that provided the system with a collection of services. I wrote:

When different features of an app can be experienced throughout the system, the app becomes more of a collection of services, broken into atomic units. They’re pervasive. Providing apps with more extensibility hooks results in moving more interactions away from the traditional app experience and into single-purpose mini interfaces. Whether it’s an interactive notification, a widget, an iMessage app, or a SiriKit extension, iOS 10 has a clear vision of apps as contextual helpers in addition to being standalone utilities. It’s only reasonable to expect Apple to follow this path going forward.

Apple followed such a path with the introduction of parameters in Shortcuts actions last year, and widgets in iOS 14 feel like the logical conclusion of a journey that began with extensions in iOS 8: now you can glance at parts of an app directly from the Home Screen, which is turning into a rich, personalized, intelligent dashboard that goes well beyond app icons.

Regardless of future applications of widgets and intelligent app suggestions, the Home Screen we have today in iOS 14 is – despite a few aforementioned missteps – a success. Apple may be late to the widget party (other companies have done them before, and we’ve all seen the concepts over the years), but the company has the ecosystem, marketplace, and technical foundation to let widgets – and, by reflection, a modernized Home Screen – gain critical mass among millions of users in a way that doesn’t impact battery life or compromise privacy.

The Home Screen is changing, turning into something more personal, versatile, and intelligent than an icon launcher. I’m curious to see if, as a result, our core smartphone habits – actions we’ve performed for over a decade – will change because of it too.

Design

I posited last year how the time of sweeping iOS redesigns may be behind us. With nearly a billion active iPhone users out there, the idea of fundamentally altering the design of the operating system they use on a daily basis becomes a tricky proposition, if not downright dangerous: change too much, and you could risk alienating an audience that, incidentally, is also paying for an array of monthly premium services. If you’re Apple, you likely wouldn’t want to upset those precious active customers with an iPhone update they don’t understand anymore; and especially after last year’s buggy iOS 13 rollout, you’d probably want to make sure no further goodwill is squandered in the name of redesigns for novelty’s sake.

The evolution of Apple’s design language in iOS 14 follows the same path traced by its predecessors: the company is refining rather than subverting the experience, making our devices easier to use in key areas such as phone calls and video playback, all while continuing to freely borrow (and remix) well-trodden concepts from macOS.

Amidst these changes, however, there are also the first signs of an overarching idea that may hint at deeper changes for the future of design on Apple platforms.

Compact UI

Apple’s philosophy for visual design in iOS and iPadOS 14 is to decrease the amount of onscreen space dedicated to frequently used UI elements. The goal is to put more focus on content, letting users retain the context of what they’re doing, and make our devices easier to use. Apple’s marketing umbrella for these changes is “compact UI”, and it’s a design principle that’s been applied to various areas of the operating system.

As I’m going to detail below, redesigning key system functionalities for compact UI is a fascinating exercise in restraint: how can you consolidate familiar interactions into a smaller interface element, cutting the superfluous bits, while being mindful of other onscreen UI? For the most part, the results in iOS and iPadOS 14 are superb, and another example of Apple’s judicious design iteration.

Phone Calls

This one deserves a big, unabashed finally: if you receive a phone call while you’re using your iPhone, the call UI no longer takes over the entire screen, interrupting what you’re doing. Instead, phone calls in iOS 14 (the same is true on iPadOS too) are displayed as notification banners that descend from the top of the screen, allowing you to pick up a call, deny it, or ignore it.

You can also put a call on speaker directly from the call banner.

This feature alone may be everything you need to know to sell you on compact UI. Replacing modal phone calls with an alternative design has been one of the most common feature requests by iPhone users in recent years; countless concepts and jailbreak tweaks envisioned solutions similar to what Apple ended up delivering in iOS 14.

Phone calls are the prime example of leveraging compact UI to redesign iOS features so they don’t lose key functionality. When a call comes in, you can answer or deny it with the tap of a button. You can swipe down on the call banner to bring it into full screen and get the usual pre-iOS 14 design, but you can also swipe the banner up and let the call continue ringing in the status bar. This is a fantastic implementation of call management since it leans into a familiar gesture (swiping a notification away) and uses it to rethink how people can ignore phone calls without staring at a full-screen call UI.

You can swipe an incoming call upward and let it keep ringing in the status bar.

There are settings to control the phone call behavior in iOS 14. If, for some reason, you like phone calls to still be displayed in full screen when your device is unlocked, you can revert to the old iOS 13 design in Settings ⇾ Phone ⇾ Incoming Calls and pick the ‘Full Screen’ option. As explained in Settings, the new phone call design applies to Phone, FaceTime, and VoIP apps; if you’re a developer of a CallKit-enabled app, you get this feature “for free” by virtue of using Apple’s native framework.

I’ve always despised the design of intrusive phone calls that interrupted what I was doing and forced me to wait until the call was done ringing so I could resume my activity. I’ve grown to love the ability to swipe call banners away into the notch, and I can’t imagine ever going back to a full-screen call UI. Good riddance.

Picture in Picture for iPhone

In keeping with the theme of addressing longstanding feature requests and making the iPhone easier to use, Apple brought another welcome enhancement to iOS 14: it’s now possible to watch videos with Picture in Picture on iPhone.

Originally launched on iPad in 2015 with iOS 9, Picture in Picture lets you continue watching videos in a floating window while you’re doing something else on your device. Picture in Picture supports multiple window sizes, can be easily controlled by moving it across the screen (or hiding it in its corners), and supports any video that plays with the system’s native video player, although developers can also integrate it with their own custom players. I love using Picture in Picture on iPad, and I’m glad Apple realized our phones are now big enough to accomodate a floating video player as well.

There’s essentially nothing to explain when it comes to Picture in Picture for iOS: it’s the same iPadOS feature, updated to work on a smaller screen. On modern iPhones carrying a Home indicator, Picture in Picture automatically activates if you’re watching a video that supports this mode and swipe up to exit the current app. The Twitch app, for instance, lets you continue watching videos in Picture in Picture by swiping up on the Home indicator to close Twitch and return to the Home Screen.

Picture in Picture for iPhone in iOS 14.

As on iPad, Picture in Picture also works with FaceTime calls, so you can continue having a conversation while checking an iMessage thread, webpage, or something else. In Settings ⇾ General ⇾ Picture in Picture, you’ll also find an option to choose whether Picture in Picture should start automatically after swiping up to go Home or not.

There is one notable addition to Picture in Picture in iOS and iPadOS 14: now, you can double-tap the video player to switch between two different sizes; as before, you can also pinch the video player to make it bigger or smaller.10

You can make the Picture in Picture window smaller or hide it in a corner.

Initially, I was somewhat concerned that the Picture in Picture video player wouldn’t be comfortable to use on iPhone. In reality, while I still think it’s preferable to enjoy longer video-watching sessions on iPad, I think Picture in Picture for iPhone is perfectly fine if you don’t want to stop watching a video when you need to do something else in another app for a few minutes. Yes, the Picture in Picture window does feel more constrained on iPhone, even on the larger Pro Max models, but it’s not that bad, particularly if the video you’re watching doesn’t require you to squint at finer details (such as subtitles). In its biggest configuration, the video player feels large enough for most videos on an iPhone 11 Pro Max, and I’ve been using this feature a lot all summer when catching up on videos from my favorite Twitch streamers.

Of course, the question on everyone’s mind right now is whether Apple and Google will put their video agreement to good use and enable native Picture in Picture for the YouTube app. Once that happens – and given that Apple and Google worked out their 4K differences, I don’t see why this can’t be resolved too – I’m sure my usage of this feature will skyrocket.

Siri

Nowhere are the effects of compact UI more visible than Siri. In iOS and iPadOS 14, the assistant is shedding its former full-screen appearance in favor of a notification-like design that displays results inline, without interrupting what you’re doing. As far as the impact of compact UI goes, what happened to Siri in iOS 14 is pretty dramatic:

Siri in iOS 14 uses a new compact mode for more concise results.

As before, you can activate Siri by long-pressing the side button or via ‘Hey Siri’. Siri’s compact redesign extends to the activation experience as well: where in iOS 13 Siri would immediately start listening in full screen, in iOS 14 you’ll only see an animated Siri blob float toward the bottom of the screen and wait for your command. The updated Siri indicator feels like an element with a life of its own: it playfully pulses and morphs as you speak, displaying a cute loading animation while it’s processing your requests until it pushes out results in the form of notification-like banners or inline responses. It’s fun, gleeful, and, more importantly, doesn’t hide what you’re doing.

The new Siri animation in iOS 14.

It’s not just iPhone: Siri no longer takes over the entire screen on iPad either, where it’s now displayed with compact UI in the lower right corner of the device’s display. In an amusing instance of time being a flat circle, this Siri design for iPad is effectively the same as the very first version of Siri for iPad back in the days of iOS 5.

The new compact Siri in iPadOS 14.

The changes in Siri this year aren’t merely cosmetic though. Besides the idea of turning the assistant into a side companion that doesn’t hide the app you’re currently using, Apple also revised Siri’s approach to responses so its results are more concise and contextual.

Most Siri results now present fewer options in an attempt to get to the core of a user’s request. Asking for today’s weather in iOS 14, for instance, brings up a compact banner at the top of the screen containing current weather conditions and a high/low forecast for the day; in iOS 13, the same question resulted in a longer card containing a full forecast for the day.

Most of the time, compact UI means getting to the core of the user’s request and ignoring everything else.

Essentially, Apple changed Siri’s default behavior in iOS 14 so that its first response is a compact version that displays key information about whatever you’re asking for. In iOS 13, results were richer by default, but took over the entire screen; in iOS 14, snippets are smaller, and you can optionally drill down into the Siri UI to get an extended version of the result.

Knowledge-based results make for a good demo of the differences between iOS 13 and 14. Asking about celebrities now pops out a small snippet with key details that doesn’t take up much onscreen space; before, Siri would load the fully expanded knowledge card by default.

To view more details about the compact snippet presented by Siri in iOS 14, you have to tap and navigate to a secondary page, which looks like the old primary Siri results page from iOS 13.

Viewing additional details in Siri’s snippets.

Having used the new Siri for the past few months, I’m quite impressed with how Apple was able to rethink results and display key information upfront. Whether I ask questions about geography, politics, musicians, movies, or other trivia, Siri now consistently provides me with a compact answer that gets to the essence of what I’m looking for. It may not seem like a big deal – after all, Apple only took the basic details of Siri’s older responses and made everything else a secondary page – but, at least for me, it’s made a profound difference to my usage of Siri. Having a compact snippet appear with just the thing I’m looking for makes the assistant feel more intelligent, and I’m more inclined to use it since I don’t begrudge the Siri UI interrupting my workflow anymore. As a result, I use Siri more and I get more out of it with less time spent looking at superfluous information.

Siri for iOS 14 prioritizes answering your questions, omitting additional context by default.

When asking about actors featured in a specific movie, iOS 14’s Siri presents a list of names rather than a generic movie card.

In this case, results are the same, but they’re more compact and Siri doesn’t hide the app you’re currently using.

I also appreciate the effects of Siri’s compact redesign on iPad, where results are presented as transient popups on the right side of the screen. Even more so than iPhone, the iPad’s larger screen is an ideal candidate for brief, temporary results. Siri’s compact design on iPad fits the platform’s aesthetic: even longer results, such as the list of events you get by asking “what’s on my schedule this week”, are presented in a sidebar that is no wider than an app running in Slide Over. This extends to how you can dismiss Siri results as well: you can tap anywhere onscreen to close Siri, but just like a Slide Over window, you can also dismiss it by swiping results into the edge of the screen.

Dismissing Siri results on iPad.

There are a few settings to control Siri’s appearance if you’re not a fan of the default compact mode. In Settings ⇾ Siri & Search ⇾ Siri Responses, you can choose to show Siri captions and speech. With captions, you’ll always see a transcription of all Siri dialog; this helps if you, like me, prefer to keep Siri silent at all times but want to see the assistant’s response in addition to the results card.

Using Siri with and without captions.

If you enable the option to show speech, you’ll get a transcription for what you asked Siri. You’d probably want to turn on this feature for two reasons: if you want to make sure you can see what the assistant understood from your request; and to gain the ability to edit the request and make a new one by typing a different command. You can do so by tapping the caption and typing an edited request in the text field that appears, effectively bringing some of the convenience of ‘Type to Siri’11 to the voice-based activation method. Obviously, both captions and speech are presented with compact UI in a bubble floating above the Siri indicator.

Editing a Siri request in iOS 14.

You can also “disable” compact UI for Siri under Settings ⇾ Accessibility ⇾ Siri ⇾ Show Apps Behind Siri. The quotes are necessary since you’re not really disabling Siri’s new compact design as much as you’re preventing the app that’s currently active from being visible underneath the assistant. By enabling this setting, Siri will keep the new compact UI for results and requests, but it’ll use a translucent background to hide the foreground app.

You can choose to disable showing apps behind Siri.

The same option is kind of hilarious on iPad.

Overall, I’m a fan of Siri’s design direction in iOS 14. Compact results strike a solid balance of utility – providing you with key information upfront and optional secondary details – and visual consistency, fitting the theme of UI receding into the background in iOS 14, leaving more room for app content while preserving the user’s context.

From Apple’s perspective, rethinking Siri around shorter, compact results is probably a good bet should a Siri-dependent, compact wearable device be in the pipeline over the next few years. That’s a broader discussion for another time, but I wouldn’t be surprised if iOS 14 is laying the foundation for that kind of always-on, unobtrusive Siri experience today.

Shortcuts Actions

Following two years of major updates, Apple’s Shortcuts app is having a relatively quieter year with several welcome, if perhaps less groundbreaking, refinements and additions to the core app experience. One such change is the adoption of compact UI when running shortcuts inside the app, from the widget, via the share sheet, or through Search.

The adoption of compact UI in Shortcuts can be boiled down to two key implementation details: shortcuts will run inline without launching the full app as much as possible, even if they require user interactions; and, much like Siri, actions that involve UI will be displayed as compact banners descending from the top of the screen both on iPhone and iPad.

Shortcuts actions displayed with compact UI.

There are several notable repercussions worth discussing here. In order to embrace the principles of compact UI, Apple had to make shortcut execution faster and more contextual. To do this, the company updated all actions that require user interactions (such as entering text, choosing from a list of items, or picking a date and time) or display of UI elements (such as alerts or Quick Look previews) to use a new design that is reminiscent of Siri’s compact mode in iOS 14 (not a surprise given the close ties between Siri and Shortcuts). Where in previous versions of Shortcuts these elements were presented modally in the middle of the screen, they now descend as banners of varying height from the top of the screen. Most of the time12, actions are activated more quickly than iOS 13; you can tap anywhere onscreen to dismiss them.

When running inside the Shortcuts app, actions are more compact, but the background is blurred.

Along with redesigning actions, Apple also tweaked how shortcuts run outside the main app. In iOS 14, you’ll no longer see the action editor when running a shortcut inside the share sheet: instead of being forced to look at the execution of actions from top to bottom, running a shortcut as an extension will simply result in a banner showing a ‘Stop’ button while the shortcut’s actions are running in the background (and displaying UI elements, if necessary). This is another example of applying compact UI to an existing feature to speed it up, and I think it’s a great approach.

When you started running a shortcut from the share sheet in iOS 13, you’d see the editor and the entire flow of actions from top to bottom. In iOS 14, you only see a compact confirmation banner at the top.

Actions that require interactions are presented with compact UI in iOS 14.

Similarly, shortcuts now always run in compact UI when activated from a widget. In redesigning the Shortcuts widget for iOS 14, Apple got rid of the “special” execution of certain actions in the widget (such as the old custom widget versions of the number pad, lists, and alerts) and embraced compact UI for everything. When you run a shortcut from a widget in iOS 14, it’ll run on the Home Screen by default (without opening the Shortcuts app) and any UI element (including input fields) will be activated on the Home Screen itself, letting you interact with them.

In iOS 14, you can run shortcuts from anywhere on the Home Screen with compact UI.

Compact UI for Shortcuts goes beyond an action’s appearance: in iOS 13, if an action’s parameter field was left empty or had the ‘Ask When Run’ mode enabled, every time that action ran you’d be presented with a full action preview and you’d have to manually tap the unassigned parameter field to give it a value. In iOS 14, Apple has removed one step from the process: if an action has an empty parameter, you’ll no longer see the full action upfront, but instead you’ll only have to choose one of the parameter values, resulting in a much nicer and faster experience than before.

Judge for yourself with this comparison showing the same shortcut running on iOS 13 and 14:

Compact UI has been applied to picking parameters while a shortcut is running, too.

I’ve shown examples of shortcuts running on iPhone thus far, but all this applies to iPadOS 14 too. In fact, Shortcuts’ new compact actions are fully integrated with the system pointer in iPadOS 14, allowing you to hover over buttons and make selections without touching the screen.

Pointer interactions with shortcuts on iPad.

All this brings me to another, arguably more important, point: what stands out with compact UI applied to Shortcuts is how much more integrated with the system the app now feels. Take the updated Search experience on iPad (more on this later), for instance: when you select a shortcut from Search in iPadOS 14 and press Return, the shortcut now runs inline with compact UI; actions and alerts will be displayed on top of the app you’re currently using, so once the shortcut is done, you’re instantly taken back to what you were doing before.13 No more jumping between apps, no more full-screen interfaces interrupting your workflow; everything runs inline, with compact banners that support interactions outside of Shortcuts.

To give you another example of how big a deal compact UI is for Shortcuts this year, I’ve created a shortcut that adds a task to Todoist with pickers for projects, tags, and dates. This shortcut contains multiple actions that require user interactions, including a Todoist one that saves a task inside the app at the end. Here’s how all this runs with compact UI and inline execution in iPadOS 14:

Quick add for Todoist, powered by Shortcuts and compact UI.

While this shortcut isn’t a full replica of desktop tools such as the OmniFocus or Things Quick Entry windows for Mac14, it’s very close to that experience thanks to compact UI and system-wide interactions. In hindsight, it’s easy to see another side of Apple’s long-term plan here: first, they allowed third-party developers to natively integrate with Shortcuts via parameters, which in return made their apps become native actions in the app and Siri; now, they’re expanding those rich interactions to widgets and Search, turning shortcuts into system-wide utilities users can run without having to pause what they’re doing.

Compact UI Regressions

For all the good that compact UI has brought to Shortcuts, there are some regressions from iOS 13 worth addressing. I was hoping Apple would fix these in time for iOS 14’s public release, but they’re still here today.

In the transition to compact UI, the ‘Choose from List’ action has lost the ability to filter items with a search field; I’ve also noticed that performance for large lists of items isn’t great when running a shortcut from the Home Screen, resulting in delays that have negatively impacted my more complex shortcuts such as MusicBot Pro.

The ‘Ask for Input’ action has also gotten worse in one considerable way: when you’re entering text into a Shortcuts alert from an external keyboard, you can no longer press Return to confirm and dismiss the alert – you have to tap a button. In the same year that Apple is so focused on shipping interactions that support both touch and keyboard, this one sticks out as a glaring problem that should have been fixed months ago.

Lastly, because compact UI elements are immediately dismissed as soon as you click elsewhere onscreen, it’s now impossible to multitask while a shortcut is running in Split View. In the setup shown below with Shortcuts running next to Safari in Split View, I can’t select text from the Safari webpage and paste it into the ‘Ask for Input’ action: merely clicking on the webpage would dismiss the action, stopping the shortcut altogether.

Safari is running next to Shortcuts here, but I can’t drag text from Safari into the input field.

In the grand scheme of things, these issues are quite niche and don’t undo all the positive effects of compact UI for Shortcuts, but I still hope Apple can fix them with software updates in the near future.

By leveraging compact UI and prioritizing the retention of user context, Shortcuts feels even more integrated with the OS, resulting in faster execution of actions and more time saved on a daily basis. Apple has removed a lot of friction from the Shortcuts experience this year, and while their compact UI implementation isn’t perfect yet, I’ve found myself running shortcuts from the share sheet, Home Screen, and Search more frequently than before.

Search

Search has undergone a few substantial updates in iOS 14 (even more so on iPadOS, but I’ll cover that later) designed to speed up common actions (such as launching apps) as well as to better integrate Search with web content and the system’s browser. After a false start early in the iOS 14 beta cycle, I have to say I’m a fan of where Apple ended up with Search, which I find myself using more than before on a daily basis.

The first change you’ll notice is that everything is a bit bolder and more compact (unsurprisingly) when comparing iOS 14’s Search to iOS 13. Apple has adopted a thicker weight of San Francisco for the names and content previews of results, and they’re now using large San Francisco Rounded headings for sections in lieu of iOS 13’s thin, all-caps font. I like these visual updates since they’re consistent with iOS’ overall aesthetic and the thicker fonts make content more approachable and easier to scan at a glance.

The refreshed look for Search in iOS 14.

iOS 14’s Search includes smarter Top Hits and integrates web search suggestions.

The second thing you should pay attention to in iOS 14’s Search is the label of a single button. When typing in the search field, in iOS 14 you’ll see a blue ‘go’ button instead of ‘search’ in the lower right corner of the software keyboard. This may seem like a small, rather inconsequential update; in reality, it’s proof of Apple’s bigger plans for the overhaul of Search in iOS 14 to make apps and websites easier to launch. This is called the quick launcher, and it lets you open the top hit of your search query by just typing a few characters and immediately pressing ‘go’.

You can use quick launcher for apps and websites.

Think about it for a second: what should the ultimate goal of a good search feature be? Finding content across apps, surfacing intelligent recommendations, and sorting results based on different patterns are all important features, but at the end of the day, Search on iPhone should allow you to open apps as quickly as possible. And until iOS 14, Search wasn’t exactly great at doing that. In iOS 13, if you wanted to, say, launch Safari, you had to swipe down on the Home Screen, type ‘Safari’, then either hit ‘search’ in the keyboard or otherwise move your finger from the keyboard to tap the Safari icon in the list of results. Despite its many integrations with knowledge sources and web services, Search was failing at being truly good at the most obvious task people likely used it for: quickly launching apps.

With iOS 14’s quick launcher in Search, this is no longer an issue. As soon as you start typing a few characters, Search will immediately highlight results as Top Hits underneath the search field and display a ‘go’ button in the keyboard for the first Top Hit; tap ‘go’ and you’ll be taken to that app or website without having to lift your fingers off the keyboard. It’s that simple. What’s even more impressive, however, is that you don’t need to “pause” to confirm the selected Top Hit before launching it: if you know you want to open Twitter, for example, you can start typing “twi…” and immediately press ‘go’ to launch the app. The beauty of quick launcher is that it lets you launch stuff faster than it can be displayed in the Search screen, which has never been true for iOS’ built-in Search before.

Top Hits and quick launcher in Search.

In my tests, iOS 14’s Top Hits and quick launcher worked well for app and domain names, consistently highlighting the item I was looking for; obviously, quick launcher doesn’t work as well for more complex queries such as long file names, titles of songs, or content stored inside apps. You can still search for those items in Search, but you likely won’t be able to open them with quick launcher, which has been optimized for launching apps and websites.

I also noticed that quick launcher learns from you if you tend to launch one app over another even though they share similar names. For instance, whenever I typed “twi…”, Top Hits would default to Twitch instead of Twitter; after manually tapping the Twitter icon a few times, quick launcher learned from my habits and started opening Twitter by default instead. It’s kind of surprising that it took Apple over a decade to refine the process of quickly launching apps to perfection, but they’ve nailed it with iOS 14’s quick launcher. Switching between apps via Search is a breeze now, and it works just as well on iPad too.

The other big addition to Search in iOS 14 is the integration with web searches and Safari suggestions. Whenever you type anything in Search, you’ll see suggestions for web searches powered by Safari appear underneath Top Hits and search suggestions; if Search can’t find either of those, web searches will be pushed straight to the top of the list, right below the search field. As you can imagine, when you tap a web search suggestion, it opens in Safari using the search engine of your choice.

Web search suggestions in iOS 14.

Based on the tweets and messages I’ve received over the past few months, I know that several MacStories readers don’t appreciate the forced inclusion of web search suggestions in Search. Personally, I’ve grown to really like these as shortcuts to open a new Google search in Safari, which is something I used to do manually all the time anyway. Now instead of relying on a custom shortcut or tapping into the Safari address bar to initiate a Google search, I can just swipe down on the Home Screen, type, and select a web search suggestion (which are provided by your search engine of choice). This is infinitely better than selecting ‘Search Web’ at the very end of the Search page in iOS 13.

In a nice touch, web search suggestions will continue working even if you set a different default browser on your device, as you can see from the search suggestions with the iCab and Chrome icons in the screenshots below:

Web search suggestions for third-party browsers.

Besides the aforementioned ability to run shortcuts inline within Search thanks to compact UI, other changes to Search in iOS 14 are primarily cosmetic or related to how different sections are sorted. The ‘Search in App’ button displayed next to apps that support this mode has been made more prominent in iOS 14 with the addition of a glyph. Generally speaking, iOS 14’s Search tends to cut off the result sections displayed by default earlier than iOS 13, so if you want to see more results from other apps, you’ll have to tap ‘Show More’.15 Lastly, the ‘Search in Apps’ section embedded at the end of the page now offers more system apps to launch searches into, but it has mysteriously lost the ‘Ask Siri’ option that was available in iOS 13.

It started out rough, but I now prefer iOS 14’s Search to iOS 13’s clunkier counterpart. Apple managed to perfect the most important feature of Search with quick launcher, made Search smarter with Top Hits, and integrated web search suggestions without compromising on the ability to find content stored inside apps. iOS 14’s Search is the richest experience it’s ever been: you can use it to quickly launch apps and websites, open web searches, find documents and contents from apps, play music, read inline Knowledge results, and even interact with shortcuts – all by simply swiping down on the Home Screen. iOS 14’s updated Search allows me to save time every day, and I hope Apple can figure out a way to use Search while inside apps with iOS 15 next year.

In case it wasn’t clear by this point, I’m a fan of Apple’s push for compact and contextual UIs in iOS and iPadOS 14. I find this approach more effective than classic visual “minimalism” as a means to emphasize content; the net result is a series of features and apps that are now faster to use and better integrated with the system. The jury’s still out on the accuracy of Siri responses and Search results; as for everything else though, I have no complaints, and I think Apple is on the right path. I struggle to imagine who would want to go back to non-compact UIs after iOS 14.

Pickers

While other design changes in iOS 14 may not have the same impact as compact UI, they are nonetheless noticeable and are poised to improve some of our key interactions with iPhone and iPad. Let’s take a look at four updated system pickers in iOS and iPadOS 14.

Date Picker

iOS 14 does away with one of iOS’ (nee iPhone OS) historical interface elements: the wheel-based date and time picker is gone, replaced by a more standard compact calendar and hybrid text field/mini wheel for times.

The date picker is now a compact monthly calendar.

In iOS 14, you can enter times by typing them or scrolling the (much smaller) wheel.

Introduced with the original iPhone in 2007, the date and time picker survived a few major transitions in the Apple ecosystem: first, it was ported to the iPad’s bigger screen; then, its 3D appearance was toned down for iOS 7, although its functionality remained intact; last, it was bafflingly brought to the Mac as well in the first (and highly criticized) wave of Mac Catalyst apps. It’s safe to say the date and time wheel represents an entire era of touch interactions, and it stands as one of Apple’s most recognizable modern UI conventions; at the same time, given current design trends and the evolution of iPhone and iPad, I think it was about time for Apple to let it go.

The new date picker in iOS 14 may not carry the same innovative spirit as last decade’s wheel, but it gets the job done, and I find it faster to use than the UI component it’s replacing. Selecting days is easier than ever: the date picker is a compact monthly calendar, and you can tap any day in the calendar to set a date; weekdays are shown as columns at the top, and the current day is highlighted. With this new design, you can more easily select distant dates since you no longer have to carefully scroll a wheel to pick the day you’re looking for. Furthermore, you can swipe horizontally on the calendar (or tap the arrows in the top right) to switch between months.

The wheel isn’t completely gone either: if you want to quickly change the selected month or year, tap the chevron next to the month in the top left corner and you’ll be presented with a classic date picker, only limited to months and years. In this context, I think it makes sense to revert to the old interaction since you’re only picking between two sets of items (months and years) rather than four as it used to be in iOS 13 (date, hour, minutes, AM/PM).

Apple literally reinvented the wheel in iOS 14.

Besides the mere clarity of its design (a monthly calendar may be uninspired, but it’s obvious to look at), I also find the new date picker superior to the old one as an interface element that has to work on iPad and Mac (via Mac Catalyst or iPad apps running on Apple Silicon Macs). On iPad, the date picker is optimized for pointer interactions: selected days playfully bounce around as you hover over them; thanks to pointer magnetism, the cursor snaps in-place to navigation arrows or the current month, allowing you to easily click and adjust the date.

Using the date and time picker on iPad with compact UI.

The time picker is going to require a bit of an adjustment period. It is comprised of two separate areas: a segmented control to switch between AM/PM, and a text field where you can enter the time of day. By default, tapping into this field brings up a number pad that lets you type out the time in full by just entering numbers (i.e. you would enter the numbers 5, 0, and 0, then select ‘PM’ to enter the ‘5:00 PM’ time). The wheel isn’t entirely gone from this picker either: it’s subtle, but you can still scroll within the (much smaller) time picker to manually adjust time the old fashioned way. However, the fact that the picker is a small input area and that the number pad comes up immediately seems to suggest Apple would like users to interact with this element primarily as a text field.

You can either type into the time picker or scroll its mini wheel.

Additionally – and I wish Apple made this clearer in the interface – you can select the hour and minute portions of the time by tapping them. You can tell you’re editing either the hour or minute if only one part of the time is highlighted with a different font color. It’s not immediately apparent you can do this, and I wonder if there’s any way Apple could explain this otherwise “invisible” gesture to less tech-savvy folks.

Using the time picker.

Despite some initial confusion surrounding the time picker, I find the new date and time picking system faster and easier to use than iOS 13’s old wheel. Rescheduling reminders or calendar events can be done more quickly than before, particularly for non-adjacent dates that involve jumping a few weeks or months ahead. The new compact calendar design feels fresh, works nicely on all platforms, and scales from touch to pointer like any modern Apple UI element should. I’m going to miss the wheel for purely nostalgic reasons, but the new date and time picker is better suited for our modern times.

Color Picker

Back in 2018 with iOS 12, Apple added a basic color picker to the palette of tools available in the system’s Markup mode; with last year’s iPadOS 13, they redesigned the palette and made it a floating element that can be rearranged anywhere onscreen with drag and drop. In iOS and iPadOS 14 – and if you’re coming from macOS, this one deserves a unanimous finally – the company has turned the basic grid of 120 colors into a full-featured, system-wide color picker that supports multiple modes and can be implemented by all apps.

The updated color picker.

The new color picker – which is available on iOS, iPadOS, and can be adopted by Mac Catalyst apps as well – should feel instantly familiar to anyone who’s ever used the default color picker for Mac or design utilities such as Photoshop and Illustrator. It’s split into three main areas: the grid of 120 colors, which was available before too; a spectrum, where you can move around a color indicator to pick exactly the tone you want; and sliders, where you can set specific red/green/blue levels (with a slider or number pad) as well as enter the Hex code for Display P3 or sRGB colors.16 All these selection modes come with the ability to set a specific opacity level, which you can do either with a slider or by entering an exact amount in a text field.

The different modes of iOS 14’s color picker.

These new modes alone would probably suffice to satisfy professional users who were seeking a deeper level of color control on iOS and iPad, but there’s more. The new color picker has an eyedropper tool that lets you capture any color currently shown onscreen: as seen in other design apps before, this is a magnifying loupe that zooms into a circular region of the UI and lets you precisely capture colors with pixel-level precision. The advantage of Apple’s native color picker is that its eyedropper tool can capture the entire system UI, not just the contents of a specific app: you can hover over the status bar to isolate the color of glyphs shown there or even grab the color of the divider between Split View apps on iPad. In the video below, for instance, you can see how Curlicues, a new drawing app by Simon Støvring, uses the new color picker to grab colors from an adjacent app in Split View using the built-in eyedropper tool:

Using the eyedropper tool on iPad.

You can also save colors and reuse them across apps. You can save the currently selected color by tapping the ‘+’ button at the bottom of the picker; you can delete a previously favorited color by long-pressing it and hitting ‘Delete’. Saved colors are shared system-wide by the color picker, so if you saved some in Markup, you’ll get access to the same colors in Notes, Curlicues, and all other apps that use the native color picker.

As someone who’s occasionally found himself wanting to capture a color in a specific app and reuse it in another, I’m glad Apple put some effort into the color picker for iOS and iPadOS 14. I like that the color picker is available both for PencilKit-compatible apps and other apps that may just need a color picker without any Pencil integration; the only (minor) complaint I have is that Apple’s color picker doesn’t support drag and drop for colors (a native iPadOS feature), so it won’t integrate with apps like Pastel and MindNode. Overall, the color picker looks good, works well, and I’m glad it’s another item we can check off Apple’s list of macOS features that also needed to come to iPhone and iPad.

Photo Picker

As part of Apple’s privacy improvements this year, iOS and iPadOS 14 come with a modernized photo picker designed to provide you with more control over how apps get access to your photo library. Furthermore, while the rethought photo picker is a new API developers will have to manually implement in their apps, Apple is also adding limited photo library access to all those apps that still use the old iOS 13 photo picker, putting you in control of your photos even when using apps that don’t want to implement the new photo picker.

The underlying principle behind the new photo picker is the following: rather than granting apps full access to your photo library, the picker only lets them access the photos or videos you select. Privacy is built into the new picker by default: it runs out of process from the app that presents it, which means that an app can’t directly access photos in the picker unless you select them; apps cannot even programmatically capture screenshots of the picker, which only provides them with access to the user’s selection. The idea is that while several kinds of apps may want to access your photos for various reasons (such as posting them on a social network or editing them), they don’t necessarily require full access to your entire library; with iOS 14’s new photo picker, Apple has sidestepped the potential issue of apps scanning the contents of your Photos library with an elegant solution that is respectful of the user’s privacy and entirely sandboxed.

The new photo picker grants apps access to individual photos and supports intelligent search.

Beyond the privacy angle, what’s also nice about iOS 14’s photo picker is that it features an all-new design that brings many of the conveniences of Photos to third-party apps. For the first time, the photo picker supports the same natural language search as the Photos app and the ability to smoothly zoom in and out in the photo grid; you can find your photos by scrolling the grid, or by switching to the ‘Albums’ tab at the top, or you can just search by photo contents, people, and places as you’d normally do in the Photos app. The same tokenized UI for searches you’re used to seeing in Photos is available in the new photo picker, which means no more back and forth between Photos and apps if you want to pick a particular photo taken a while back.

You can zoom in the photo picker and search with the same engine as Photos.

The new photo picker on iPad.

The picker also supports a couple configuration options for developers. First, third-party apps can implement the photo picker so that only certain types of content (such as Live Photos) or combinations of types (e.g. photos and videos) can be filtered and presented in the picker by default. Additionally, developers can set a maximum number of photos that can be selected by users in the picker, which is useful for those services that limit you in the number of media attachments you can post or upload. If an app supports multiple selections in the picker, you can tap items in the picker to add them to your selection, which sticks even if you switch between the Photos and Albums tabs; you can also long-press items to preview them and hit ‘Select’ from the context menu. Once items are selected, you can tap the ‘Show Selected’ button at the bottom of the picker to jump into a separate view that lets you swipe between your selected items in full screen.

You can select multiple items in the new photo picker.

iOS 14’s new photo picker is the kind of private-by-design, intelligent feature that only modern Apple can build: it puts users in control of their data, doesn’t compromise the utility of third-party apps, and integrates with Photos, context menus, and pointer control to deliver an experience that works seamlessly everywhere, in all apps that choose to support it.

But what if they don’t? Apple thought about this potential scenario as well. In iOS and iPadOS 14, if an app doesn’t implement the new photo picker and uses the old one instead (UIImagePickerController), the system will automatically add a new option to select a subset of photos to the dialog that prompts you to grant (or deny) access to the full photo library. Even if an app hasn’t been updated to iOS 14 (i.e. it is still compiled against iOS 13), the system will “force” the inclusion of a limited photo library access option in the initial photo permission prompt.

Limited access to photos in the old photo picker.

Apple is serious about stopping unfettered access to the photo library by apps that don’t actually need it, and I applaud their decision to retroactively update the old permission dialog with a new limited access option. Choosing this mode, of course, has consequences: if you restrict photo library access to an app that hasn’t been updated for iOS 14, you have a couple ways to update your initial choice or grant the app access to more photos besides the ones you initially selected.

First, you can go to the app’s entry in the Settings app, select Photos, and update access from ‘Selected Photos’ to ‘All Photos’, thereby granting unrestricted access to your library. You can also review the photos you previously granted the app access to by clicking the ‘Edit Selected Photos’ button at the bottom, which will bring up iOS 14’s new photo picker.

Reviewing photo access in Settings.

Alternatively, you can select more photos the next time you relaunch the app. Apple made the smart decision of displaying the permission prompt again every time you relaunch an app (or if you manually request access to photos in that app) with options to keep your current selection of photos or select more from your library. It should also be noted that limited photo library access doesn’t support creating or fetching from albums, nor does it support picking cloud-stored assets.

You can extend photo access in apps that previously got access to only some of your photos.

It was a little confusing at first to see the photo permission dialog come up over and over again this summer for apps like Slack every time I wanted to share screenshots with my team, but I understand Apple’s goals now. I think it’s a smart move to bring limited photo library access to apps that may not have updated to iOS 14, even if it adds a few more taps to the experience. Ideally, going forward all apps will just use the new photo picker in iOS 14, so we won’t have to deal with permission prompts and visiting Settings anymore. Ultimately, very few apps actually need full, unrestricted access to my photo library, and I’m glad Apple updated the photo picker to reflect this reality in a secure, privacy-conscious way.

AirPlay Picker

Starting with iOS 14.2, you’ll find a redesigned AirPlay picker in Music. Still available by tapping the AirPlay icon, the menu is now a floating popover that opens on top of the app instead of full-screen.

The new AirPlay picker in the Music app.

You can tap the ‘Control Other Speakers & TVs’ button at the bottom of the picker to bring up a different view that lets you control playback on other speakers and TVs with play/pause buttons and virtual Apple TV remotes.

Controlling other speakers from the new AirPlay picker. You can see how multiple speakers get collapsed into a single item if you’re streaming to them simultaneously.

The new popover design also works well in Music for iPad since it doesn’t take over the entire screen anymore:

The new AirPlay picker on iPad.

Controlling other speakers from iPad.

The move from a full-screen menu to a compact popover isn’t surprising in the context of this year’s UI updates: the new AirPlay picker feels faster because you don’t have to wait for a full-screen animation to finish anymore. Automatic AirPods switching has reduced the number of times I need to interact with the AirPlay picker, but it’s still a feature I use for my HomePods and Apple TVs, and I’m glad Apple is continuing to get rid of leftover full-screen UIs in the iOS 14 release cycle.

Podcasts for iOS and iPadOS 14.2 doesn’t have a popover style for the AirPlay picker.

Unfortunately, right now it’s unclear whether or not third-party developers will be able to use the same floating design for the AirPlay picker seen in Music. At the moment, not even Apple’s Podcasts and TV apps are using it, and although the picker features a new design, it still opens in full-screen over the foreground app. I hope the new popover design won’t remain exclusive to Music.

Pull-Down Menus

In its quest to rid iOS and iPadOS of modality and embrace compact UI, Apple turned to an interface element introduced last year – context menus – and used it as the foundation for another system change in iOS 14: pull-down menus.

The easiest way to understand what pull-down menus are is the following: they’re menus that (roughly) use the same physics and appearance of context menus and have been implemented throughout iOS and iPadOS to replace all sorts of action sheets. Pull-down menus may look and behave similarly to context menus, but they don’t require a long-press to be activated; they’re typically found in toolbars and navigation bars in iOS and iPadOS 14, and they can be displayed with a single tap.

Pull-down menus in iOS 14.

With pull-down menus, Apple leveraged the design and interactions of context menus to rethink menus that used to occupy too much onscreen space. Pull-down menus are generally more compact; they allow developers to use SF Symbols, destructive actions, and nested menus; and they open near the UI element that invoked them, creating an instant visual relationship between item and related actions. It’s not just that they’re smaller though: pull-down menus don’t block onscreen interactions either; scroll outside of a pull-down menu in iOS or iPadOS 14 and it’ll be dismissed right away, without having to select anything in it. And just like context menus, you can swipe with your thumb over multiple options in a pull-down menu, select the one you want, and lift your finger to perform the associated action.

When I say that Apple used pull-down menus throughout the entire system, I mean it. Both iOS and iPadOS 14 have adopted pull-down menus profusely, replacing old action sheets with compact pull-down menus that feel great to use both with touch and the pointer.

In Safari, pull-down menus have replaced action sheets when long-pressing toolbar buttons or uploading files to a website:

In the Files app, view and sorting options are now clearly exposed via a pull-down menu from the top toolbar:

The new pull-down menu in Files collects options that were previously hidden behind gestures.

Want to put a phone call on speaker or connect to a HomePod from the iPhone’s call UI? Pull-down menus can also be found there:

In the updated Messages app, a pull-down menu is used in the main conversation list to select messages, edit pinned conversations, and set a different name or photo:

Pull-down menus have even been used for one of the new system shortcuts in iOS 14: in any app that features a native ‘Back’ button for navigation (such as Settings), you can long-press it to show a pull-down menu with the current navigation hierarchy, which lets you quickly jump back to a specific page:

Long-press the Back button in apps to show navigation in a pull-down menu.

You can also find pull-down menus when sorting your library in Music, adding attachments to a note, trimming videos in Photos, or adding a new accessory in Home. Pull-down menus are everywhere, and I like how compact and consistent with context menus they are.

Pull-down menus in Aviary, MusicHarbor, and Anybuffer.

In my conversation with Craig Federighi back in May, recorded before WWDC, I pointed out how context menus felt like the ideal UI element for the modern iPad platform: they scale gracefully from touch to pointer, taking advantage of haptic feedback on iPhone and hover states on iPad in a way that makes the same UI element feel like a perfect fit for two different input methods. Pull-down menus are based on the same underlying philosophy, with the addition of this year’s compact UI theme: whether they’re used on iPhone or iPad, pull-down menus adapt to each platform’s preferred interaction method naturally; they’re replacing sheets and menus that used to block the UI with modality and a larger footprint; as a result, apps that use them feel faster, cleaner, and more focused. I was a fan of context menus last year, and I appreciate this fork of the same UI element in iOS 14.

Other Changes

In addition to compact UI, new pickers, and pull-down menus, there are other evolving interface elements worth noting in iOS and iPadOS 14.

Refresh indicator. The refresh indicator (seen in apps that use pull-to-refresh such as Mail or when loading results in Podcasts and Music)17 now has fewer paddles and its animation timing has been adjusted. It looks fun.

All the great paddles.

Elements that slide down from the top of the screen. I also mentioned these last year, and the pill-shaped indicators that descend as transient notifications from the top of the screen are continuing to gain a foothold in both iOS and iPadOS 14. New instances of such elements include clipboard alerts (see our Privacy story for more details), AirPods notifications, and Bluetooth device connection alerts. Apple clearly loves this style of compact alerts – too bad it’s not available to third-party apps still.

The visual glitch in the alert seems to be a bug in iOS 14.2.

Page controls. As seen on the Home Screen and in the Weather app, the classic page control (UIPageControl) has been enhanced with the ability to offer an unlimited number of pages and a scrubbing mode for quick navigation across pages (long-press and swipe over the control to try it yourself). Additionally, page controls can now use custom images as glyphs and different background styles.

You can now quickly scrub native page controls.

Sliders. In an effort to make iOS and iPadOS (and therefore Mac Catalyst apps) more consistent with macOS, sliders feature a thicker track in iOS 14. Just like on the Mac, you can also now tap or click the track to adjust the knob’s position without sliding it.

The slightly thicker slider track in iOS 14.

Progress bars. In line with sliders and macOS, progress bars are also thicker in iOS and iPadOS 14.

The also slightly thicker progress bar in iOS 14.

SF Symbols 2.0. Apple introduced SF Symbols last year as a collection of 1,500 glyphs that developers could implement in their apps. What set SF Symbols apart wasn’t just the integration with the system – it was how the set was designed to match the visual characteristics of the San Francisco typeface and how glyphs behaved as fonts with multiple sizes, weights, and embedded baseline values. Some in the design community heavily criticized SF Symbols after WWDC 2019; over the past year, I’ve seen SF Symbols pop up everywhere in my favorite apps, and I’ve appreciated the visual consistency they’ve brought to the iOS app ecosystem.

Apple is back this year with a major update to SF Symbols, which introduces over 750 new glyphs and multicolor options.18 SF Symbols now includes over 2,000 symbols for different categories (which you can browse using the official SF Symbols app for Mac), but Apple decided to offer multicolor versions of a subset of them. As of iOS 14, only 156 symbols support a multicolor appearance, which automatically adapts to vibrancy, different Accessibility settings, and dark mode (for more on color and dark mode, see here and here). These 156 symbols are pre-configured by Apple, and I was able to preview them all on-device using Adaptivity:

A selection of the new multicolor SF Symbols in iOS and iPadOS 14.

I like the appearance of multicolor symbols since they almost feel like brand new icons instead of new flavors of existing glyphs. However, besides the Weather widget, I’ve yet to see multicolor symbols in any of my favorite apps. Also interesting: in some cases, developers will be able to specify a different color for a multicolor symbol’s specific area; for instance, in the folder.badge.plus symbol, a third-party developer may want to use their app’s accent color for the folder area of the symbol, with the system providing a different color for the badge. This increased flexibility should allow for some fresh takes on SF Symbols this year, and I look forward to seeing how developers will take advantage of it.

One last thing about SF Symbols: you have to respect the Apple product manager who approved this symbol for ‘PC’. We see you, and your work is appreciated.

The ‘PC’ symbol, as seen in San Fransymbols.

iOS and iPadOS design has been in a state of constant evolution for the past few years. Apple has seemingly moved away from the sweeping redesign approach, favoring instead a judicious iteration that is better suited for a vast audience who doesn’t love the idea of their primary computer fundamentally changing overnight. This is a careful balancing act for Apple, but we can still spot interesting themes and trends emerging beneath the surface.

This year, compact UI and consistency with macOS feel like the overarching principles we should be paying attention to over the coming months. The latter is quite obvious: Mac Catalyst is growing up, and Apple Silicon Macs will soon gain the ability to run unmodified iPhone and iPad apps, so it’s in Apple’s best interest to ensure consistency with the Mac environment, particularly for those iPad apps that will feel right at home on macOS.

As for compact UI, it’s fun to speculate on the underlying motivation behind it: why now, and what’s the subtext? Compact, glanceable, transient interfaces that appear on one side of the screen without interrupting what you’re doing seem awfully well suited for a headset, where screen real estate would be at a premium and you wouldn’t want any UI to completely take over your field of view. I might be way off base here, but I have a feeling compact UI in iOS 14 is but a training ground for a much bigger initiative to follow over the next few years. Let’s keep an eye (no pun intended) on this one.

iPadOS

Following last year’s platform split with the introduction of iPadOS 13, an old doubt crept back into the iPad community: with iPadOS now its own entity, could Apple keep up the pace of annual updates? Or was the separation from iOS a mere marketing ploy?

A year later, we have our answer: iPadOS 14 doesn’t revolutionize key aspects of the iPad experience such as multitasking or the Home Screen, but it’s not devoid of new features either. Apple is committed to the iPadOS platform, and it shows in the larger vision looming over this year’s update. And if you consider iPadOS 13.4 and its systemwide pointer as part of the “iPad in 2020” storyline, it’s pretty clear that Apple is, more than ever, pushing iPad as a new breed of portable computer.

A trait of iPadOS 14 that immediately stands out is how this year’s changes to the iPad experience do not come in the form of shiny new pro apps or reimagined multitasking. Apple didn’t showcase iPad-specific versions of Xcode, Final Cut, or Logic at WWDC, nor did they address longstanding criticisms related to how the iPad operates in multitasking and multiwindowing contexts. They didn’t, for instance, rethink the role of drag and drop as the sole mechanism to activate Split View or introduce new menus to manage multitasking and multiwindowing. As we’ll explore later, these areas of iPadOS are now ripe for reinvention, and they stand out as sore omissions this year.

The quest to find the iPad’s new identity continues in iPadOS 14.

Instead, iPadOS 14 is all about refinements to the core iPad experience, with changes in the design department aimed at increasing information density, speeding up interactions by reducing taps and modality in apps, and taking better advantage of the iPad’s large canvas. In many ways, iPadOS 14 is setting the stage for the iPad’s next big functionality jump, and it does so by once again borrowing interaction principles from macOS and adapting them to the device’s modular computing nature.

Last year’s iPadOS 13 was both a statement and declaration of intent: Apple knew the iPad was more than a large iPhone and different from a Mac, but the company had to break with the past to find out what, exactly, the iPad experience was going to be. Even if the end result wasn’t drastically different from iOS versions of years past, Apple had to draw a line; they started moving past the platform’s iPhone origins with multiwindowing and, months later, the native pointer.

The quest to find the iPad’s new identity continues in iPadOS 14, only this time Apple seems to be asking: what does a truly modern iPad app even look like?

Apple’s Goals

To properly evaluate the new functionalities and potential of iPadOS 14, it’s important to understand Apple’s goals and the scope of their ambitions. After spending the past four months using iPadOS 14 on my iPad Pro, I think there are two major themes at play in iPadOS 14.

First is the idea of rethinking information density and taking better advantage of the iPad’s display. Since the iPad’s introduction in 2010, tablet apps were largely rooted in the iPhone’s existing interface guidelines. As much as Apple wouldn’t miss taking a shot at Android tablets (which were also a thing back then) and Google’s blown-up smartphone apps, it was also undeniable that iPad apps – even, and especially, those designed by Apple itself – shared many of the same visual and interaction traits of their iPhone predecessors. From Apple’s perspective, the play was to optimize for familiarity and consistency: millions of users already knew how to use an iPhone, and what better way to carry them over to a new platform than ensuring they’d already know how to use iPad apps?

As a result, the initial wave of iPad apps did offer new, tablet-specific UI elements such as popovers and sidebars, but by and large, everything else was based on existing iPhone conventions: most apps relied on tab bars at the bottom of the screen to deal with navigation across different sections and the idea of more UI complexity was generally frowned upon. iPad apps could only run in full-screen, had more space available for extra content, but ideally they had to remain as straightforward and uncomplicated as iPhone apps. This underlying assumption stuck for many years, putting Apple in the awkward spot where most of their iPad apps were turning into the very things they made fun of in years prior.

In looking back at the iPad’s evolution, you can see how 2015 was a pivotal year for the platform: with the introduction of the iPad Pro, Apple effectively started a second chapter in the iPad’s history, accepting the reality that some users wanted to elect the device as their primary computer. With such newfound responsibility for the device came Apple’s concessions to complexity. iOS 9 brought deeper multitasking with Split View and Slide Over; two years later, iOS 11 revamped multitasking entirely with the addition of drag and drop, a proper file manager, and a more powerful dock; with last year’s iPadOS 13, Apple adapted the Mac’s multiwindowing system to the iPad, blending the desktop and tablet worlds in a fascinating, if somewhat confusing, UX experiment.

Which brings me back to the idea of information density as a core theme in this year’s iPadOS 14. For the past five years, it’s been clear that Apple is unafraid of taking ideas that worked on the Mac and rethinking them for a device that supports multiple input methods. But while previous software updates were aimed at rethinking the experience around apps – Split View, drag and drop, windows, the pointer – iPadOS 14 gets to the root of the issue itself: why do so many iPad apps still look like enlarged iPhone versions with tab bars, nested menus, and sparse content that feels like a waste of space? Apple’s answer is a combination of elements that are, once again, inspired by the Mac but rethought for iPad: sidebars, multiple columns, and new toolbar menus aren’t a groundbreaking novelty in app design, but in the context of iPadOS’ growth, they show how Apple is willing to rethink the very foundations of apps.

The second high-level iPadOS 14 theme is also related to information density, and it’s the idea of reducing modality in apps. This isn’t as easily explained as “iPad apps have a sidebar now” – it’s a more subtle effort to balance the relationship between UI elements and content in iPad apps. As we’re going to explore later in this chapter, this strategy shares many of the same objectives as compact UI: Apple is prioritizing the retention of context when using apps – UI is more compact and it doesn’t block or hide what you’re doing. Various apps have received updates throughout their interface to follow these principles, such as popup menus that are automatically dismissed when scrolling or view filters that update an app’s displayed content without blocking interactions. These sort of changes may not be glamorous or easily marketable, but they add up, and they fit the aforementioned broader vision – Apple wants to rid the iPad of UI conventions that are better suited for iPhone.

In a fun twist of fate, iPad apps are coming full circle: once inspired by the iPhone, and progressively updated with classic Mac features reimagined for touch, these are the same apps that will be ported to macOS via Catalyst and run natively on Apple Silicon Macs. The standard look of iPad apps is fundamentally changing in iPadOS 14, and the ramifications of this will be one of the most fascinating topics of the upcoming year.

Let’s dive in.

Made for iPad

The most notable updates to iPad apps in iPadOS 14 fall under the Made for iPad initiative, which describes Apple’s efforts to rethink the default look and behavior of tablet apps. At a high level, Made for iPad encompasses three app-specific enhancements and one native system feature; all of them contribute to making iPadOS a more versatile platform for everyday work, with interesting repercussions on the iPad app ecosystem as a whole.

Sidebars

Nowhere is Apple’s push for better widescreen-optimized apps more apparent than the new system sidebars – by far the standout addition to several built-in iPad apps in iPadOS 14. Apps like Photos, Music, Calendar, and Shortcuts sport a new multicolumn layout with a sidebar that dramatically simplifies navigation by putting different sections and modes just one click or tap away. In Apple’s own words, sidebars “provide the same quick navigation as tab bars while making better use of the large display”; Apple is advising developers to replace tab bars with sidebars and split views (i.e. columns) in their iPad apps, and they’re leading by example with a roster of sidebar-laden app updates in iPadOS 14.

For third-party developers, the sidebar is now a native iPadOS UI element available with a dedicated API; Notes and Files, which featured a sidebar before, have been updated to use the new one provided by iPadOS 14, along with its new default behaviors.

Files in iPadOS 13.

Files in iPadOS 14, featuring the new native sidebar and denser grid view.

Notes in iPadOS 13.

Notes in iPadOS 14.

Let’s talk about some of those new behaviors and default capabilities for sidebars in iPadOS 14 that weren’t supported back when sidebars were exclusive to a couple Apple apps only.

Native iPadOS 14 sidebars support an “outline mode” that lets them offer collapsible groups that collect related app categories or sections together, letting you easily hide or show them. A good example of this is the Photos app, where you now have a sidebar that collects all sections and albums in a single list. There are top-level sections for key functionalities such as For You and Search; everything else is grouped under four additional sidebar sections you can expand and collapse at any time depending on what you want to see in the sidebar. In a nice touch, the expanded/collapsed state of outline mode sticks across app relaunches, so you can customize sidebars to your liking and rest assured your preference will remain saved over time.

The new sidebar in Photos.

Outline mode is also supported in Mail (for different accounts), Shortcuts (which finally offers folders in iOS and iPadOS 14), Files, and Notes. The behavior is consistent everywhere, and third-party developers can take advantage of this, too. Aviary, a new Twitter client by indie developer Shihab Mehboob, uses a sidebar in iPadOS 14 and makes extensive use of outline mode to group extras and lists, which you can easily hide or show with a single tap or click on the trackpad.

The native sidebar with support for outline mode in Aviary.

Similarly, Anybuffer – one of the most powerful clipboard managers and shelf apps for iPad – has switched from a custom sidebar to the new system one in its iPadOS 14 update. In the new version, the developers implemented outline mode as a way to differentiate between regular and smart shelves:

The new system sidebar in Anybuffer.

Spring-loading is another default behavior supported by sidebars in iPadOS 14. As previously seen on the Mac and in older iPad apps with their own custom implementations of sidebars, spring-loading is a drag and drop feature that lets you move an item into a specific category by hovering and pausing over the destination until it loads. If an app supports sidebar spring-loading in iPadOS 14, you’ll be able to grab an item – either via touch or the trackpad – hover over the location you need in the sidebar, and watch it spring open so you can drop the item there. You can try this yourself in Photos: grab a picture, drag it over to the ‘Favorites’ section or an album in the sidebar, wait a second, and the page will spring open, allowing you to drop the photo there:

Spring-loading in Photos.

Another good example is Music: Apple replaced tab bars with a sidebar in the updated app for iPadOS 14, and in addition to outline mode for multiple sections, Music’s sidebar supports drag and drop with and without spring-loading for both songs and entire albums. Spring-loading is optional in Music: if you just drag a song over a playlist, it’ll get highlighted (with a new rounded and padded selection style) and the classic green ‘+’ badge will appear next to the drag item, suggesting you can let go of the song to add it to the playlist. It’s kind of silly, but I love the visual effect caused by rapidly hovering over multiple playlists in the sidebar – I can almost feel what it would be like with haptic feedback even though the iPad doesn’t come with a Taptic Engine.

Spring-loading for playlists in Music.

The same drag and drop technique has been implemented in Mail: Apple’s email client now uses iPadOS 14’s native sidebar, so you can drop messages into different accounts or folders in a way that’s consistent with other apps updated for iPadOS 14. You can even spring-load collapsed mailboxes if you want to drop a message into a folder in a different account.

In my experience using iPadOS 14 on my iPad Pro for the past few months, I’ve realized that drag and drop and the system’s native sidebar perfectly complement each other. While previously I had to pick up items with one finger, use another finger to switch locations, then drag the item and drop it somewhere else, now I can just grab it, drop it in a section of the sidebar, and I’m done. The fact that this interaction works equally well with touch and the trackpad is yet more proof of Apple’s modern approach to designing iPad features: they can’t be limited to one input method or mode; they have to support both the pointer and touch, and remain equally accessible and intuitive for both novice and experienced users.

You can use drag and drop and the sidebar to move photos quickly between albums.

There’s more interesting tech worth mentioning about the sidebar. Items in the sidebar can invoke their own context menus: as seen in Music, you can long-press/right-click playlists in the sidebar to reveal a context menu with various playback options.

In Notes, the same menu lets you share, move, or rename folders:

In the clipboard manager Anybuffer, you can long-press individual shelves in the sidebar to access a host of related options:

And in the popular RSS reader Lire, the sidebar features a mix of colorful icons, collapsible sections, and context menus:

Sidebars also support “accessories” in the form of checkboxes, reordering, swipe actions for individual rows, or just about any custom button or element added by developers. In the music collection app VinylBox, which I want to use to catalog my CD collection via its Discogs integration, the app’s native sidebar features a button to create a new folder for your collection:

Item reordering is seen in Files, which – like Notes and Mail – has been updated to use the system’s native sidebar instead of a proprietary one. In iPadOS 14, you can reorder favorite folders either via drag and drop or by entering a manual editing mode.

Reordering items in the Files sidebar.

As I mentioned before, the Calendar app has also been updated with a sidebar this year, and this is Apple’s most intriguing implementation of the technology in iPadOS 14. Calendar’s sidebar can switch between three modes, one of which lets you select which events you want to see in the secondary view on the right19 by clicking the calendars you prefer.

You can also view a list of events in the app’s sidebar.

The most important aspect of iPadOS 14’s sidebars and the reason why I believe all developers should adopt them, however, is the consistency of the feature. Aside from the custom elements that developers can embed in them, native sidebars share an underlying consistency in activation and behavior: sidebars can be invoked and dismissed with swipes from the edge of the display or with the trackpad by swiping with two fingers over an app’s title bar at the top. Sidebars were designed to play well alongside size classes and different device orientations (more on this below); most of the time, you’ll always find the same button in the upper left corner of a title bar that lets you easily dismiss or show a sidebar with one click.

The sidebar button.

This, I believe, is the true advantage of Apple’s new API over custom sidebars third-party developers (and Apple itself) may have used in the past: in becoming a systemwide UI element shared across apps, the iPadOS 14 sidebar’s consistent functionality has created a common denominator that users will come to expect in all iPad apps. This happened to me over the past few months: after using Apple’s built-in apps and a handful of third-party ones with updated sidebars, custom sidebars such as the ones seen in Dropbox, 1Password, Reeder, and DEVONthink started slowing me down since they weren’t behaving as I’d expected them to. This isn’t without precedent, either. Think about share sheets and context menus: how often do you see apps with custom versions of those nowadays? And if they do use them, do you like them, or do you just wish they’d use the standard system controls instead? That’s how I feel about sidebars in iPadOS 14: I hope all iPad apps will adopt the system-provided sidebar in lieu of custom alternatives.

The more I use them, the more I think the spawning of sidebars all across iPadOS is going to be terrific for the iPad app ecosystem. Apps such as Photos are dramatically faster to use since the sidebar makes destination targets always available. The mere addition of a sidebar makes certain apps, like Music and Shortcuts, feel brand new – like they’ve finally graduated into desktop-class experiences that are fully supportive of folders, drag and drop, and other features that are now part of the iPad’s interaction vocabulary.

Considered in isolation, a sidebar may feel like a trivial, inconsequential addition that’s so obvious, one could wonder why we’re even talking about it. But in practice, the sidebar adds a new dimension to apps, unlocking a new level of functionality for iPad apps that are no longer constrained by typical iPhone layouts.

And yet the sidebar is only one part of a bigger restructuring for iPad apps this year.

Three-Column Layouts

For the past few years, Apple’s Mail and Notes apps have offered a three-column display mode that allowed users to quickly navigate sections. As we discussed on MacStories before, the three-column mode was one of the key advantages of the 12.9” iPad Pro over smaller models, which were limited to standard split modes with two concurrent columns. In iPadOS 14, Apple is opening up a native three-column mode to third-party developers with a major update to the existing UISplitViewController API; in the process, they’ve also updated the technology to make it work on more iPads, in more orientations, and with full support for size classes.

In short: between sidebars and three-column layouts, iPad apps are growing up, and you should expect a lot of your favorite apps to look a bit more like their Mac counterparts.

If you’ve ever used Notes or Mail on a 12.9” iPad Pro before, the addition of three-column layouts in more apps may not seem like a big deal. Notes and Mail are now using the updated three-column mode in lieu of their former custom implementations, and a three-column layout has been added to Voice Memos and Contacts as well.

As is often the case in updated view controller APIs (and, I may add, life in general), don’t let appearances fool you: Apple’s modernized split view controller and native three-column mode marks a fundamental shift in designing iPad apps. I don’t want to get too deep into the technicalities of this framework, but I think it’s important to understand what it does to get a sense of where the iPad app ecosystem is going.

Before iOS 14, Apple’s split view controller system (not to be confused with Split View, the multitasking feature) only supported a classic split interface style with a column on the left (called the ‘Primary’ window) and the content area on the right (the ‘Secondary’ one). For instance, this is what Notes looked like with a classic split view controller before Apple added the proprietary three-column mode in iOS 10. As a developer, if you wanted to offer a three-column mode in your app, you had to build one yourself – which is exactly what the likes of Ulysses, iA Writer, and Fiery Feeds did. In many ways, those apps were ahead of the curve; however, each implementation differed from the other, resulting in a confusing landscape of powerful iPad apps that didn’t share a consistent multicolumn experience. It felt like the days of custom drag and drop before Apple shipped the real thing in iOS 11.

Fiery Feeds for iPadOS 13.

GameTrack for iPadOS 13. Note the inconsistent sidebars between Fiery Feeds and GameTrack.

In iPadOS 14, the split view controller framework has gained the option to show an additional column in between the sidebar and content area: the new column is called “supplementary”, and it’s what displays your list of messages and notes in the Mail and Notes apps, respectively. In the two Apple apps updated with three-column mode in iPadOS 14, Voice Memos and Contacts, the supplementary column is used to collect your recordings and scroll lists of contacts.

Much like sidebars, what makes iPadOS 14’s native three-column mode special is its flexibility and multiple options available to developers. Consider, for example, dismissing the extra column: by default, in Notes and Mail, there’s a button to hide/show the sidebar and, as I noted above, you can swipe with two fingers over the title bar to toggle columns as well. The gesture, however, is optional, and developers can choose to disable and override it with something else. There’s also the double-arrow button that lets you expand the secondary window (content area) to fill the screen, which is used in Notes to view any note in full-screen mode. This button can also be implemented by third-party apps now, so they will be able to mimic Notes’ behavior and let you rotate between multicolumn and full-screen layouts.

You can use this button in apps with multicolumn support to focus on content.

What’s truly remarkable, though, is the extent to which the three-column framework integrates with size classes and deals with multiple orientations and iPad models. In iPadOS 14, developers can choose different behaviors and modes for their three-column layouts: for instance, they can opt to always tile the primary and supplementary columns next to the secondary one, or they can choose to “displace” the content area, or they can overlay a column on top of another. They can do so by setting specific properties in their apps; they can also set an ‘automatic’ behavior that lets the system take control and lay out columns based on size classes, device orientation, and multitasking conditions.

To give you some practical examples of this technology applied to everyday iPad usage, I turned once again to Adaptivity, the amazing developer utility created by Geoff Hackworth, which I use every year to test new system functionalities in iOS and iPadOS. As you can see below, on a 12.9” iPad Pro in landscape, I can choose to show two columns next to the content area at all times with the ‘tile’ behavior, which allows me to interact with every column at the same time; this is different from Apple’s system behavior, which defaults to hiding the sidebar upon opening an app for the first time – even on a 12.9” iPad Pro. You can try this yourself by force-quitting Notes and reopening it – the app will default to two columns only. However, if you’re a third-party developer and would prefer your app to always display three columns instead, iPadOS 14 gives you the tools to do so.

Tiling three columns in Adaptivity.

The different split behaviors available to developers in iPadOS 14.

Don’t want to tile the primary and supplementary columns next to the secondary one? iPadOS 14 allows apps to displace the content area (it gets dimmed and cannot be interacted with until you dismiss one of the columns on the left) or display columns over it. Here’s what the “displace” and “overlay” display modes look like in Adaptivity:

In overlay mode, two columns cover the third one on the right.

In displace mode, the third column gets dimmed and pushed off to the side.

The Twitter client Aviary, which supports multiple columns in iPadOS 14, uses the displace behavior to dim columns on the right when the sidebar and timeline are shown:

By default, Aviary displaces the third column.

However, there’s also an advanced setting in Aviary to use the tile layout instead and always display three columns in the app:

If you enable the ‘Adjacent Sidebar’ option, Aviary uses a tile split behavior instead.

The options selected by developers in their multicolumn apps are only one part of the equation: ultimately, the system is in charge of deciding how columns should be laid out depending on size classes, which take into consideration both device orientation and multitasking conditions. In simpler terms: the number of columns displayed onscreen is going to change depending on the iPad model you have and its orientation and whether you’re using Split View or not. Let’s go over some examples, which I was able to capture on iPads at two opposite ends of the spectrum: my 12.9” iPad Pro and an iPad mini.

On the largest iPad Pro, VinylBox, like Notes, supports the new three-column layout in landscape mode. Turn the device sideways, however, and the app – again, just like Notes – loses the ability to display three columns simultaneously. In portrait, you’ll be able to see two columns (the primary and supplementary ones) placed over the content area, making it non-interactive.

VinylBox shares the same column behavior of Apple’s Notes app; Contacts works the same way. Another Apple app updated this year with multicolumn support – Voice Memos – takes a different approach altogether. In both landscape and portrait, Voice Memos can always display three columns at once:

Voice Memos in landscape.

Voice Memos shows three columns in portrait mode too.

I’m not sure why Notes, Contacts, and Mail don’t support three columns on the 12.9” iPad Pro in portrait while Voice Memos does. My gut feeling says that there isn’t a larger vision behind this – rather, I suspect different teams at Apple chose to implement column behaviors based on what they preferred. I’m struggling to find the deeper, hidden meaning behind extensive multicolumn support in Voice Memos as opposed to Notes or Mail; in any case, I applaud the Voice Memos engineers since theirs is, I believe, the best implementation to offer on a 12.9” iPad Pro, where three columns are perfectly fine to use in portrait mode as well.

Stay with me, because it gets even better on the iPad mini. On Apple’s diminutive tablet, neither Notes nor Mail support working with three columns simultaneously in landscape at all – the rightmost one gets displaced offscreen. There’s one Apple app in iPadOS 14, however, that comes with a full-featured three-column layout on the iPad mini in landscape mode. You know where this is going.

Here’s, once again, Voice Memos, running on the iPad mini in landscape mode in all its minuscule, yet functional three-column glory:

Voice Memos on an iPad mini running iPadOS 14.

Even on the small screen of the iPad mini, I find Voice Memos’ three landscape columns comfortable to use. It helps, of course, that Voice Memos sports a relatively sparse user interface; I can imagine it’d be more challenging to pack the UI of richer apps like Notes and Mail in a narrow third column, but I’d like to see Apple try nonetheless. It’s also worth noting how, as other developers have pointed out to me, the plethora of options available in the UISplitViewController framework may make it challenging to come up with a consistent application of the technology. Regardless, I wish more Apple apps would behave like Voice Memos on all iPad models; right now, it almost feels as if an app with a strong Catalyst foundation (such as Voice Memos) has an inherent advantage over older apps that were designed before the age of iPad apps turning into Mac experiences.

As I noted above, multicolumn layouts also have to account for changes in multitasking conditions on iPadOS – namely, whether Split View is active or not. Generally speaking, the system follows this automatic behavior: you won’t be able to see three concurrent columns once a second app is added in Split View next to the current one; when you enter Split View – even with the 75/25 compact layout, the two left columns will either displace or be overlaid on top of the secondary one.

When a secondary app is added via Split View, Notes loses the ability to display three concurrent columns.

In this case, I agree with Apple’s choice: once another app is shown, three columns would likely be too narrow for most apps, and it seems reasonable to default to only showing two columns.

Lire and MusicHarbor in Split View. Lire can’t display three columns next to another app.

GoodLinks pushes the third column off to the side when a secondary app is added in Split View.

That’s not to say it isn’t possible for developers to code their apps in such a way that three columns are always shown, even if Split View is active. As shown below in GameTrack and Adaptivity, iPadOS 14 gives developers the tools to hardcode a three-column layout regardless of Split View. It’s up to a developer’s discretion to make use of this technology, and I understand how it may not be the best approach for apps with complex UIs that involve several toolbar buttons or content that can’t fit in a narrow column.

GameTrack can always show three columns at once, even when a secondary app in a compact size class is added via Split View.

Adaptivity lets you enable a tile behavior to always show three simultaneous columns.

In using apps with sidebars and multicolumn layouts on my iPad Pro for the past few months, I’m left with three main takeaways that should inform your experience with iPadOS 14 going forward.

First, developers have a lot of leeway when it comes to implementing multiple columns in their apps. Yes, the framework can be fairly complex to understand at first, but that complexity is necessary to offer a flexible system that can work equally well for simple user interfaces and more elaborate ones. The multiple display modes, paired with customizations for the sidebar and support for size classes, should provide a solid foundation for the vast majority of iPad apps to replace their proprietary flavors of multicolumn in favor of iPadOS 14’s system, which offers sizable advantages such as integration with touch and pointer, multitasking, accessibility, right-to-left languages, and more. Going forward, apps that don’t use the native multicolumn framework are going to stick out as odd leftovers, much like those that still rely on custom share sheets or context menus.

Second, by providing developers with a native solution for multicolumn that also works out of the box once ported to macOS, Apple is removing a lot of friction from app development. We’ve seen this happen before with other built-in technologies like drag and drop, Safari View Controller, and keyboard shortcuts: before those system frameworks became available, developers had to code those features themselves, resulting in more time spent developing options that should have been system features instead of devoting their efforts to app design and new functionalities. If you’re a new developer, there’s never been a better time to design an iPad app: iPadOS 14 provides you with a wide range of tools such as pointer control, keyboard events, multiwindow, and multicolumn that not only are supported system-wide with no additional work, but also make your iPad app ready for macOS “for free” just by virtue of using Apple’s native APIs. Conversely, if you’re an existing developer, now more than ever is the time to reconsider all the custom implementations of sidebars and multiple columns shipped over the years. As a result, I expect we’re going to see a chasm between “old-gen” iPad apps and brand new ones, at least for a while.

Last but not least, using iPad apps with modern sidebars and multiple columns feels like a breath of fresh air in the ecosystem. By itself, a three-column layout with a sidebar is not a groundbreaking invention: desktop apps (and several third-party iPad apps) have offered one for years. What’s important in the context of iPadOS 14 is how Apple, by endorsing a specific approach to laying out and interacting with iPad apps, is signifying a shift in the platform’s role that’s now more tipped toward the Mac end of the computing spectrum rather than the iPhone’s – something we saw coming after last year’s iPadOS 13 and which was further highlighted by the introduction of the Magic Keyboard and system pointer a few months ago.

iPad apps with updated sidebars and multiple columns now feel like rich, flexible experiences that blend the best aspects of “classic” iPadOS, such as multitouch and gestures, with a modular environment that allows for multiple windows, trackpads, and keyboard control. Saying that “Apple just made iPad apps look like Mac ones” is shortsighted: rather, iPad apps now offer the power and versatility of a desktop experience, but they’re still iPad apps at heart, and you can use them with touch, in full-screen, without multiple columns if you want to. On a large iPad Pro, multicolumn layouts are fantastic for managing information-heavy apps with multiple levels of navigation and content areas; I find three columns comfortable enough on a 12.9” iPad Pro, and I’m more efficient at using apps that involve folders and multiple layers of navigation. At the same time, when I don’t need multiple columns, I’m not forced into them: I can always pick up the iPad from the Magic Keyboard, put a full-screen app in my hands, and concentrate on one task at a time.

Having the option of choosing between desktop-class, multicolumn layouts and traditional full-screen apps, all while seamlessly switching modes, is what makes the iPad experience tick. And from this standpoint, iPadOS 14’s multicolumn system absolutely delivers.

Toolbars

Compared to updated sidebars and the new multicolumn framework, changes to toolbars in iPadOS 14 will likely be considered minor enhancements, but they’re still relevant in the context of Apple’s ‘Made for iPad’ initiative.

Apple’s general advice in iPadOS 14 is that toolbar buttons should be moved to the top of the screen in a unified location that follows the Mac’s traditional approach. In an effort to free up space at the bottom of the screen and, once again, move away from iPhone-inspired designs (where it makes more sense to have controls within thumb’s reach), Apple has started embedding buttons in title bars, using sidebars and pull-down menus to expose functionality that was either hidden or hard to access before.

The two best examples of toolbars in iPadOS 14 are Calendar and Files. In the Calendar app, buttons to filter your calendars, view and create events, and check on your invitations have been moved to the top of the window; when pressed, they either load a sidebar or display a popover to add a new event.

Toolbar icons have been moved to the top in the Calendar app.

I like this design: the title bar always had enough space for extra controls, and putting buttons up there makes sense since the iPadOS 14 button to open/dismiss the sidebar is also at the top. Additionally, by removing the toolbar at the bottom, Apple created more space for the calendar itself, which is ultimately what matters in a calendar client. That said, the Calendar toolbar is also responsive: when the app is in a compact size class, it reverts to the old design with controls at the bottom of the window.

In a compact size class, Calendar returns to an iPhone-like layout with toolbar buttons at the bottom.

With the Files app, Apple used the toolbar to bring view controls (which a lot of users struggled to find before) front and center. Press the new button in the top right corner of the title bar and you’ll be presented with a pull-down menu to switch between different view modes or sort your documents.

The new toolbar in Files.

Notes also comes with an updated toolbar now, with the camera button opening a pull-down menu to add attachments to a note:

The new toolbar in Notes.

Some third-party developers have been following Apple’s guidance on toolbars as well. In the iPadOS 14 update to the excellent MusicHarbor, the app features buttons to select and sort music releases in the top toolbar; those buttons also open pull-down menus when pressed. The highly customizable Twitter client Aviary was designed for iOS and iPadOS 14 from the start, and it uses toolbar buttons with pull-down menus to handle column management and perform actions on selected tweets.

MusicHarbor uses a toolbar button to sort your music releases.

Toolbar buttons in Aviary present pull-down menus to manage columns and tweets.

There isn’t much else to say about toolbars. They fit the underlying iPadOS 14 theme of consolidating UI elements in one place, making more room for content, and preparing iPad apps for an eventual transition to the Mac. The integration between toolbar icons and pull-down menus is particularly apt given how closely the end result resembles a classic macOS toolbar. Just like most iPad apps will be losing their tab bars this year, expect to see fewer bottom toolbars and more UI elements moving to the top of the screen.

Search

All the changes and improvements to Search mentioned previously – more compact results, instant app launching, and support for web searches, among other things – apply to iPadOS 14 too, with one notable difference: on iPad, Search is now a floating window that appears on top of the app you’re using, without fully hiding it.

The new Search on iPad.

You’ve probably seen this Search design before: effectively, iPadOS 14 offers the equivalent of Spotlight on macOS. In another instance of Apple deliberately borrowing from the Mac to make the iPadOS platform more powerful and easier to operate, you can now invoke Search from anywhere (provided you have an external keyboard) and scroll results while continuing to see the app you were previously using.

It’s hard to describe how much faster iPadOS 14’s updated Search feels without trying it. Press ⌘Space (or if you’re on the Home Screen, swipe down) and a search box comes up immediately, ready for you to type. At this point, you can either enter a few characters for the name of the app you want to open and press Return to launch it right away, or put together a more complex search query to view results from apps and the web. The search box accepts text input as soon as the ⌘Space shortcut has been triggered, which makes typing out a query and getting results back after an instant a pure joy. Even more so than the updated Search on iPhone this year, Search in iPadOS 14 feels faster, less intrusive thanks to its compact design, and inviting. You’ll only need 30 seconds with this feature to wonder how we ever got by with the iPad’s former full-screen (and much slower) Search.

The integration of Search with the pointer and trackpad is fascinating. Right off the bat, when the search box comes up you can hover over the microphone button and click it to dictate your search query rather than typing it. As in iPadOS 13, you can scroll through different sets of results (now more compact, like in iOS 14) with the keyboard’s arrow keys, but you can also scroll and open results with the trackpad. And there’s more: in addition to scrolling and navigating into results with nested pages (such as dictionary definitions or contacts) with the pointer, you can also long-press results to view their context menu previews inline within Search. In the screenshot below, you can see how I previewed a MacStories article – itself one of the new web suggestions in iPadOS 14 – as a small popup inside Search by long-pressing it:

You can long-press Safari results in Search to preview them inline.

Search results that offer inline actions, such as Music and Contacts, can be interacted with using the pointer right from Search itself. My favorite example: search for a song or playlist, hit the Play button, and the item will start playing in Music, in the background, without leaving Search.20

“So long and goodnight.”

With the new floating design, it’s also easier to use drag and drop for search results: highlight the result you want to drop into the app you’re using, drag it outside the search results window, and drop it. This works with both the pointer as well as regular touch input. By moving away from a full-screen design, it’s now easier to grab app icons from search results and drop them elsewhere onscreen to activate Split View or Slide Over since Search is quickly dismissed as you start dragging an icon away. I still wish there was an alternative to drag and drop for managing multitasking from Search on iPad (perhaps keyboard shortcuts?), but this is nicer nevertheless.

Using Search to activate Split View.

Just like on iPhone, Search in iPadOS 14 supports compact UI for shortcuts, meaning that Siri shortcuts donated by apps or custom ones you created in the Shortcuts app will be executed atop Search with compact UI without launching another app. Like I said, this is also supported on iPhone, but it’s more impressive on iPad because the floating search bar that can be invoked anywhere with an external keyboard makes for a fantastic way to trigger and interact with shortcuts. It’s almost as if they were native components of Search. Here, for example, you can see how I can now create a new todo in my task manager while using Safari simply by invoking a shortcut from Search, which will run it in compact mode with support for interactions.

Creating a new task while inside Safari.

The ability to run shortcuts inside Search with compact UI speaks to a bigger idea that permeates iPadOS 14: as we’ve seen with other features, Apple’s focus this year was to utilize the device’s larger screen while retaining the user’s context as much as possible. The same design philosophy that gave us sidebars, multicolumn layouts, and toolbars is at the core of the iPad’s new Search. Its compact mode, paired with smarter results, pointer integration, and support for shortcuts makes this the best version of Search the iPad has ever seen, and one I find myself using considerably more than before. Because of these improvements, Search has become an integral part of getting my work done on iPadOS 14.

This is the best version of Search the iPad has ever seen.

That being said, Search still isn’t perfect. As I hinted above, its most perplexing limitation is that it can only be activated inside apps if you have an external keyboard and can press ⌘Space. If you’re using the iPad in tablet mode with touch input alone, the only way to open Search is to swipe down on the Home Screen, which severely diminishes the utility of Search for all those who don’t want to pair a keyboard with their iPads. Given Apple’s recent efforts in creating iPadOS features that scale seamlessly from touch to pointer, it’s odd to have a new functionality that’s obviously skewed toward external keyboard usage.

I hope Apple can figure out a faster way to operate multitasking (i.e. adding apps to Split View and Slide Over) from Search without drag and drop, as well as a touch equivalent of ⌘Space, in future versions of iPadOS. In spite of these lingering omissions, I think Apple has struck an ideal balance of compactness and expanded functionality with Search in iPadOS 14, which joins multicolumn layouts and compact shortcuts in the list of my favorite iPad enhancements this year.

Apple Pencil

While I’m no heavy user of the Apple Pencil myself, I can’t deny it’s rapidly become a key element of the iPad Pro experience for millions of users who rely on it to take handwritten notes, sketch, or put together amazing works of art. iPadOS 14 brings some major improvements and additions to Apple Pencil ranging from system-wide support for any text field to deeper integration with Notes and higher performance for PencilKit-enabled apps.

Scribble

By far the marquee enhancement to Apple Pencil in iPadOS 14, Scribble is an all-new way of entering text in any text field, in any app, using handwriting recognition instead of a regular keyboard. Put simply: with Scribble, you can use the Apple Pencil to handwrite text anywhere – be it the Safari address bar or Messages’ compose box – and the system will automatically convert your handwriting to typed text. Scribble was designed for people who never want to put down the Pencil while they’re in the middle of their creative flow or a particular task; rather than placing the Pencil somewhere and temporarily typing on the software keyboard, Scribble lets them continue using the Pencil while iPadOS converts handwritten text to its typed counterpart.

Using Scribble in iPadOS 14. I apologize in advance for my terrible handwriting showcased in this review.

The idea behind Scribble is at the same time deceivingly simple and technically intricate. Scribble isn’t a separate mode you need to manually activate: it’s naturally integrated system-wide with any text field; transcription from handwritten to typed text happens as-you-write, and there’s no particular invocation technique you need to be aware of to start using it. As Apple describes it, Scribble’s strokes are ephemeral, and they disappear as soon as they’re converted to typed text; it is, in a way, like “dictation with motion”.

Even as someone who won’t use this feature on a regular basis – I like my Magic Keyboard too much, and I effectively never use the Apple Pencil – I have to admit that Scribble’s disarming simplicity is astounding when you consider the technicalities involved. First of all, Scribble uses a private, on-device text recognition engine to convert handwritten text to its typed form; only English and Chinese are supported by Scribble right now.21 Second, there is a new API for developers to support Scribble specifically with custom integrations; however, most apps are going to support Scribble out of the box, with no adjustments necessary, since the feature was designed to enable this new experience “for free” with behaviors that are automatically applied to apps – even if the developer didn’t explicitly add support for Scribble.

Search bars are a good example of how much iPadOS 14 does to enable Scribble integration in every app. When you write with the Pencil in a search field, two things happen: first, you’ll see a floating tools palette appear at the bottom of the screen with a big ‘Search’ button and additional controls to show the software keyboard and manage other Pencil settings. You can tap the Search button to confirm your search query; the floating palette is reminiscent of the one previously seen in Notes and Markup – you can also drag it around the screen and minimize it the same way.

First you scribble in any search field…

…then the search palette appears once text has been converted.

Additionally, if a search bar comes with placeholder text inside it, iPadOS 14 will automatically remove it so that you’re not scribbling on top of existing text, which could be confusing. This happens in Music (where the search field has the ‘Artists, Songs, Lyrics, and More’ placeholder text), but it also works out of the box in third-party apps like LookUp, even though its developers didn’t opt into any of the new Scribble APIs. This will work for search fields of most apps that use Apple’s native text field APIs22 – even if they haven’t been updated for iPadOS 14 yet.

Placeholder text disappears from search fields when you use Scribble.

There are other behaviors Apple enabled for Scribble by default for all apps. For instance, you don’t need to “stay within the lines” when scribbling into a text field: your writing can extend outside its boundaries, and it’ll be fine – text will still be recognized and converted inside the text field. Scribble even works if you’re writing into a text field that can only be partially viewed onscreen. Consider the example below: the address bar of a compact Safari window was covered by a video playing in Picture in Picture, and I was still able to handwrite with Scribble in it.

Using Scribble in a partially covered text field.

There’s more. If you’re writing into a darkened text field, iPadOS 14 will give scribbled text a light font automatically, so it’s easier to see. And, of course, secure text input fields (i.e. password fields) are not supported by Scribble, so you won’t be able to handwrite the passwords you’ve memorized over the years.23

As I mentioned above, there are also instances of apps specifically adapting their UIs to Scribble in iPadOS 14. Messages, for example, detects when you’re using Scribble to handwrite a message and makes the compose field bigger so it’s easier to write into.

The compose field in Messages grows taller when it detects Scribble input.

I expect this design choice to become the norm in iPad apps that want to integrate with Scribble. In the latest version of Fantastical, for instance, the compose field is automatically expanded if you tap the ‘+’ button to create a new event with the Pencil instead of your finger; the app detects a Pencil interaction, assumes you’ll want to scribble an event’s title, and automatically makes the compose field bigger for you.

Using Scribble in Fantastical.

I’ve also seen examples of developers implementing Scribble as a “universal” input method that intelligently adapts to their apps’ UI. In Things for iPadOS 14, you can use the Pencil to select sections in the app’s sidebar; start writing in a blank space on any page, however, and the app will recognize Scribble input and create a new task for you based on converted text.

Scribble anywhere in Things…

…and the app will create a new task for converted text.

Fantastical has also followed a similar approach with the ability to create new events (with natural language support) with Scribble:

You can scribble natural language commands in Fantastical.

There are some fascinating implementations of Scribble’s floating palette in iPadOS 14, too. If you’re writing in Mail, the palette will give you options for the font picker, image and document insertion, and more – essentially replicating the buttons you’d get in the QuickType bar when using the keyboard. Based on the same idea, in Reminders the palette features options for time and location settings.

The special Scribble palette in Mail.

The Scribble palette in Reminders.

Interestingly enough, when the floating palette is shown in a compact size class (e.g. the app is in Slide Over), it takes on an alternate compact form at the bottom of the window, sort of like an additional toolbar.

The compact palette underneath Safari’s bottom toolbar.

In addition to writing into text fields, you can also manipulate text inside them with new Scribble-specific Apple Pencil gestures that let you delete words, make selections, insert spaces, and join words. These gestures (and Scribble itself) are explained to you the first time you connect an Apple Pencil to an iPad running iPadOS 14, but you can also go through the onboarding process and associated demo under Settings ⇾ Pencil ⇾ Try Scribble. The gestures are:

Delete: You can remove words in editable text fields by scratching them out, either vertically or horizontally.

Select: Circle or draw a line over text to select it, which will make the default copy and paste popup menu appear.

Insert: Tap and hold with the Pencil anywhere in a text field to make room to write additional text.

Join: You can join characters or separate words by drawing a vertical line before or after any character.

In a way, these gestures remind me of last year’s gestures for text manipulation: they’re somewhat hidden, and only advanced users will likely master them. I really like the inclusion of an interactive demo for Scribble and its gestures in Settings though, which is something I’d like to see the company do for more iPad functionalities.

As I mentioned above, I’m not the target user for Scribble: I don’t think I’ll ever find myself in the position where I want to use the Pencil in lieu of a keyboard to type text – and that’s totally fine. We’ve discussed this many times before: the beauty of iPad lies in its modularity – in how a single device paired with different accessories can yield a variety of experiences for a broad range of users.

If you’re a heavy Apple Pencil user who wants to write with the Pencil as much as possible, Scribble should be downright amazing for you: in my tests with the English language and the world’s worst penmanship, performance with handwriting recognition was solid, and the system-wide integration for all apps and text fields (even before iPadOS 14’s launch) was remarkable. I can only imagine how big a deal Scribble is going to be for students, artists, designers, and other iPad users who depend on the Apple Pencil for their work and use it for several hours a day. For those users, I feel like the impact of Scribble will be comparable to the system-wide pointer Apple added in iPadOS 13.4. Plus, I think it’s just cool that handwritten text can magically morph into typed text thanks to on-device intelligence.

I’m not going to use Scribble much personally, but it’s a groundbreaking addition for Apple Pencil users, and I’m fascinated by it.

Handwritten Notes

The other noteworthy addition for Apple Pencil in iPadOS 14 is deeper integration with Notes, which encompasses four major features: the ability to convert handwriting to typed text; Smart Selection for handwritten text; automatic shape recognition; and support for data detectors inside handwritten text. If you’re an Apple Pencil note-taker and rely on Apple’s Notes app, you’ll want to pay attention to what’s going on here.

iPadOS 14 builds upon the handwriting recognition originally introduced with iOS 11 in 2017: at the time, the system could only recognize text in the background, allowing you to search for specific words or passages via Notes’ built-in search feature; in iPadOS 14, you can actually select handwritten text and copy it as typed text, ready to be pasted elsewhere. As before, handwriting recognition is still limited to English and Chinese.

To copy handwritten text as typed text, you can select it in Notes and hit the new ‘Copy as Text’ option from the copy and paste menu. Unfortunately, there is no way to convert handwritten text to typed text inline within a note, as we’ve seen in other note-taking apps on iPad; you can only copy the typed equivalent to the clipboard and paste it somewhere else.

You now select handwriting in Notes and copy it as text. Obviously, this beautifully handwritten note isn’t mine.

You can paste copied text anywhere – in this case, Search will find the matching note inside the Notes app.

To select handwritten text, you can brush over it with your finger or Apple Pencil. Selecting handwritten text is, in my opinion, one of iPadOS 14’s most delightful touches: this feature is dubbed Smart Selection, and it’s a beautiful selection style that progressively surrounds your handwriting as you swipe over letters and words; it’s categorized as “smart” in that it uses on-device machine learning to distinguish text from drawings and doodles, automatically excluding non-text elements from the converted text you get at the end of the process. The intelligence of Smart Selection paired with the intrinsically analog feeling of handwriting is a unique combo that stands out as one of iPadOS 14’s coolest features.

Smart Selection in Notes.

Besides its looks, a lot of fascinating tech went into Smart Selection. For instance: Smart Selection supports acceleration, which means you can select large swaths of handwriting by swiping across text quickly, or you can decelerate to gain greater precision and select individual characters. If you’ve selected text too quickly, you can slowly swipe back to deselect entire words or specific letters, and the result is a beautiful animation that is both contextual and pleasing to look at.

Additionally, Smart Selection supports non-contiguous text selections, drag and drop, and the ability to change colors for selected text. The latter is pretty self-explanatory: select some text, press the drawing button in Notes’ top toolbar again, and choose a new color for the selected text from the system’s color picker. Drag and drop is supported both for in-app rearrangement of text (so you can, say, pick up a paragraph and drop it somewhere else in the same note) as well as other apps. In my tests, handwriting selected in Notes was always imported by other apps as an image; it’d be nice if apps could also opt in to receive handwriting from Notes as typed text.

You can also double- or triple-tap with your finger to select individual words or entire sentences in handwritten text, respectively.

Selecting non-adjacent blocks of handwritten text ties into another addition to the Apple Pencil experience in Notes: built-in shape recognition. In both iOS and iPadOS 14 in Notes, screenshots, and Markup, you can draw a shape, pause briefly while still holding down with your finger or Apple Pencil, and watch as your freehand shape is converted to a geometrically perfect version that respects the size and angle of your original shape. You’ve probably seen similar implementations of this before in third-party note-taking apps for iPad; Apple’s version works system-wide, supports both touch and Pencil input, and uses on-device processing to recognize 16 different types of shapes:

Line

Curve

Square

Rectangle

Circle

Oval

Heart

Triangle

Star

Cloud

Hexagon

Thought bubble

Outlined arrow

Continuous line with 90‑degree turns

Line with arrow endpoint

Curve with arrow endpoint

Shapes created with iPadOS 14. And yes, please vote.

I was somewhat skeptical of shape recognition when I first heard about it at WWDC, but Apple delivered on their promise with this feature: as someone who often needs to annotate webpages or screenshots, I found myself enjoying the ability to draw perfect lines, arcs, and circles with my finger or Pencil. Even more complex shapes such as stars, bubbles, and hearts are recognized consistently and quickly.

There’s still more interesting tech to point out. Handwritten text now supports data detectors: elements such as links, addresses, phone numbers, names, and email addresses will be recognized inside your handwriting and underlined to suggest they can be interacted with. Tap on them and you will kick off the associated action, such as making a phone call, viewing a location in Maps, or opening a link in Safari. You can also long-press them to preview the item or available options inline.

Data detectors in handwritten text.

You can open and preview detected URLs in handwritten text.

You can also open and preview locations.

Once again, I don’t see myself ever taking advantage of this functionality since I don’t use my Apple Pencil much (let alone use it to jot down URLs or phone numbers), but it’s wild to consider how iOS and iPadOS can now identify entities such as URLs and addresses inside handwritten text and summon specific view controllers (such as Maps and Safari previews) when they’re long-pressed. And that all of this is done privately and securely with on-device processing, in a couple seconds, without requiring an Internet connection.

Shortcuts and Handwritten Text

In a nice touch, handwritten text from Notes can also be searched using Shortcuts’ built-in ‘Find Notes’ action, which will see the converted text of a handwritten note automatically. You can still search for text contained in your handwriting inside Notes itself, but it’s good to know Shortcuts can match recognized text as well.

Lastly, there’s a new way of adding or deleting space between sentences or paragraphs in your handwritten notes: once you’ve selected handwritten text, you can drag a small triangle that appears on the left with your finger or Apple Pencil. Doing this will let you add or delete as much space as you want, bringing text closer together or spreading it apart to create a blank section in the middle. You can also use the new ‘Insert Space Above’ option in the copy and paste menu to add some white space above the current selection, which will make the horizontal bar and small triangle icon appear.

Inserting space in between handwriting in Notes.

I’m not an analog note-taker, so I don’t think I’m qualified enough to comment on the overall quality of Apple’s text recognition engine. In my few tests this summer, English transcriptions were mostly okay, with the occasional hilarious mistake. I will say, however, that I’m impressed by the technological aspect of Apple’s new Pencil integration with Notes, which I find the ideal app to support all these new features since it’s a powerful, free, built-in solution for taking notes, searching them, and accessing them via Siri, Shortcuts, and even the Lock Screen. Shape recognition has worked wonderfully for me; Smart Selection’s visual effects are beautiful and fun to play around with; handwritten data detectors are the classic mix of technology and liberal arts that only Apple can pull off with such elegance. Notes may not be as powerful or customizable as GoodNotes or Notability, but iPadOS 14’s updates have raised its baseline considerably.

PencilKit

I’d be remiss not to mention some of the more technical and esoteric improvements to PencilKit, the Apple Pencil framework for developers, in iPadOS 14.

First, there’s a new option in Settings ⇾ Apple Pencil ⇾ Only Draw with Apple Pencil; once enabled, only the Apple Pencil will be used for drawing and touch input from your fingers will be exclusively employed for scrolling and interacting with apps. This option is great to have if you’ve ever been annoyed by the iPad picking up both the Apple Pencil and your finger as inputs when drawing in a note.

This setting applies globally to all PencilKit views in apps: once you enable it in Settings, it’ll work for all apps that use the PencilKit framework. Furthermore, developers can query the state of this setting (to see if the user has enabled it) and make appropriate suggestions in their apps. You can override this option with the ‘Draw with Finger’ toggle available in the tools palette of Markup and PencilKit views.

Also new this year, developers get access to the new color picker for free if they’re using PencilKit; as soon as you start drawing, the picker is automatically dismissed. As announced by Apple at WWDC, developers can also access individual strokes in PencilKit now, which should open up some fascinating possibilities for illustration, animation, and writing apps. Finally, in terms of latency improvements, Apple noted that both visual and blur effects on strokes are supported in PencilKit for iOS and iPadOS 14.

Other Changes

It wouldn’t be an iPadOS chapter without a final list of other changes worth discussing. After all, you’ve made it this far, you might as well get some extra details about iPadOS 14, right?

The new keyboard button. The old chevron in the right corner of the QuickType bar (which used to toggle the software keyboard in iPadOS 13 when an external keyboard was connected) has been replaced in iPadOS 14 with a menu that includes the option of toggling the software keyboard, among other things. If you’re using your iPad with an external keyboard attached, pressing the new keyboard button reveals a small popover with options to show emoji, dictation, toggle the software keyboard, and temporarily dismiss the extra QuickType bar.

The new keyboard button and menu in iPadOS 14.

We recently wrote about the iPad keyboard’s frustrating way of dealing with the QuickType bar and tab bars in Split View, so I won’t rehash Ryan’s list of complaints here. What should be clarified now that iPadOS 14 is out, however, is that the new keyboard button doesn’t really remedy any of the issues Ryan covered in his article. While it’s nice that Apple added a menu with more options to this button, hiding the QuickType bar isn’t a permanent tweak: as soon as you type a single keystroke in a text field, the extra QuickType bar appears again, potentially hiding the tab bar or bottom toolbar of an adjacent app in Split View – just like Ryan explained a few weeks ago.

If anything, given that there are now faster ways of activating emoji and dictation in iPadOS 14, you could argue that Apple made the process of toggling the software keyboard slower than before since you can’t long-press the chevron to instantly display the software keyboard anymore; you always have to show the menu first, then toggle the keyboard with a second tap. I realize I just spent three paragraphs describing the role and pitfalls of a single button, but this is precisely why I write these reviews.

An emoji popover…without search. As we’ll see later in this review, one of the big “finally” moments of iOS 14 is the addition of a search field to the emoji keyboard, which lets you search for specific emoji by name instead of hunting them down by category or shape. In an apparent case of Apple thinking that iPadOS users have no chill, the company decided that emoji search should remain exclusive to the iPhone this year. You can’t search for emoji by name on iPad because….

checks notes

…reasons.

Search? Where we’re going, we don’t need search! Or maybe we do.

Apple did, however, change how the emoji keyboard is displayed in iPadOS 14 while you’re using an external keyboard: it’s now a popover instead of a full-size keyboard (if you’re using the regular software keyboard, the emoji one is unchanged). There are also new ways to activate the emoji popover from an external keyboard: in addition to the aforementioned button in the keyboard menu, there is also a new option in Settings to instantly bring up emoji by pressing the Globe key once. This can be found in Settings ⇾ General ⇾ Keyboard ⇾ Hardware Keyboard ⇾ Press Globe for Emoji. Once enabled, pressing the Globe key on an external keyboard will bring up the emoji popover right away; you’ll still be able to cycle through installed keyboards with the ⇧⌃Space keyboard shortcut.

While I appreciate the inclusion of a faster way to activate emoji, I’m dumbfounded by the lack of search. Apple already did the work for the iPhone, so why not on iPad too? Is it because iPads are for work, and emoji are for fun? Is it a technical limitation we can’t possibly imagine? Who’s going to tell Jeremy Burge?

Easier access to dictation. Tapping the microphone button in the aforementioned keyboard menu isn’t the only way of activating dictation in iPadOS 14: if you’re using an external keyboard, you can now assign a shortcut to toggle dictation right away. You can customize this keyboard shortcut in Settings ⇾ General ⇾ Keyboard ⇾ Dictation Shortcut; by default, it’s double-pressing the Control key.

Now, any time you’re in a text field, you can double-press the assigned key on your external keyboard and dictation mode will be triggered instantly, without having to touch anything onscreen. This is a very welcome addition to iPadOS, and I’ve been using it a lot.

iPadOS 14

For Apple today, it’s clear that iPadOS has turned into the most challenging platform to design for. Unlike iOS and macOS, apps on iPadOS can run in a variety of size classes, with different multitasking conditions, with support for a multiplicity of inputs that range from touch and keyboard to the Pencil, pointer, and a combination of them all. At this point, it’s evident that any modern iPadOS app needs to feel great both when used with touch and the keyboard-trackpad combo – a unique problem Apple never faced in any of their other OSes before.

Apple’s challenge for the future of iPadOS is to rid the platform of features that are only optimized for one of the device’s modes. The changes in iPadOS 14, while not revolutionary when considered in isolation, are part of this bigger narrative, and they’re paving the way for a redefinition of the iPad app ecosystem, powered by an OS built around modularity and multiple interaction methods.

iPadOS 14, with its sidebars, multicolumn layouts, and reimagined toolbars, is Apple’s first major step into a future where the iPad, free of the preconceptions from its first decade, can embrace its intrinsic modularity. At the same time, iPadOS 14 also shows us that 13.4, seemingly dropped at random during the spring alongside the Magic Keyboard, was essential to have all these pieces in place for WWDC. iPadOS 13.4 provided Apple with a necessary foundation for iPadOS 14, and it set expectations for developers, who should stop thinking of iPad apps as glorified iPhone counterparts, and more as flexible experiences that encompass the whole spectrum of modern interactions – from touch to tablet to laptop. It’s no coincidence, after all, that Mac Catalyst, the technology that powers the conversion of iPad apps to Mac apps, is receiving a substantial update this year.

With this strategy in place, it’s clear that Apple is going to continue borrowing interface idioms and interaction principles from macOS. We’ve discussed this idea at length before, and the narrative isn’t changing with iPadOS 14: the company is not afraid to lean into lessons learned with the Mac years ago, but they’re also willing to remix those ideas and adapt them to the iPad’s peculiar modular nature.

Alas, this is also why certain issues stick out even more when this newfound approach isn’t followed.

The new universal Search in iPadOS is a fantastic improvement over the old, full-screen Search of iPadOS 13; however, there’s no way to invoke Search inside apps without an external keyboard. Similarly, while I don’t think Split View and Slide Over are the interaction disaster other folks paint them to be, they were designed for touch during the iPad era preceding the Magic Keyboard and pointer; as a result, it’s still awkward to operate multitasking via the trackpad and keyboard in iPadOS 14, which brings no meaningful improvements to Split View and Slide Over management when you’re not touching the screen. If ever there was a solid case against the current implementation of Split View and Slide Over, their lackluster support for the keyboard and trackpad in iPadOS 14 is it. I hope to see meaningful changes on this front with iPadOS 15 next year.

With iPadOS 14, Apple is asking both users and developers to reconsider what a truly great iPad app experience should look like in 2020. The answer is multifaceted, but it boils down to this: designing apps for iPad no longer means just “making a tablet version”; it means starting from the familiarity of touch while accounting for a diverse, vibrant platform where there’s no single input and no single correct way to hold a computer. It means accepting that the iPad has evolved into a flexible computing platform like no other in Apple’s ecosystem.

Five years after the iPad Pro’s debut, the iPad is changing again. But this time, iPadOS 14 is taking the whole iPad lineup along for the ride.

Shortcuts

Following two years of relentless updates aimed at relaunching Workflow as an Apple app (iOS 12) and revising its core functionalities with a new editor, automations, and deeper integration with the system (iOS 13), the Shortcuts team is looking inward this year, slowing down to address many of the app’s longstanding limitations.

Shortcuts’ changes in iOS and iPadOS 14 break away from the constant pursuit of adding dozens of new features to focus on the app’s overall experience. As we’ll see below, there are some notable additions in terms of actions and automations (and there’s a brand new Watch app, which we covered in our watchOS 7 review), such as new ways to run shortcuts automatically or new actions for Apple Watch and Apple TV. For the most part, however, this year the Shortcuts team seems to have prioritized requests from developers and power users: this is evident in the new ways of moving actions between shortcuts, support for multiwindow on iPad, and – I almost can’t believe I’m finally typing this – folders. Developers are gaining a proper way to mark their apps’ actions as deprecated as well as a brand new API for running memory-intensive actions in the background. Alongside all these changes, there’s compact UI, which has brought an all-new way to run and interact with shortcuts from the Home Screen, share sheet, and Siri.

To the untrained eye, Shortcuts in iOS 14 may not look that different from iOS 13; personally, I’m glad Apple is investing resources in addressing Shortcuts’ low-hanging fruit, and I’m excited about what third-party developers will be able to do with Shortcuts in iOS 14. Let’s dive in.

App Changes

Allow me to take you on a quick, if only mildly self-indulgent, temporal digression. Shortly after Apple’s acquisition of Workflow in 2017, in a story aptly titled The Future of Workflow I suggested, among other things, the viability of folders as a better way to organize the user’s collection of workflows:

While the team has done a remarkable job with the ability to easily reference workflows and a larger collection of icon glyphs, there should be a way to create folders for workflows and control their appearance (with folder icons) and sorting settings. Folder navigation would introduce new challenges, but the current single-view model doesn’t scale anymore.

You don’t want to miss the footnote from this paragraph:

Especially if the app retains a dedicated widget for workflow shortcuts; the widget would have to support folders too.

When Apple relaunched Workflow as Shortcuts the following year with iOS 12, I couldn’t help but mention the absence of folders again:

I think it’s incredible that, four years after Workflow came out, the Shortcuts app still can’t organize shortcuts in folders. As someone with hundreds of shortcuts, I’m disappointed and surprised that Apple didn’t prioritize this feature for the relaunch of the app.

In last year’s Beyond the Tablet story, I sadly entered the begging phase of my relationship with Shortcuts:

Frankly, at this point, anything would be better than the simplistic grid we’ve had to deal with since the Workflow days. Please, Apple.

Fortunately, I was back to good spirits and disbelief for my iOS 13 review:

I know that Apple is aware of the need for heavy Shortcuts users to organize their shortcuts in folders, and I can’t believe they still haven’t added this functionality to the app. In May, I theorized that Apple may go for something more innovative than plain folders for shortcut organization. Whatever their solution may be, I just hope it comes at some point during the iOS 13 cycle; I can’t stand having to find my shortcuts via search anymore.

All of this ended with the release of iOS and iPadOS 14. Shortcuts comes with folders now, and they’re as good as literally anybody who ever used a computer before assumed they were going to be.

The addition of folders is part of a bigger redesign for the Shortcuts app this year. On iPadOS 14, Shortcuts comes with a sidebar that hosts the app’s navigation structure: the top-level items are All Shortcuts, followed by smart folders24 that collect shortcuts you’ve enabled for the share sheet, Apple Watch, or the Wind Down mode in Health’s sleep tracking. On iPhone, this sidebar is the root view of the default ‘My Shortcuts’ tab; on iPad, the Shortcuts team has followed the company’s own guidelines and they’ve moved away from tabs altogether, putting the Gallery and Automation sections at the top of the sidebar.

Folders!

Shortcuts for iPadOS 14.

You can create regular folders to organize your shortcuts by tapping the new folder button in the sidebar. Apple has also been proactive in teaching users about the ability to create folders: in addition to Shortcuts’ updated splash screen, when you launch the app for the first time after updating to iOS or iPadOS 14 you’ll find a default ‘Starter Shortcuts’ folder in the app containing four pre-installed shortcuts that give you an idea of the app’s capabilities.

Shortcuts’ starter pack, as captured on my girlfriend’s iPhone 11 Pro.

The starter pack is a nice idea in that it explains Shortcuts and teaches you about folders at the same time; I just wish Shortcuts was smart enough not to create a starter pack for someone who already has 250+ shortcuts installed and hundreds of logged hours using the app in Screen Time.

Upon creating a folder, you can give it a custom name and icon choosing from the usual collection of Objects/People/Symbols glyphs previously found in Shortcuts, which has been updated for iOS 14 with a new style and some additions. You can edit a folder at any time by opening the folder’s properties (the easiest way: long-press the folder and select ‘Edit Name and Icon’). To add a shortcut to a folder, you can use drag and drop, create a new shortcut inside the selected folder directly, or long-press a shortcut and pick the new ‘Move’ action from the context menu. You can also select multiple shortcuts at once and move them in batch.

Creating a new folder in Shortcuts.

The Edit button at the top is a new toolbar item in iOS 14 that instantly displays a pull-down menu with options for the current screen.

Folders you’ve created in the app will also appear as sections in the main All Shortcuts view; in this mode, you can use drag and drop (which is accompanied by some delightful haptic feedback on iPhone) to quickly move shortcuts between folders without using the sidebar.

You can see folders in the All Shortcuts view too.

As should be obvious given the introductory portion of this section, folders in Shortcuts are everything I was hoping for. As someone with over 250 shortcuts in his library25, I can’t even begin to express how much easier to use Shortcuts is after having spent an afternoon sorting everything into folders and rearranging those by importance in the sidebar. Thanks to folders, I can find my shortcuts more quickly and I’ve been able to rethink some of the app’s roles in my workflow, which became apparent when I reorganized my entire library a few weeks ago. I assume most people will go through a similar process once they sit down and devote a couple hours to decluttering their libraries and adopting folders instead.

I also want to point out the convenience of smart folders for the share sheet, Apple Watch, and Wind Down. These filters have made it super easy to clean up the list of shortcuts available on the Watch or as extensions in the share sheet since they only show shortcuts that have been enabled for those respective modes. What I find particularly handy is the ability to hit Select ⇾ Select All ⇾ Remove to remove all shortcuts from the share sheet or Apple Watch without deleting them.

This is how I removed all the shortcuts that somehow ended up being installed on my Apple Watch.

Besides the sheer convenience of better organization inside the app, folders have been instrumental to another major addition to Shortcuts in iOS and iPadOS 14: the app’s new Home Screen widget.

There are two kinds of Shortcuts widgets: in the small size, you can run a single shortcut from your library; in the medium and large flavors, the Shortcuts widget displays a grid of four or eight shortcuts that are either fetched from the All Shortcuts view or from a specific folder. As you can imagine, the latter option means that, thanks to widget configuration in iOS 14, you can install multiple Shortcuts widgets on your Home Screen, each displaying shortcuts from a specific folder from the app.

You can configure Shortcuts widgets to either load a specific shortcut or multiple ones from a folder.

As with all widgets in iOS 14, this is a drastic departure from the old system, which only supported one Shortcuts widget, forcing you to carefully handpick the shortcuts you wanted to launch from the Today page. That limitation has been lifted with iOS 14: now you can install a medium widget with four shortcuts related to, say, posting on social media, followed by a large one with eight of your favorite task manager shortcuts, and so forth. The possibilities are virtually endless, especially if you consider the ability to stack widgets on top of each other on the Home Screen.

As I noted in the Design chapter, when they’re running inside the widget, shortcuts in iOS and iPadOS 14 use compact UI to display information and allow for user interactions from the Home Screen. This is another substantial change compared to iOS 13’s Shortcuts widget, which was limited to a handful of inline interactions, and it’s also an example of a private API not available to third-party developers yet. Shortcuts executed from the widget in iOS 14 can bring up date pickers, the keyboard, Quick Look previews, alerts, lists, and just about any interactive element (from built-in actions or third-party ones) without leaving the Home Screen. A shortcut running in a widget in iOS 14 can even display a webpage with Safari View Controller inline, returning to the Home Screen after closing the page.

Examples of shortcuts running with compact UI from the Home Screen.

Even though I would have liked to see these options made available to third-party developers too, I can’t help but think of all the cool new integrations I can build thanks to these Shortcuts features. Thanks to Shortcuts’ more powerful widgets, I can create tasks from the Home Screen with the ability to pick dates and enter text; I can preview a link I’ve copied from an app directly on the Home Screen itself; I can preview images with Quick Look and check out the headlines from my favorite blogs – all thanks to the Shortcuts widget and inline interactions in iOS 14.

That said, there are some improvements to the widget I’d like the Shortcuts team to consider for iOS 15. First, the information density of both the medium and large widgets is too low: in both instances, I feel like they could easily host twice the number of shortcuts and still remain perfectly usable. Right now, because the large widget is limited to eight shortcuts, I’m forced to stack multiple widgets in the same slot; I’d rather just have a denser grid that shows me 16 shortcuts in the widget.

Second – and this goes beyond the Shortcuts team – I wish the small widget supported multiple tap targets instead of being limited to just one shortcut at a time (imagine if it was a small grid of four shortcut icons instead). Generally speaking, I’d like to see more layout flexibility in WidgetKit next year, and I hope Shortcuts will follow.

There’s another major app-related change in Shortcuts for iPadOS 14 worth mentioning: on iPad, Shortcuts now supports multiwindow. It took the Shortcuts team a year to implement multiple windows in the app, but the integration with iPadOS 13’s multiwindowing system is fairly extensive: you can create multiple Shortcuts windows to browse different folders and sections of the library, and you can even open the editor for the same shortcut across two separate windows, which is especially handy if you want to compare two portions of the same shortcut side by side.

Multiwindow support in Shortcuts.

As with other iPad apps that supports multiwindow, there are multiple ways to open and manage windows in Shortcuts. The easiest method is drag and drop: grab the Shortcuts icon from the dock, drop it along one side of the screen, and you’ll create a new Shortcuts window showing the library in Split View. Alternatively, you can right-click (or long-press) the Shortcuts app icon and select ‘Show All Windows’ to enter Exposé, which will show you all currently open windows and give you a ‘+’ button to create a new one in full screen.

You can right-click a shortcut in the library and select ‘Open in New Window’ to open the editor for the selected shortcut as a new secondary window in Split View. Since this window is an accessory to the primary one26, tapping the ‘My Shortcuts’ button in the top left corner of the upper toolbar closes the secondary editor window, returning to the primary library window in full screen.

You can open a shortcut in a new window via this context menu.

The shortcut opened on the side is a secondary window.

If you want to open the editor for the same shortcut as two windows in Split View, the process is a bit more convoluted. First, create another primary window by dragging the Shortcuts icon to the side; then, you can tap the ellipsis button for the selected shortcut in both windows to open the same editor screen side by side.

First, create a new primary Shortcuts window with drag and drop…

…then find the shortcut you want to open in two separate editor windows…

…and boom.

In my tests, opening the editor for the same shortcut in Split View and making changes to the shortcut in one instance of it didn’t cause any issues in terms of conflicted copies and other errors. However, you have to be mindful of the fact that changes you make on one side aren’t immediately reflected on the other. For instance, if you add a new ‘Show Alert’ action to one side of the shortcut while the editor is open in Split View, the action will not show up on the other side right away. You’ll have to return to the library and reopen the same shortcut to see the changes you’ve made in the other window. Still, I’m impressed that this is possible in the first place since, unfortunately, too many apps that have implemented multiwindow over the past year prevent you from opening the same document in multiple windows.

When you add actions to one instance of the same shortcut opened in two foreground windows, you may not see changes reflected on the other side right away.

Support for multiple windows in Shortcuts is the kind of enhancement that will likely pass by average users of the app, and which power users will adore. The ability to compare folders or different sections of a long shortcut is a terrific boost to productivity in Shortcuts; thanks to this change alone, I’ve saved several minutes I’d have otherwise spent navigating back and forth in the app just to compare views and actions. For this reason, the iPad has become my go-to platform for editing and debugging complex shortcuts.

Lastly, in case you haven’t noticed from the screenshots in this section, Apple tweaked the colors of shortcuts once again, abandoning last’s year “dull, washed-out” colors in favor of fun, vibrant tones once again.

What if I told you that colors can be fun? Is that something you might be interested in?

I went on the record saying I didn’t understand why Apple chose such boring, muted colors in iOS 13, and I’m glad the Shortcuts team listened. The new Shortcuts colors are a pleasure to look at, they’re easier to identify, and they work equally well in both light and dark modes.

New Library Sorting

You might also notice another change in the Shortcuts library: Apple changed the default sorting behavior in the app so that new shortcuts are now displayed at the top, rather than the bottom. In my opinion, this makes it easier to find shortcuts you’ve recently created and go back to editing them.

On iPhone, you can still tap the ‘My Shortcuts’ tab to quickly scroll all the way to the bottom of the window (and you can tap the status bar to jump back to the top). On iPad, you can click the same section in the sidebar to scroll to the bottom, but you can also click it again to revert the app’s position to the top.

Additionally, you can use drag and drop to freely rearrange the order of shortcuts in a folder. This is useful if you want to place the most used shortcuts in a folder at the top of the screen for faster access.

Editor Changes

Along with changes to the core app experience, Apple also managed to ship some noteworthy improvements to the Shortcuts editor this year.

On iPad, the action library (the sidebar inside the editor) has been moved to the right side of the screen. This may be a little disorienting at first as we’ve been trained since the Workflow days to drag in new actions from left to right, but I got used to it quickly.

The updated action library on iPad.

Furthermore, the button to access a shortcut’s properties has been moved next to the shortcut’s title at the top, matching the iPhone app. In a nice touch, the properties screen now shows you a list of actions that are not compatible with Shortcuts for Apple Watch, so you can know ahead of time if a shortcut won’t be able to run independently on your wrist.

The refreshed properties screen.

The most important addition, however, is the ability to copy and paste actions in the editor, even between different shortcuts. It’s quite easy to do: in the editor, right-click (or long-press) an action and select ‘Copy’; then, either elsewhere in the same editor window or in another shortcut altogether, long-press another action and choose either ‘Paste Above’ or ‘Paste Below’. In doing this, the action you copied will be pasted inline, keeping its original parameters whenever possible.

Using copy and paste for actions on iPhone.

Over the past few months, I’ve been wondering whether the Shortcuts team was fine with designing features for average users only or if they’d ever return to adding advanced functionalities for power users. It’s a legitimate question: Apple has been busy simplifying Shortcuts for novice users for the past couple years, and one could assume the company would like to stay away from more esoteric additions to avoid confusing the masses. I’m pleased my skepticism has been proven wrong: of all the power-user features I was hoping Apple would eventually build inside Shortcuts, I wasn’t exactly optimistic about copy and paste for actions. It’s the kind of semi-hidden option that power users have been requesting for years, but which most people would likely ignore or outright never discover.

Apple’s implementation of copy and paste in the editor is good enough for now, but there’s more the company could do. Copy and paste works wonderfully for individual actions, particularly when paired with multiwindow support on iPad: if you have an action you want to reuse in a different shortcut, you just need to click twice to copy and paste it. Shortcuts tries its best to maintain the original action’s configuration: parameters are preserved across copies (so you don’t have to reconfigure the same action from scratch), but if a variable included in the action isn’t available in the shortcut you’ve pasted the action in, it gets highlighted in red as an error, which makes sense.

Currently, Shortcuts doesn’t support pasting groups of actions contained inside blocks.

Where copy and paste falls short, which I hope Apple can figure out next year, is copying and pasting groups of actions contained inside Repeat loops or If blocks. If you copy a block of actions in iOS and iPadOS 14 then paste it, the actions contained inside the block disappear, leaving you with just the basic ‘Repeat’ and ‘If’ actions. One of the reasons Shortcuts power users were asking for the ability to copy and paste actions was the idea of transferring entire blocks of reusable actions across shortcuts, and that’s still not possible. I won’t complain too much because we did (surprisingly) receive support for copy and paste of individual actions, but I hope the Shortcuts team is already thinking about this more complex variation of the feature for iOS 15.

Automations

iOS 14 brings a few notable changes for the marquee addition to last year’s Shortcuts update: Apple is extending automations – the feature that lets you run shortcuts automatically based on schedules, locations, and other criteria – with new triggers, the ability to run scheduled automations without confirmation, and a new way to get started within automations via the Shortcuts Gallery.

Scheduled Automations

Let’s start with scheduled automations. Last year, one of the common criticisms surrounding automations in Shortcuts concerned the need to manually confirm each time-based automation by tapping a notification. Users had long asked Apple to implement a way to run shortcuts automatically on a schedule; when the company did add a feature to do so, it felt like they only half-trusted users and their ability to configure scheduled automations on their devices.

Here’s what I wrote:

I understand Apple’s position regarding triggers and background execution. The company likely didn’t want to introduce a feature that made it possible for automations to run unfettered in the background, particularly in the first release of an app that just got pushed to the Home screens of millions of people. The current limitations, though tedious for power users, are reasonable boundaries for the masses.

That said, I wonder if Apple could have found ways to mitigate the annoyance derived by confirming automations for expert users who know what they’re doing. There’s a larger discussion about Apple’s security concerns and permission dialog obsession here (more later); in the case of automations, I would have liked to see an “expert mode” to outright disable confirmation steps. Or perhaps Shortcuts could learn from my usage: if I manually confirm an automation enough times each week, maybe the app could prompt me to disable the extra step the next time it runs.

Apple went for the easiest solution to this issue in iOS 14: time of day automations can now be configured to run in true automatic mode – without user confirmation – by disabling the ‘Ask Before Running’ toggle in the configuration screen. Furthermore, support for recurrence in scheduled automations has been enhanced, so you can now repeat an automation on a daily interval, on specific days of the week, or on a specific day each month (alas, you still can’t repeat an automation every few hours).

You can now disable confirmation for scheduled automations.

New recurrence options for scheduled automations in iOS 14.

Automatic execution for scheduled automations is going to be a big deal for Shortcuts power users. With a single fix, Apple removed the most annoying limitation of Shortcuts automations and opened the door to all the use cases we imagined last year – automations that could be implemented, but which were hindered by the need to confirm them each time. With iOS 14’s improved time of day automations, you can now run any shortcut, at any time, without having to do anything else.

Let me give you a few examples of what I’ve been doing with scheduled automations in iOS 14. A while back, I put together a shortcut that plots my time tracked in Timery on a chart generated via Charty in Shortcuts (Club members can find my original TimeChart shortcut in Issue 224 of MacStories Weekly). At the time, the chart could only be presented as an image inside Shortcuts; in iOS 14, however, Charty supports generating widgets from charts, and you can do so entirely via Shortcuts actions by updating a chart (and thus its related widget) in the background, without launching Charty. So, I updated my TimeChart shortcut for iOS 14 (you can find it in the Examples section below), scheduled it to run twice a day with an automation and voila – I now have a pie chart widget of my tracked time that updates during the day thanks to scheduled automations.

Thanks to scheduled automations, I can now update a chart displayed in a widget in the background throughout the day.

Here’s another: every day at 11 PM, I like to switch my Apple Watch to a different watch face that helps me wind down for the night and removes work-related complications from view. I could do this manually, but I’m a man of culture, and I know better than to trust my habits and memory. This is the perfect use case for improved time of day automations and the new Apple Watch actions in iOS 14: the new ‘Set Watch Face’ action lets you change watch faces on a paired Apple Watch from Shortcuts, and with automations you can now do so on a schedule without confirmation. Here’s what this automation looks like:

How to automatically change your watch face on a schedule in iOS 14.

Anything you can manually run in Shortcuts can now become something that runs on its own.

It’s impossible to describe all the potential use cases of scheduled automations, but I’ll say this: by removing the need to confirm a scheduled automation, Apple is providing users with an infinite toolbox of ideas to automate their daily lives and routines in a way that no other mobile OS has ever attempted before.

Effectively, anything you can manually run in Shortcuts can now become something that runs on its own, in the background, at a specific time of day without your input. The implications for third-party apps are also huge here: with this new system, and thanks to the new in-app intent handling technology (more on this later), actions from your favorite apps can also run automatically and for more complex tasks, meaning that developers can build more memory-intensive actions that weren’t supported by Shortcuts before. I expect iOS 14’s more flexible scheduled automations to be an area where we’re going to see a lot of innovation from users over the next year, and I’m excited to see how developers will rethink their actions to integrate with automations.

New Triggers

There are also new triggers for automations in iOS 14, which extend Shortcuts’ awareness of a device’s context and provide a fascinating peek into what third-party “app-based triggers” could look like in the future.

The new triggers are:

Sleep

Wind Down Begins

Bedtime Begins

Waking Up

Charger

Is Connected

Is Disconnected

Battery Level

Equals

Rises Above

Falls Below

Close App

Message

Sender

Message Contains

Email

Sender

Subject Contains

I’ve yet to come up with interesting implementations of these triggers on my devices, but I find them fascinating nonetheless since they give us some clues on the future direction for automations.

With the addition of battery and charger (joining CarPlay, NFC, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and location), it’s clear Apple wants to ensure a device’s context and conditions can be used as triggers in Shortcuts. If we follow this theory, I wouldn’t be surprised to see ‘Proximity’ via the U1 chip become a trigger in the near future.27 The more our devices grow aware of their surroundings, the more I think it’s in Apple’s best interest to translate that awareness into triggers that tie into Shortcuts and Siri.

Sleep, Message, and Email are also interesting. These are triggers that take into account something that happened inside a specific app (Health, Messages, and Mail, respectively) and provide you with multiple filters and conditions you can configure before assigning actions. Creating automations for when you receive an email message from a specific sender is surprisingly flexible:

New Mail automations in Shortcuts.

I don’t have a particular need for running actions whenever John texts or emails me, but I understand why these could be useful for people who work in office environments and want to automate emails from their colleagues; if you’re the type of person who likes to have a fixed, regular morning routine after waking up, look no further than the new Sleep triggers.

What I do find intriguing about these triggers is the potential for opening up the same technology to third-party developers in the future with triggers for “events” occurring inside apps. I hinted at this last year, and I wonder if Apple could ever make it work given iOS’ technical constraints: Health, Mail, and Messages have background execution privileges not available to third-party apps, but what if Apple devised a new system for apps to “push” events28 to the system in the background, which would then pass them along to Shortcuts? Imagine if you could let Shortcuts perform specific actions whenever a specific account tweets, or when Lire finds a new article from a favorite feed, or when you get a Slack message from a coworker. The technology to do this isn’t here today, but I hope it’s something Apple is considering for the evolution of Shortcuts automations. This would open up new opportunities for developers to integrate with Shortcuts; I want to see a future where apps can provide both triggers and actions to Shortcuts, covering the full spectrum of user automation.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Today, the new triggers in Shortcuts for iOS 14 extend the app’s integration with hardware and provide new ways to automate sleep, messages, and emails. I welcome this added flexibility; generally speaking, I’m glad Apple is continuing to expand automations and listening to users’ requests.

Suggested Automations

In iOS 13, Shortcuts could recommend automations to set up with a few taps, but they were largely centered around the idea of daily routines – activities such as being at the gym, commuting to work, or going back home. In iOS 14, the Gallery is gaining a richer Automation Suggestions section that spans all kinds of user activities, including third-party apps.

New suggested automations in the Shortcuts Gallery for iOS 14.

…or at least that’s the idea. In practice, as I’ve noted with Smart Stacks earlier in this review, I’ve found the “intelligent” automation suggestions in the Gallery too generic for my needs and, frankly, somewhat random. To give you a few examples of app-based automations recommended in iOS 14, which have no particular ties to my computing habits:

At 11 PM, create a new note in Bear (I downloaded Bear a few weeks ago to test it and only played around with it twice)

At 2 PM, view your recent photos (okay!)

At 2 PM open a note in Notes (for those times when I’m not looking at my recent photos?)

Log hydration in WaterMinder at 3 PM (do I get thirsty after looking at my photos?)

None of these suggestions are useful to me and, more importantly, I struggle to understand how the system came up with them. In the time I’ve used iOS 14, I’ve come across one potential suggested automation that could have worked for me, but even then the system was slightly off: Shortcuts suggested an automation for texting my girlfriend using WhatsApp when my iPhone connects to my car’s Bluetooth. I text my girlfriend every day, but what iOS 14 wasn’t smart enough to figure out was that I text Silvia from the car only when I arrive at home. Somehow, that clear, repeatable, consistent signal got lost in the process, with iOS 14 prioritizing things like “create a new note at 11 PM” instead.

At this point, I’ve lost hope in iOS’ ability to deliver timely and accurate shortcut suggestions, whether they involve individual actions or automations. Every year I want to believe iOS’ recommendations will finally be contextual and useful, and I’m consistently disappointed by them.

Wind Down Shortcuts

Ryan covered this feature in his sleep tracking story a few weeks ago, but I want to mention it again for the sake of context. iOS 14 gives you the option of running specific shortcuts (both individual app actions as well as custom shortcuts) when Wind Down kicks in. Wind Down shortcuts are presented as a list of actions on the Lock Screen, and they can be configured the first time you set up sleep tracking and Wind Down on your iPhone. You can also find the complete list and tweak it under Health ⇾ Sleep ⇾ Full Schedule ⇾ Wind Down Shortcuts.

Wind Down shortcuts in iOS 14.

Wind Down shortcuts are organized in categories such as journaling and meditation, and most of the system’s recommendations consist of one-action shortcuts that open apps into specific screens or modes – such as viewing tomorrow’s events in Calendar before going to bed or meditating in Calm for 10 minutes to facilitate falling asleep. The system recommends both built-in and third-party apps for each category; developers can donate shortcuts from their apps to the system if they believe they’re appropriate for Wind Down. Then, all you need to do is choose one on the Lock Screen and relax while winding down for the night.

Shortcuts you add from Health’s recommendations will also appear in the Shortcuts app as one-action shortcuts.

In addition to the app shortcuts you’ll find recommended in Health, you can also make any custom shortcut from the Shortcuts app a Wind Down shortcut. To do this, you need to enable ‘Show in Sleep Mode’ in a shortcut’s detail screen. Custom shortcuts added to Wind Down will run in compact UI on the Lock Screen, meaning they will support user interactions and rich data presentation. Personally, I’ve added my custom ‘New in Todoist’ shortcut to do a brain dump of the next day’s tasks before going to bed, and I like the convenience of being able to do so from the Lock Screen at the end of the day.

Actions

One of the more fascinating trends to observe in the evolution of Apple’s Shortcuts app is its progressive integration with other devices in the company’s ecosystem. We saw the first signs of this with last year’s initial Apple TV actions in Shortcuts for iOS 13; Apple then followed up with new actions to control AirPods Pro with Shortcuts.

iOS 14’s updated Shortcuts app doesn’t bring the same amount of noteworthy action changes as iOS 12 and 13 did. Its most compelling action improvements come in the form of new actions that integrate with Apple Watch and Apple TV – a sign that Apple is increasingly looking at Shortcuts as a centralized automation utility for different parts of the ecosystem.

Apple Watch. In Shortcuts for iOS 14, you’ll find six new actions under a brand new Watch category in the action library, each of them capable of directly controlling specific aspects of a paired Apple Watch via parameters. The actions are:

Ping My iPhone

Set Always On

Set Silent Mode

Set Theater Mode

Set Watch Face

Set Water Lock

The actions’ names are fairly self-explanatory. In the ‘Set’ actions, the ‘Set’ command is a parameter, which you can tap to change the action’s mode to ‘Toggle’; this way, you can use Shortcuts to rotate between whatever is set as the current mode on the Watch (i.e. if water lock is already on and you use the ‘Toggle’ action, it’ll be turned off, and vice versa). Additionally, the ‘Ping My iPhone’ action supports a parameter for flashing lights when pinging an iPhone nearby.

What I find interesting about these actions isn’t the functionality per se – after all, it doesn’t take much effort to manually change a watch face or activate theater mode from Control Center on the Watch – but what they enable in the context of automation with Shortcuts. Basically, I’m intrigued by the idea of my Apple Watch adjusting its modes or changing watch faces throughout the day based on conditions I can define in Shortcuts on my iPhone from the Automations tab. I already mentioned how I can change my watch faces at 11 PM each day in the Automations section above, but I have a couple more examples to share.

First, I wanted to ensure my Watch would be set to silent and have theater mode active before bed. I sleep with my Apple Watch on for sleep tracking purposes, but I don’t want the device to make any sounds or light up at night. In Shortcuts for iOS 14, I can create a time-based automation that runs at 3 AM each night and executes the Set Silent Mode and Set Theater Mode actions. By disabling the ‘Ask Before Running’ toggle, the automation will always run at 3 AM, on its own, without waiting for a confirmation from me.

I then turned to workouts. I’m not the kind of person who regularly switches watch faces throughout the day; however, I do like to see a particular watch face when I’m doing my indoor cycling or treadmill workouts with complications that open the Workout, Music, and Heart Rate apps on the Watch. I used to switch between my regular and workout watch faces manually before starting a workout; with Shortcuts in iOS 14, I can make the Watch do it automatically for me.

In Shortcuts, I created a personal automation based on the Workout trigger. Specifically, I set the trigger to activate when any workout is started on the Apple Watch; as we saw last year, you can be more granular about this and filter the trigger by a specific type of workout too. Then, I set the automation to run two separate actions: Set Watch Face, which enables my Modular Compact watch face for workouts, and Run Shortcut, which runs a shortcut on my iPhone that presents me with a menu so I can choose to listen to some music or podcasts in the Castro app.

Thanks to this automation, I now have a reliable way of setting my Apple Watch to “workout mode” without having to remember to do it myself. It’s probably a small thing, but it’s an automation that removes a bit of friction every day – in my opinion, that’s always the best kind of automation.

Workouts. Speaking of Apple Watch, Shortcuts could previously only log completed workouts in the Health app; in iOS 14, you can start workouts on a paired Apple Watch directly from Shortcuts.

You can now start workouts from Shortcuts.

You can do this with the new Start Workout action, which supports all the workout types available in watchOS 7 and comes with an additional parameter to pick either an open goal or specific duration for the workout.

Apple TV. In addition to Apple Watch, Apple also extended Shortcuts’ capabilities for interacting with an Apple TV on the same local network. In iOS 14, you’ll find the following new actions under the Apple TV Remote category:

Launch Screen Saver on Apple TV

Switch User Account

Set Captions

Set Light/Dark Mode

Set Reduce Loud Sounds

Skip Content on Apple TV

Just as I mentioned with the Apple Watch, there’s nothing particularly revolutionary about how these actions work: you pick an Apple TV found on the local network from a parameter, then you either toggle or pick one of the supported modes from a secondary parameter. Actions don’t have to be groundbreaking to be useful though: as someone who has two distinct user accounts on his Apple TV, I find switching between them with a shortcut incredibly convenient since I no longer have to find the option buried in tvOS’ Settings app.29 I’m a fan of these new actions, and I hope Apple continues to expand the Shortcuts-Apple TV integration next year.

Apple News. Do you feel like you’ve had your fair share of news in 2020 and would rather use Shortcuts to automate other, more relaxing aspects of your life, such as TV shows and workouts? Well too bad, because Shortcuts in iOS 14 comes with Apple News actions to ensure you never miss out on your favorite topics.

Apple News actions in iOS 14.

There are two Apple News actions this year: ‘Show Today Feed’ and ‘Show Topic’. The first one is a simple launcher that opens the News app in the main Today page; the latter lets you pick a topic to read in Apple News choosing from a list of topics you already follow as well as Siri suggestions. If you still have the energy to keep up with the news this year and use Apple News, I think you’re going to like these actions.

Stocks. Perhaps you’re not a news person, but you’re really into the stock market.30 If that’s the case, you’ll be happy to know Shortcuts in iOS 14 comes with three new actions for everyone’s favorite gateway into the world of Wall Street, the Stocks app:

Get Stock Quote

Get Details of Stocks

Show Symbol Price

Whether you’ve ever found yourself wishing for a quick way to check the 52-week low of your favorite stock symbol or keep track of the change in price over time, these parameter-based Stocks actions will make it easy to craft business automations that were previously unsupported on iOS 13.

Request Ride. With this new action, which you’ll find under the Maps category, you’ll be able to book rides using compatible apps such as Lyft and Uber from Shortcuts. The action has parameters for location, ride types, payment methods, and number of passengers. Thanks to parameters, you can integrate Request Ride with other actions and do some interesting things with it, such as booking a ride to the location of your next calendar event.

Calculate Expression. As the name implies, this new action lets you calculate the result of a mathematic expression inline. Useful if you want to write your own expressions from scratch instead of using the built-in operators of the Calculate action.

Show Weather. This action opens the Weather app for a selected location. Amusingly, this is what happens if you try to run this action on iPad:

The only thing that’s “unknown” here is the reason why we still don’t have a Weather app for iPad.

Seek. The new ‘Seek’ action deals with controlling media playing on your device. You can either use the action to skip backward and forward by a specific amount of time, or you can seek a specific portion of the media by jumping to a timestamp. This could be handy if you’re writing shortcuts to control audio and videos without using the system’s media player.

Open Shortcut. This action lets you open the shortcut editor for a specific shortcut in your library. For instance, you could use this action as part of a bigger shortcut that lets you quickly jump between different shortcuts you’re building.

Get shortcuts from folder. On a similar note, the ‘Get My Shortcuts’ action has been updated with a parameter that lets you restrict the search to a specific folder in the app.

As I’ll demonstrate in the Examples section later, you can use this action in combination with a ‘Choose from List’ action to build a custom shortcut picker that lets you navigate folders and the shortcuts contained inside them from a widget rather than using the Shortcuts app itself.

Biking option in Show Directions. As part of support for cycling directions in Maps this year, the ‘Show Directions’ action has received a new ‘Biking’ option so you can use Shortcuts to directly open cycling directions in Maps.

New filter in Select Photos. In the ‘Select Photos’ action, you’ll find a new ‘Include’ option that lets you filter out images, Live Photos, or videos. This is great for those times when you want to bring up a photo picker without, say, videos in it. As you can imagine, this action brings up the new photo picker in iOS and iPadOS 14.

More flexible Reminders actions. I saved the best action update for last. One of my complaints from last year’s iOS and iPadOS 13 review was the lack of support for Reminders’ new rich link and subtask functionalities in Shortcuts. You could create and retrieve reminders with Shortcuts actions in iOS 13, but you couldn’t add anything to the new ‘URL’ field of a reminder, nor could you check whether an existing reminder had any associated subtasks. Both issues have been fixed in Shortcuts for iOS 14.

First, it is now possible to add a rich link to a reminder upon creating one from a shortcut. To demonstrate this, I’ve put together an updated version of my ‘Webpage Reminder’ shortcut that lets you create a new reminder from a Safari webpage by invoking it as an extension in the share sheet. In iOS 13, you were forced to save the webpage’s URL in the ‘Notes’ field of the reminder, which wouldn’t be displayed as a rich link (with a thumbnail preview) in the Reminders app; in iOS 14, the ‘Add New Reminder’ action now features a dedicated ‘URL’ field that lets you save the current webpage URL as a rich link for the newly created reminder. You can find the ‘Create Reminder with Rich Link’ shortcut in the Examples section.

Second, the ‘Get Details of Reminder’ action has been updated to include support for retrieving subtasks, parent reminders, images, and URLs from reminders. The shortcut I’ve put together to demonstrate these new options, called ‘Reminder Details’, lets you search for a specific reminder by name and allows you to check whether the found reminder contains a rich link, attachment, or subtasks. You can also find this shortcut in the Examples section below.

Lastly, the ‘Add New Reminder’ action now features the ability to create a new reminder as a subtask of an existing parent reminder, which you have to previously fetch via Shortcuts as well. I’ve also put together a shortcut that takes advantage of this option: called ‘Add to Grocery List’, the shortcut lets you save things to buy at the supermarket quickly by appending them as subtasks to a master ‘Grocery’ task in the Reminders app. You can, as you might guess at this point, find it below.

Developer Changes

Although I typically refrain from covering highly technical topics in my annual iOS reviews, I think it’s important to point out some of the developer-related additions to Shortcuts this year since they’ll have a sizable impact on the third-party actions we use every day.

Developers can mark actions as deprecated. Every once in a while, a developer may have to replace one of their Shortcuts actions with a new version that breaks compatibility with existing shortcuts. Shortcuts in iOS 13 didn’t support this kind of scenario natively, so developers resorted to workarounds such as keeping two similar actions around but labeling one of them ‘Old’ to dissuade users from adding it to their shortcuts.

An example of a deprecated action in iOS 14.

In iOS 14, developers can mark actions as deprecated, which means you’ll see a warning message in the shortcut editor if you add one of these actions to a shortcut you’re building.

Rich disambiguation means richer lists in Shortcuts. As part of the rollout of conversational shortcuts last year, Apple gave third-party developers the ability to bring up multiple results for an action running inside the Shortcuts app or Siri. This technology serves the purpose of letting users pick one among multiple answers, and it’s known as disambiguation. In iOS 14, Apple is introducing rich disambiguation, meaning that these multiple results can now have subtitles and images in addition to a text string.

Rich disambiguation carries two advantages in the context of Shortcuts. First, when a shortcut is running in conversational mode, options presented onscreen will carry additional context thanks to the subtitle field and associated thumbnail image; imagine, for instance, telling a food ordering app that you want pizza and seeing a rich list with the names of the different pizzas, their price and ingredients in the subtitle, and pictures for each pizza.

Rich disambiguation in practice: Anybuffer can now return lists with thumbnails and subtitles. Previously, they were limited to text.

Second, in terms of building shortcuts that use lists, developers will no longer have to rely on hacks such as converting multiple entries to contact cards to present a rich menu inside Shortcuts. If you’re a heavy Shortcuts user, you’re probably familiar with the workaround I’m referring to: Toolbox Pro, for example, relied on the VCF format to assemble rich lists with images and subtitles under the hood; as a result of iOS 14’s rich disambiguation, Alex Hay, the developer of Toolbox, was able to create a separate utility called Menu Box that uses rich disambiguation to build rich lists natively.

With Menu Box, you’ll be able to design your own rich menus for Shortcuts.

Unfortunately, Shortcuts itself still doesn’t offer an action to create rich lists with images and subtitles inside the app, so if you want to make one yourself from scratch, you’ll have to use a third-party utility like Menu Box or fall back to the old contact workaround. However, you should expect results provided by third-party actions to take advantage of this new API, providing you with richer lists of items (such as articles from an RSS reader, documents from a text editor, etc.) that contain subtitles and thumbnails. Hopefully, with this technology in place, Apple will also find the item to implement a rich list builder in Shortcuts next year.

More powerful actions with in-app intent handling. This is the big addition for developers in Shortcuts this year: with the new in-app intent handling API, developers can create more powerful, memory-intensive actions that run inside Shortcuts and pass output to the next action without actually launching another app.

In iOS 13, performing actions that needed a lot of memory, such as photo or video processing or accessing a resource on the filesystem, forced you to leave Shortcuts, open a separate app, and return to Shortcuts. I went over the limitations of the framework last year when I covered Toolbox Pro, whose more advanced actions – such as those that dealt with image processing or heavy text manipulation – couldn’t be executed inside Shortcuts. With iOS 14’s in-app intent handling, this is no longer the case, so developers can offer even more powerful actions that run inline without interruptions.

If you’re a heavy Shortcuts user who relies on several third-party actions to get your work done quickly, this is a major improvement over iOS 13, and I have a few examples to share. Most developers I know are still working on getting this right, but I’ve been able to test a couple new actions that showcase the practical benefits of in-app intent handling.

MakePass, a Wallet pass creation app by indie developer Pedro Jose Pereiera Vieito, offers a ‘Make Pass’ action to generate Wallet passes in Shortcuts. When I say “generate passes”, I mean you can create fully functional Wallet passes featuring a custom logo, graphics, colored background, labels, barcodes, multiple text labels, and more. It is the most technically impressive action I’ve ever seen in Shortcuts – just look at the number of parameters available in this action, and you get the idea:

This is a single Shortcuts action.

Now, as you can imagine, generating a Wallet pass with graphics and lots of embedded information can be a fairly resource-intensive task for the system. But thanks to in-app intent handling in Shortcuts for iOS 14, this entire workflow runs inside the Shortcuts app and produces a Wallet pass you can preview inline without the full MakePass app ever launching:

A pass generated with MakePass inside Shortcuts thanks to in-app intent handling.

Under the hood, in-app intent handling delegates the associated process to the host app (in this case, MakePass) while the shortcut is still running; the app that needs to perform the intent activates in the background, does what it needs to do, and passes back a native output (meaning: no clipboard hacks) to the next action in the shortcut, and that’s it. You never leave the editor, and you don’t have to jump back and forth between Shortcuts and MakePass.

Another example of in-app intent handling is Scriptable. In iOS 14, Simon Støvring’s JavaScript utility can now perform actions that previously required launching the Scriptable app inline within Shortcuts. One such example is accessing file bookmarks: in iOS 13, if you wanted a Scriptable action to read the contents of a file bookmark previously created in Scriptable, you had to leave Shortcuts, launch Scriptable, and come back; with in-app intent handling, the bookmark can be resolved by the action inline, so you can access any previously bookmarked file (even those outside of Shortcuts’ iCloud Drive sandbox) without ever leaving the Shortcuts app.

With in-app intent handling and file bookmarks, Shortcuts can use Scriptable to access folders outside its sandbox.

In-app intent handling is a big deal for the Shortcuts app ecosystem because, until today, developers were limited by the Intents framework in terms of memory and resources they could allocate to their actions. With this API, developers are now free to build actions that perform more complex tasks without compromising on the convenience of running native actions inside Shortcuts.

Ideally, this should result in most third-party developers finally abandoning the last implementations of x-callback-url they were using to launch their apps and return to Shortcuts; it should also mean that your shortcuts will be more flexible since the results from those actions will be rich items instead of glorified plain text strings. I’m curious to see what the likes of Alex Hay and Simon Støvring will do with in-app intent handling, and I look forward to creating even more powerful and useful custom shortcuts that rely on third-party actions.

Shortcuts on Apple Watch

I haven’t spent much time with watchOS 7 this summer, which is why I’m not covering Shortcuts’ brand new Watch app and support for multiple complications in this review. However, Alex did in his in-depth review of watchOS 7, and I suggest checking out his Shortcuts section if you want to know more about what can be done with custom shortcuts on watchOS.

I’ll say this though: the few times I’ve tried to run one of my shortcuts on the Watch, I ran into error messages that informed me one of the actions I was using wasn’t supported by the Apple Watch version of Shortcuts, and I wasn’t impressed. My understanding is that, as far as Apple’s actions go, basic things such as choosing from lists or entering text are supported, but anything related to the clipboard, image manipulation, the Photos app, or handing off playback will fail. As for third-party developers, if they want their actions to run natively on the Watch without invoking remote execution on the iPhone (i.e. Shortcuts will tell you to continue running a shortcut on the iPhone), they’ll have to update their Watch apps with an Intents extension for watchOS. This might explain why shortcuts I tested which had third-party actions in them weren’t working on the Watch. I also didn’t like the fact that whenever I tapped on a complication, I needed to confirm running a shortcut every time.

I’m glad that Shortcuts is now available on Apple Watch, but I think I’ll need more time to understand which of my simpler shortcuts can be useful on the Watch, and I also want to wait and see if third-party developers adopt Watch independence for their actions. Right now, I’m still primarily using Shortcuts on my iPhone and iPad.

Examples

As I’ve argued over the past couple years, the best way to understand the potential of the updated Shortcuts app is to download some examples, run them, and modify them to your needs.

Below, you’ll find a series of shortcuts I’ve put together specifically for this review. Most of them can be downloaded for free from the MacStories Shortcuts Archive; the more advanced ones are exclusive to Club MacStories members and will be shared in our MacStories Weekly newsletter later this week.

Create Reminder with Rich Link

This shortcut takes advantage of the ability to include a rich link when saving a new reminder via Shortcuts in iOS 14. The shortcut is designed to be used in the share sheet from Safari (or any other browser or web view), which will also help you appreciate the new compact UI for running shortcuts as extensions in iOS and iPadOS 14. Instead of being presented with the vertical flow of actions from top to bottom in the shortcut editor, you’ll just see the shortcut activate as a banner at the top of the screen.

Creating reminders with rich links.

The new URL field in the ‘Add New Reminder’ action.

After getting the URL of the current webpage to use a rich link in Reminders, the shortcut will also let you enter a due date and time. Naturally, you can do so with the new date and time picker for iOS and iPadOS 14, which is enabled in Shortcuts by default.

Creating a reminder from the share sheet in iOS 14.

The link you pass to the shortcut will always be saved as metadata for the new reminder, and it’ll be displayed as a rich link in the Reminders app, where you’ll get a nice thumbnail preview for the original link.

You can download the Create Reminder with Rich Link shortcut below.

Create Reminder with Rich Link

Create a reminder for the webpage currently open in Safari or Safari View Controller using the webpage’s original title and URL. The shortcut needs to be executed from the share sheet. The original webpage’s URL will be saved as a rich link in the reminder.

Get the shortcut here.

Reminder Details

With the ‘Reminder Details’ shortcut, you can extract metadata from an existing task in the Reminders app. Specifically, these pieces of metadata include URLs, image attachments, and subtasks; they can be extracted thanks to Apple’s additions to the ‘Get Details of Reminders’ action in iOS 14. To use the shortcut, all you need to do is enter the title of an existing reminder and pick the metadata you want to extract, which will be displayed in Shortcuts either with Safari, a list, or a Quick Look preview.

Extracting reminder details.

Building a shortcut like this one is fairly straightforward: to extract URLs, you just need to select the ‘URL’ parameter in the ‘Get Details of Reminders’ action; for subtasks, you can select the ‘Subtasks’ parameter; to retrieve an image attachment, you just need to choose the ‘Image’ property.

Extracting details from reminders.

If a rich link is found in the matched reminder, the URL will open in Safari View Controller, making it easy to double-check which webpage, exactly, was saved alongside the reminder; if subtasks are present in the selected reminder, they will be presented in a list, and you’ll be able to tap one to reopen the parent reminder’s associated list31; any image attached to the reminder will be displayed in full-screen with a native preview instead.

This shortcut supports interaction from the Home Screen with compact UI, so the Shortcuts app will never launch when this shortcut is run from a widget. Even more impressively, if a reminder contains a rich link, the original URL will be previewed with Safari View Controller directly on the Home Screen.

You can preview a reminder’s link on the Home Screen thanks to Safari View Controller integration.

You can download the Reminder Details shortcut below.

Reminder Details

Extract rich links, images, subtasks from any reminder.

Get the shortcut here.

Add to Grocery List

This is my favorite Reminders-based shortcut I’ve built for iOS 14, which I’m releasing exclusively for Club MacStories members later this week.

With the ‘Add to Grocery List’ shortcut, you’ll be able to save things to buy at the grocery store not as individual reminders in a dedicated list, but simply as subtasks of a master ‘Grocery’ reminder. Take a look at the video below to see the shortcut in action:

Adding groceries as subtasks in Reminders.

I love the simplicity of this shortcut and the fact that items can be easily expanded and collapsed as subtasks in Reminders. Even better, you can add multiple items at once by entering them on multiple lines in Shortcuts’ text input, and the shortcut will take care of splitting them up and saving them as individual subtasks for you in a parent reminder of your choice. This is quickly becoming one of my most used shortcuts thanks to the improvements to Reminders actions in iOS 14.

This shortcut will be released exclusively for Club MacStories members in a special issue of the MacStories Weekly newsletter later this week.

Shortcuts Picker

This is a very simple shortcut that takes advantage of the option to filter shortcuts by folder in the ‘Get My Shortcuts’ action. When you run Shortcuts Picker, you’ll be presented with a list of your Shortcuts folders to choose from; pick a folder, and shortcuts from that folder will be displayed in a second list; pick one, and the shortcut will run.

Essentially, Shortcuts Picker is a Shortcuts navigator you can run from the Home Screen as a widget. By default, the shortcut lets you choose from all folders in the app since the first action is configured with the ‘Ask Each Time’ parameter; however, you can tweak the action to only load shortcuts from a specific folder if you want to have a Home Screen widget that lets you quickly run shortcuts contained in a folder of your choice. If you want to install multiple widgets for Shortcuts Picker on the Home Screen, you can duplicate the shortcut and configure each version to load shortcuts from a different folder. If you’re going all in on Shortcuts folders this year, Shortcuts Picker can be a nice addition to your Home Screen setup.

You can download Shortcuts Picker below.

Shortcuts Picker

Pick a Shortcuts folder, then pick a shortcut contained inside that folder you want to run.

Get the shortcut here.

Request Ride to Next Event

Using the new ‘Request Ride’ action in iOS 14, this shortcut scans your calendar for upcoming events and lets you book a ride to an event that has a location attached using a compatible ride sharing app installed on your device.

This shortcut is a good example of the fact that shortcuts don’t have to be complex to be useful in everyday life. Request Ride to Next Event doesn’t do anything you can’t already do manually by opening different apps and copying an address; however, the shortcut streamlines this process, and the time savings will add up over time if this is the kind of repetitive action you find yourself doing manually over and over.

You can download Request Ride to Next Event below.

Request Ride to Next Event

Request a ride to the location of your next calendar event. The shortcut relies on compatible ride sharing apps installed on your device.

Get the shortcut here.

TimeChart Widget

Available exclusively for Club MacStories members, TimeChart Widget is the evolution of the TimeChart shortcut I shared a while back in the MacStories Weekly newsletter. Thanks to iOS 14, I was able to transform TimeChart from a chart previewed with Quick Look into a a colorful widget that shows you a pie chart of your tracked time for the past week.

My TimeChart widget, based on Timery, Charty, and Shortcuts.

The new version of TimeChart uses actions from Timery and Charty to fetch your tracked time and preview a chart on the Home Screen as a widget, respectively. Thanks to improved automations in iOS 14, the pie chart can also update throughout the day, so you can always see, at a glance, where your time is going. I’ll share more details on my widget and automation setup for TimeChart later this week.

This shortcut will be released exclusively for Club MacStories members in a special issue of the MacStories Weekly newsletter later this week.

Shortcuts in 2020

While the Shortcuts team has done a solid job in addressing the laundry list of missing features often reported by the community (folders, copy and paste for actions, multiwindow, etc.), there’s still plenty of work to be done, both in terms of old problems and new ones created by iOS 14.

There are no file management-related changes in Shortcuts this year, meaning the app still cannot access documents and folders located outside of its iCloud Drive sandbox. Notes actions are still limited to plain text even though the Notes app allows you to enter rich text, images, rich links, and other attachments to a note. You still cannot preview images with Quick Look when a shortcut is activated via Siri, which third-party apps such as Scriptable can do.

There are also some new inconveniences caused by the introduction of new features in iOS 14. The Photos app has gained support for captions, but you cannot filter images by caption using Shortcuts’ ‘Find Photos’ action. Rich disambiguation now allows third-party developers to provide Shortcuts with rich lists of results featuring subtitles and images, but you still cannot make those rich lists yourself unless you employ old workarounds. If you install a shortcut as a widget, you can’t configure it to accept specific input from the Home Screen: in the future, I’d like to see the option to configure an individual shortcut widget with a ‘Shortcut Input’ field, so I could prevent scenarios such as the one I described above with the Shortcuts Picker and its duplicate copies. And speaking of widgets, I hope the Shortcuts team will revise the current default layout or at least offer options for users who would like to fit more shortcuts in the medium and large sizes.

Despite these issues and complaints, I’m happy with Shortcuts’ evolution in iOS 14 and I’m glad to see Apple continuing to invest resources in Shortcuts as a communication layer between apps and different devices in the company’s ecosystem.

With compact UI, Apple has dramatically simplified the execution of shortcuts from the Home Screen and share sheet, making it more convenient than ever to create your own custom enhancements for iOS and iPadOS to save time every day. On the power user side, the arrival of folders means deeper organization of shortcuts is not only possible, but also a great way to set up the app’s new widgets; removing the need to confirm time-based automations is opening tons of interesting use cases that were previously limited by iOS 13’s restrictions; the ability to open multiple Shortcuts windows and paste actions across different shortcuts is just icing on the cake. And for developers, the introduction of in-app intent handling should hopefully result in a second wave of powerful Shortcuts-based utilities that can perform even more powerful tasks.

The combination of these improvements in Shortcuts for iOS and iPadOS 14 is a welcome change of pace: rather than having to explain all the different ways in which Shortcuts is changing, this year I was able to focus on how Shortcuts has been refined, simplified, and made more versatile for power users.

For the first time since it was called Workflow, it feels like Shortcuts’ engineers are content with the foundation they’ve laid over the past couple years. They’re now free to spend time polishing the app, modernizing the experience, and extending Shortcuts’ reach to more apps, more devices, and, ultimately, more users.

Apps

While Apple’s engineering resources were primarily allocated to the Home Screen and compact UI this year, iOS 14 features an array of updates to its built-in apps, bringing a handful of new features and quality-of-life improvements that positively affect the daily experience. Surprisingly, there’s even a brand new app joining the collection of Apple’s system utilities.

More Apps Coverage

As in previous years, we shared some initial coverage of new apps and system features in iOS and iPadOS 14 earlier this summer in our OS Preview 2020 series. I won’t rehash those in-depth stories here, but in case you missed them, you can find them using the links below:

Apple Maps in 2020: Cycling and EV Routing, City Guides, and Feature Parity on All Platforms

Apple and Privacy in 2020: Wide-Reaching Updates with Minimal User Intrusion

Deeper Controller Support and a Revitalized Game Center: Exploring Apple’s 2020 Gaming Updates

Sleep Tracking in watchOS 7 and iOS 14: Elevated by a User Experience-Driven Design

The New Fitness App in iOS 14

App Clips in iOS 14: The Right App at the Right Time

Translate

In any other year, Translate, Apple’s latest addition to its roster of built-in iPhone apps, would have been regarded as the perfect solution for tourists traveling abroad and looking for an easy way to hold a conversation with other people in a different language. Unfortunately, the current pandemic means Translate’s primary use case will have to wait for its effects to be evaluated in real-life scenarios. But that didn’t stop me from holding multilingual conversations with myself and trying to judge Apple’s efforts to the best of my Italian and English knowledge.

Translate is a new iPhone app that lets you translate text between two different languages, choosing from a selection of 11 supported languages32 at launch. The app was designed to help with real-time conversations, and it can be used either in regular text input mode or via dictation. Translate relies on iOS’ intelligence and machine learning to detect languages automatically and perform translations; if you’re in a foreign country without a data connection, you can choose to use Translate completely offline, but you’ll have to download languages on your device beforehand. To set the app to offline mode, you can visit Settings ⇾ Translate ⇾ On-device mode.

Translate is fairly straightforward and clearly inspired by existing alternatives on the App Store. When you open it, you’ll be presented with a large text field in the middle of the screen and buttons to pick two languages at the top. You can start translating between languages by tapping the text field, which brings up an input screen for manual typing mode. Here, you need to select the language you want to type in with a segmented control above the keyboard; when you do, you’ll notice that international keyboards for each language are automatically included in Translate even if you didn’t previously enable them in Settings, which is a nice touch.

The new Translate app for iOS 14.

If you’d rather speak your sentence instead of typing, you can tap the microphone button at the bottom of the page. This will reveal one of Translate’s big advantages over most competing apps from the App Store: by default, Translate performs automatic language recognition when speaking, which means the app will automatically detect which of the two languages you’re speaking by simply listening to you. If you don’t want Translate to use automatic language detection, you can disable it in the Languages screen.

Translate automatically understands the language you’re speaking.

Once a translation has been performed, Translate will display the original transcription and its translation in a split-screen UI. At this point, you can either turn the iPhone’s screen so the other person can look at what’s onscreen, or you can tap one of the three buttons displayed underneath the translation. You can play the translated sentence using Siri’s voice through the iPhone’s speakers; you can mark the current translation as a favorite, which will save it in the Favorites screen alongside a full log of your recent translations; or you can tap the dictionary button to access Translate’s built-in definition feature. In this mode (which you can also quickly access by tapping any word in the translation without hitting the dictionary icon first), selecting a translated word displays an inline definition via the system’s dictionary, which will default to showing the translated definition for the current language pair if available. In my examples below, you can see how Translate shows translated definitions based on the Oxford Italian-English dictionary, which is built into iOS.

Translate offers built-in integration with the system dictionary.

Translate also comes with a special ‘attention mode’ designed to make it easier to have a conversation with someone else using the app as a translator. Turn your iPhone sideways to landscape mode, speak or type the sentence you want to translate, then tap the two arrows in the bottom left corner: the translated sentence will be enlarged to take over the entire display in full-screen, which is ideal if you want to turn your device to get someone’s attention with the just-performed translation. While in attention mode, a play button lets you play the translated sentence via Siri’s voice, and you can return to the app’s regular mode by tapping the conversation button in the bottom left.

Attention mode in split screen.

Attention mode in full screen. I also stand by this opinion.

As a bilingual person who regularly speaks two languages on a daily basis (if anything, it could be argued that I now speak more English than Italian given my writing and many podcasts), I was uniquely positioned to test the new Translate app and evaluate the quality of its translations. I’m pretty impressed by Apple’s first showing with the Translate app in iOS 14: translations are good enough, and although there’s the occasional “robotic translation” for more complex terms that gives away the non-human nature of these translations, I think Translate does a solid job at preserving the context of conversations and getting to the core meaning of most common requests. There were occasional misgivings, particularly with more colloquial Italian expressions that don’t have an exact English match, but overall, I think Translate produces results that are comparable, and sometimes even superior, to Google Translate – without the need to use Google services or an Internet connection.

I wouldn’t recommend Translate as a study tool to learn a foreign language, but the app wasn’t designed to fill that niche. The practical impact of Translate will have to be judged in the real world, when people are allowed to travel internationally again and if they choose Translate as a utility to aid them in their exploration of cities and locales around the world. For now, based on my tests with Italian and English, Translate works well, has plenty of integrations with the system (in addition to the dictionary, Siri translations are also powered by Translate now), and can work offline, respecting your privacy and data usage. Once the world opens up again, Translate will be a handy utility to have on our iPhones.

Messages

In what shouldn’t come as a surprise given the effects of the global pandemic, Messages – already one of Apple’s most popular apps for iOS and iPadOS – has seen, according to the company, a 40% increase in messages sent with twice the amount of usage in group conversations. With these numbers, and given the underlying importance of Messages, it’s not shocking that Apple took the time to bring some long overdue enhancements to the iMessage experience in Messages this year. The additions in iOS 14 mostly revolve around conversation management and group threads, with smaller tweaks and new Memoji features to round out the update.

First up is the ability to pin conversations in the main Messages screen. When you pin a conversation in iOS 14, iPadOS 14, and macOS Big Sur (which is also getting a brand new, Catalyst version of Messages this year), pins will be displayed as large profile pictures at the top of the screen in a grid layout. You can pin specific conversations by swiping right on them, long-pressing and choosing ‘Pin’ from the context menu, or using drag and drop. You can pin up to nine conversations, and pins will sync across all your devices via iCloud.

You can pin conversations either with a button or drag and drop.

Pinned messages on iPad.

The new pinned UI makes it easy to open your most used threads, and I couldn’t imagine going back to the old Messages app where all conversations were displayed in a list. Pins have become muscle memory for me at this point: I know that my girlfriend is at the top center of the grid and the Connected group thread is right below her. It’s nice to have a clear visual separation between pins and regular conversations, and Memoji avatars lend themselves well to this new design.

There’s more Apple has done to make pins and group threads easier to manage in Messages. Typing indicators are now displayed in the conversation list: whether someone is typing, left a Tapback reaction, or sent a new message, a small indicator will be displayed next to the pin as a preview of what’s happening in the conversation. Indicators are useful insofar as they give you a better sense of what you’re missing in a conversation without having to open it; switching between multiple conversations is also improved now since you can see at a glance who’s typing or has shared something in one of your pinned threads.

With context menus and more indicators, you have new ways to preview conversations from the main list.

By default, group threads are now displayed in the conversation list with a round picture that contains the avatars of the conversation’s participants – a good design tweak that lets you immediately tell group threads apart from individual ones. The ‘floating avatars’ design also carries over to the title bar inside the conversation itself.

The new look for group photos.

As before, you can rename a group conversation and give it a unique or fun label. In iOS 14, however, you can also set a picture, emoji, or Memoji as a custom group photo: the new editing screen for a group’s name lets you pick different styles and color options for the image you want to use; I’ve had fun picking random emoji characters or funny Memoji expressions as group photos in Messages this summer. If a group has been assigned a custom photo, small profile pictures of its participants will gravitate around it, sort like little moons orbiting around a planet.

You can use emoji and custom backgrounds for group photos.

The biggest changes in group conversations, however, come in the form of the long-awaited ability to reply to specific messages and mention users directly in a group thread. Both features were clearly “inspired” by popular messaging alternatives such as WhatsApp and Messenger, but – despite some design missteps – I prefer Apple’s take on this implementation to its competitors. Both inline replies and mentions are available in individual conversations too, but they’ve been obviously created to help in group conversations with more than two participants.

To send an inline reply, you can long-press a message and select ‘Reply’ or double-tap (as if you were adding a Tapback to that message) and press the new ‘Reply’ button there. Doing this reveals Apple’s different direction for inline replies right away: when you reply to a message you don’t just quote the original text in your response (like in WhatsApp), but you actually create an entirely separate thread within the conversation. Inline threads dim the main conversation underneath and the new thread becomes a separate “layer” of the transcript; you can reply once, but you and other participants can also keep sending additional messages that will become part of the thread, which will thus generate its own transcript. It’s much easier to see in practice:

Creating a reply and thread in iOS 14.

If you think this is more similar to Slack threads than WhatsApp replies, you’re not wrong: rather than allowing users to just reply to a specific message by quoting it, Apple chose to take a page from Slack and allow for the creation of nested threads within the main one. But while Slack went for a more simplistic approach in that you navigate to a secondary page for each thread, Messages in iOS 14 treats inline threads as separate conversations that “expand” on top of the main one.

The problem with Apple’s approach – and where the newfound complexity with threads lies in iOS 14 – is that by not copying Slack’s design, messages belonging to a reply thread also show up in the main conversation. However, only some of them do depending on the length of the thread, which is displayed in the main transcript as an actual thread with curvy lines and “knots” that indicate the presence of a nested conversation. I wish I was kidding with this, but I’m not:

Lines on lines on lines on lines.

I don’t have a particular issue with the decision to use curvy lines with knots as a visual metaphor for threads – I’m all for adding a touch of whimsy here and there when appropriate. The problem in this case is the inconsistency of Apple’s design with different types of disconnected lines appearing in the main transcript in addition to new, smaller bubbles that indicate the original message in a nested thread. Stay with me here. Most of the time, you should see a “thread line” that closes on itself, encapsulating the whole thread; you can see how many replies were sent to the original message and you can tap on any of these messages within the thread line to open the standalone thread view on top of the main conversation:

I’m not sure what the knots mean, but at least they’re cute?

Things fall apart when Messages has to display earlier messages from the same thread. Sometimes, you may see the thread line without the knot, which at this point I have to assume means the “closing” of the thread? I’m not sure.

Hello, friend. Please tell me you’re seeing this too.

Create enough threads, and you may end up with something like this:

insert This Is Fine meme here

…and you thought Twitter’s UI for threaded replies with different types of lines was confusing. To me, this feels like a good example of “over-designing” a UI that should have been much simpler: the lines and knots may be cute, but they’re not obvious in what they mean; if they were only designed to act as visual flourishes in a conversation, then I think Apple should have opted for more subtle, and perhaps even boring, indicators that consistently suggest the presence of a thread.

I hope Apple will refine or change the design of inline reply threads going forward: I actually prefer full-blown separate threads to WhatsApp’s individual quoted replies, and I’ve been using threads a lot to have separate conversations about a particular topic. The functionality is excellent, but the appearance and integration with the main transcript aren’t good enough. The lines have to go, and everything should be simplified.

Also new this year is the ability to mention users directly in a conversation, which you may want to do to grab someone’s attention. Unfortunately, this is another case of Apple getting a new feature only partially right. You can’t mention users via the popular ‘@’ character used by any other messaging service that deals with mentions: in Messages for iOS 14, you have to write the recipient’s full name and pay attention to the text, which will turn gray; at that point, you can tap the light gray text to display a “mention bubble” for the user; tap it, and the person’s name will turn blue, suggesting you’re going to mention that person directly in the conversation.

Mentioning someone in an iMessage thread.

At no point during the typing stage is it clear that you need to tap the light gray text to initiate a mention: there are no visual indicators other than the slightly different font color, which is far from accessible. This entire process is so hidden and poorly explained, I don’t think most users are going to realize mentioning others is now possible.

This is a shame since the inclusion of mentions has also brought new settings to control how you’re getting notified by Messages. In Settings ⇾ Messages ⇾ Mentions, you’ll find a new toggle that lets you be notified for direct mentions even if a conversation has been silenced. This is ideal for those busy, high-volume threads that you’d typically set to Do Not Disturb: enable the option, and you’ll only see a notification if somebody wants to get your attention. But what good is this setting if no one actually knows how to send a direct mention? In my opinion, Apple needs a stronger visual indicator than a font color, and they should also add support for ‘@mentions’ with auto-completion for each participant’s name. Right now, the feature is useful, but it’s too hidden.

Last, Memoji. Everyone’s favorite iMessage gimmick has gained 10 new hairstyles this year (including man bun and top knot), 18 headwear styles (including nurse cap and cyclist helmet), six new age options (go update your Memoji, mom), three new sticker options, a revamped facial and muscle structure for more accurate expressions, and, most importantly, face coverings.

Some of the new Memoji options in iOS 14.

Apple mentions that over a trillion possible Memoji combinations are now supported in Messages for iOS 14. Mostly, I’m happy that face coverings got the attention they deserved, including a nice touch if you want to celebrate something while wearing a virtual mask. You should also wear a mask in real life, and I don’t want to hear otherwise. Please wear a mask and be safe.

Overall, I like the Messages updates in iOS and iPadOS 14. Pins offer a terrific way to switch between my top conversations, group photos and updated Memoji are fun, and inline threads are useful to discuss specific topics in a separate area within a conversation. I just hope Apple can simplify the interactions and design of inline replies before iOS 15 next year.

Music

One of the highlights of this year’s app updates is Music. With a strong foundation of well over 60 million users, Apple Music is gaining an even stronger presence in the Music app with an all-new Listen Now tab, smarter search, and more diverse algorithmic suggestions for users. It’s not just Apple Music though: the Music app itself has been entirely redesigned on iPad with a new sidebar and updated Now Playing screen; a new Autoplay mode keeps the music playing even once you’ve reached the end of a playlist or album; and there are several other cosmetic updates and quality-of-life enhancements that make discovering and managing music a more pleasant experience than iOS 13 regardless of whether you subscribe to Apple Music or not.

Listen Now

The For You tab, which collected personalized recommendations, recent activity from you and your friends, and new releases, has been relaunched in iOS 14 and is now called Listen Now. The best way to think of Listen Now is as an expanded version of For You that features the same content plus new sections, with a focus on prioritizing personalized suggestions.

The new Listen Now page in Music for iOS 14.

The new look for Apple’s algorithmic mixes in Apple Music.

The Listen Now page starts with a summary of your Top Picks, which are displayed as large cards at the top of the screen and encapsulate recommendations across your full range of musical interests. While the old For You page always highlighted Apple Music’s default mixes as the first items in the list, Top Picks in Listen Now go beyond those to include other types of content as well, which will change over time based on what you listen to. You may find radio stations, recently updated mixes, specific albums from heavy rotation, or playlists in your Top Picks. In my experience, Top Picks frequently rotated through different sets of suggestions with a particular emphasis on radio stations, which Apple seems to be pushing quite heavily this year given the rebranding of Beats 1 and the Radio tab now sitting in the center of Music’s tab bar.

Activity from your friends has gained a prominent spot in Listen Now as the section immediately following Top Picks. I like this since my Apple Music friends have excellent taste, and it’s fun to see what they’ve been into lately without having to go find the Friends Mix.

The rest of the Listen Now page includes all the sections and suggestions that used to be available in For You, with some extras. Apple’s algorithmic mixes have become a new ‘Made For You’ section where you can flick though the same large cards seen in Top Picks, which also feature beautifully animated motion covers33 that are fun to look at, plus a written summary of the artists featured in each mix. There are the usual ‘If You Like…’ sections, genre recommendations, and Recently Played sections; new releases have been moved up in the page, and there’s a new section for ‘Stations For You’, confirming my idea that Apple wants to promote Apple Music Radio as much as possible this year. Replay playlists and Zane Lowe’s interviews have also received dedicated sections in Listen Now.

Having used Listen Now for the past few months, it’s clear that Apple’s priorities were to increase the amount of personalized recommendations and put the spotlight on the other types of content exclusively offered by Apple Music, such as radio stations and artist interviews. It makes sense to differentiate the Music app’s start page by highlighting content that’s unique to Apple Music; as a user and avid music listener, I like what the company has done with Listen Now since there’s more to discover on a single page and playing something I like is easier thanks to Top Picks. I’m sure there will be folks who aren’t going to appreciate the heavy-handed approach with curated picks and new sections; personally, I spend more time in Listen Now than I did in For You, so I think the redesign is working.

Search

Music’s search experience has been vastly improved in iOS 14 for Apple Music subscribers. When you first open the Search page, even before tapping into the search field, you’ll be presented with all-new music categories for different genres, moods, and activities, which you can tap to explore those sections and find something to play. The difference in the initial search screen between iOS 13 and 14 is pretty dramatic:

Music’s Search page has received a big update in iOS 14.

Improvements to search extend far beyond suggestions though. As soon as you tap into the search field, iOS 14’s Music app presents you with a list of your recent searches. Unlike iOS 13, recent searches feature the type of item (artist, song, etc.), a ‘+’ button to add songs to your library with one tap, and thumbnail previews – a terrific improvement over iOS 13’s plain text recent searches.

The refreshed look for recent searches.

The experience of searching Apple Music’s catalog and your library has been redesigned as well. While you’re typing a search in iOS 14, you’ll have a list of search suggestions underneath the search field followed by richer results for artists, albums, and other media:

As you type, iOS 14’s Music app shows you richer search suggestions.

And lastly, after you tap ‘Search’, the results screen now features inline filters so you can easily narrow down search results by artist, album, playlist, and other categories.34

New filters for search results in iOS 14.

The combination of all these tweaks – search suggestions, thumbnails, and filters – makes searching for music in iOS 14 easier and faster than iOS 13. It’s good to see Apple catching up in one area where its primary competitor, Spotify, has long had an advantage. If you’ve ever been frustrated by Music’s lackluster search feature, I recommend giving it a try again in iOS 14.

Now Playing

Arguably one of Music’s most important features, the Now Playing screen has been redesigned in iOS 14 to be more elegant and colorful, as well as more convenient to use on iPad.

The most visible change to the Now Playing screen is Apple’s embrace of colors intelligently extracted from the current song’s artwork. In iOS 13’s Music app, dynamic colors were only used in the Lyrics view of the Now Playing screen; in iOS 14, artwork colors are also used in the standard Now Playing view, albeit without the fancy background animation seen while reading lyrics. I like this approach since motion effects make more sense for the Lyrics page, which is already an animated view because of scrolling lyrics; the “flat” color suits playback controls best, and it adds a touch of personality (and context) to what was otherwise a fairly boring white screen. With color, each Now Playing screen is now unique to the song currently playing.

You can still tap the artist’s name to bring up a menu to navigate to the artist or album page for the current song.

The other addition to the Now Playing screen is Autoplay, available in the Up Next view next to the shuffle and repeat buttons. A feature that’s long been part of Spotify, once enabled Autoplay will keep the music playing when you’ve reached the end of a song or playlist. This works by taking similar songs into consideration; even though I’ve never been an Autoplay kind of music listener myself, in my tests it worked as advertised. I just prefer to fully control what’s in my queue and when the music stops.

With Autoplay enabled, your Up Next queue is never empty.

As for the Lyrics screen: nothing much has changed this year, except for the addition of a scrubber so you can rewind or skip ahead in a song while reading lyrics.

The Now Playing screen has received a drastic makeover on iPad. The whole Music app has been redesigned for iPadOS 14 (more on this below), but the Now Playing screen in particular is a solid example of Apple applying their new ‘Made for iPad’ strategy to existing apps on the larger screen. In iPadOS 14, the Now Playing screen now properly takes advantage of the bigger display to display album artwork and either Lyrics or Up Next simultaneously, at least when Music is running in full-screen.

I love this Now Playing design, and I love this song.

It doesn’t take an expert to see why this is an improvement over the old Now Playing screen for iPadOS 13, which felt like a waste of space in how it only displayed enlarged album artwork in the middle of the screen. With the new design, artwork is still big enough, and you don’t have to toggle between views anymore if you want to read lyrics or manage your queue while still having access to playback controls. I still would like the option to detach the Now Playing window and use it anywhere on iPadOS as a quasi-Picture in Picture floating element, but I’ll take this update for now.

iPad App

In addition to the redesigned Now Playing screen, Music for iPad has received another substantial enhancement this year: a sidebar, replacing the old iPhone-based tab bar layout.

Music is all grown up on iPad this year.

Having a sidebar to browse different sections of the Music app may not seem like a revolutionary invention, and it really isn’t, but it’s good to see Apple following their own iPadOS 14 guidelines in this regard. With the sidebar, you can now more easily navigate between sections of Apple Music and your library since they’re just one click away; the sidebar is also customizable, so you can collapse sections and even edit the options listed under the Library section.

Music’s sidebar supports editing mode.

My favorite addition to the sidebar is the inclusion of playlists: not only are they easier to find now (you no longer have to navigate to Library ⇾ Playlists), but you can even long-press one to get instant access to various playback options right from the sidebar itself:

Long-press playlists in the sidebar for quick actions.

And that’s not all: since your playlists are always shown in the sidebar now, this means you can quickly add a song to a playlist with drag and drop on iPad, which is something that has already become second nature to me:

You can use drag and drop to quickly add songs to playlists in the sidebar.

Thanks to the redesigned Now Playing screen and the new sidebar, the iPad is now my favorite platform to listen to Apple Music and manage my library. If you’re looking for a practical example of just how beneficial the addition of a sidebar can be to an old iPad app, Music is it.

And More

What kind of Music section would it be without a list of other smaller, semi-hidden changes I’ve been collecting over the summer? This year, it’s a pretty short list.

New icon. So, yes, as you may have noticed, the Music app has a new icon in iOS 14. It’s…pink? Coral? Pseudo-orange? I’ve always been bad with naming colors. Still: I’m not a fan, and I very much preferred the old icon, which retained the identity of the Apple Music brand with its rainbow colors. Why go back to the old, boring Apple Music icon now? What’s not to like about rainbows? And again, what’s the name of this color? I look forward to an explanation from the inevitable unofficial Twitter account.

Larger artwork in detail pages. Detail pages for albums and playlists have been redesigned in iOS 14 so that larger artwork is front and center. As a result, the ‘Add’ and ‘More’ buttons have been moved to the top of the page.

Detail pages feature larger artwork in iOS 14.

Love, Play Next, and Add to Playlist are easier to find. The context menu that appears when you long-press a song in iOS 14 has been redesigned to make it easier to find the ‘Love’, ‘Play Next’ and ‘Add to Playlist’ buttons, which are now highlighted in a top section of the menu. I’m guessing Apple saw that these were the most popular actions selected by users in the menu, so it’s reasonable they’re pushing them to the top.

Common actions are now listed at the top of Music’s context menu.

I still maintain that Apple Music has a huge opportunity to become a central hub for discovering artists’ upcoming live performances, merchandise, and other projects. However, given the current global pandemic, I’m not surprised Apple isn’t experimenting more in this field for now. Instead, the company has prioritized a variety of app-related enhancements, better search, and an easier way to start listening to music you love via the Listen Now page. The question remains though: is there more Apple could do to surface Apple Music’s catalog of non-music material, such as radio stations, interviews, and music videos? Why can’t you see a full schedule and set reminders in the Radio section? Why is it so difficult to find all of Zane Lowe’s amazing, in-depth interviews? With a stronger app foundation, I’m curious to see where Apple Music the service will go from here.

Reminders

Reminders in iOS 14 builds upon the modernized app introduced last year with a series of refinements and smaller additions targeted at improving collaboration, list management, and search. This year’s Reminders update offers little in the realm of power-user options, but the enhancements are welcome nonetheless.

Let’s start with smart lists. In iOS 14, you’ll find a new ‘Assigned to Me’ smart list joining the existing set of Today, Scheduled, All, and Flagged. As the name suggests, this new smart list displays reminders that have been assigned to you in any shared list, which is a new feature of the app this year. With the inclusion of a fifth smart list, you now have the option to rearrange and hide smart lists at the top of the app’s start page: hit ‘Edit’ and you’ll be able to hide smart lists you don’t want to see and rearrange their tiles as well. Alas, you still cannot create your own smart lists based on specific filtering criteria.

Reminders now features a total of five default smart lists.

The customization options for regular Reminders lists have grown too. You can now choose from an additional 12 symbols (there are 72 symbols in total); if none of them suit your taste, you can now also use any emoji as a list’s icon. When you pick an emoji, it’ll be displayed on top of the color you set for the selected list. Surprisingly, you’re still limited to 12 color options for lists and you can’t choose any other color with the new iOS 14 color picker. I like the personalization granted by emoji though, and it’s nice to see these cute little characters being used as symbols in contexts other than messaging.

You can now use emoji as icons for Reminders lists.

Speaking of the main list view: Apple added a ‘New Reminder’ button to the bottom of the page on iPhone35, which means you don’t have to open a specific list anymore if you want to add a new task. Also, when you’re in smart lists such as Today and Scheduled, Reminders will now show you which list a reminder belongs to in the item’s subtitle; missing this information was among my complaints last year, and it’s good to see it fixed.

You can now see the list each reminder belongs to when viewing smart lists such as ‘Today’.

As I noted above, Reminders in iOS 14 lets you assign tasks to a person collaborating on a list with you. When you select a reminder in a shared list, you’ll find a new person icon in the extra keyboard row; tap it, and you’ll get an inline picker to choose the person who should be responsible for that reminder. The profile picture of the assignee will also be displayed next to the reminder’s title in the list, and you can tap it to remove the assignment or reassign it to someone else. The ability to specifically assign reminders was long overdue, and this addition makes it possible to use Reminders as a lightweight task manager in a shared environment. It’s especially timely considering the resurgence of remote work this year.

Assigning a reminder in iOS 14.

But what if you end up with an eager collaborator who’s really into assigning reminders to you? Fear not – you can mute notifications for assigned tasks in Settings ⇾ Reminders. No more worrying about your spouse clicking that Assign button like there’s no tomorrow.

The other updates to Reminders in iOS 14 are pretty diverse from each other, so I’m going to share a miscellaneous grab bag of everything else. There is an expanded selection of keyboard shortcuts on iPad for both lists and selected items, bringing the iPad app close to the Mac experience for managing reminders without touching the screen:

As previously noted in the Design chapter, Reminders now uses the new system-wide date picker for assigning dates and times to a task, which I find handy for quickly rescheduling tasks to a later date:

The new date picker in Reminders for iPad.

There are new batch actions when multiple reminders are selected at once. Previously, you could only move or delete reminders; in iOS 14, you can also batch reschedule, flag, complete, and assign them with a single action:

More options for batch actions in iOS 14.

Search has been made more flexible: now in addition to matching reminders by title, search will also find matches in their note, location, and assignee fields:

There are some new options when swiping across reminders: if you’re in a regular list, swiping left on a task will reveal a new ‘Details’ button to open the inspector; in the Today smart list, you can swipe right to find a new ‘Date & Time’ button that instantly brings up the date picker to reschedule the selected item:

New swipe options in Reminders for iOS 14.

If you’re one of those iPad users who never wants to put the Apple Pencil down, you’ll be happy to know Reminders is one of the few Apple apps with a custom Scribble implementation in iPadOS 14. You can write down anywhere on an empty space in a list and Scribble will convert your handwriting into a new reminder:

You can use Scribble on iPad to create new reminders.

Lastly, Reminders has gained some additional intelligence this year. When you’re entering or editing an item, Reminders will try to suggest lists, locations, and due dates based on signals and patterns previously captured on-device. Additionally, you may come across Reminders suggestions in Mail when reading a message that the system thinks should be turned into a reminder; however, I’ve yet to see this option be offered in Mail myself.

And that’s it for Reminders in iOS and iPadOS 14. While this collection of tweaks and new options is well executed, I hope Apple won’t take its foot off the gas here and instead will continue to grow Reminders’ scope over the next few years. More customizable widgets, true smart lists, and integration with Files should be possible; I hope we’ll see more updates on this front in iOS 15.

Notes

The most important updates to Apple’s note-taking app revolved around new Apple Pencil features this year, which I already covered in the iPadOS chapter. 2020 has been a Pencil year for Notes, and Apple’s engineering efforts primarily went into ensuring an even smoother, smarter drawing and sketching experience.

But what about Notes’ myriad other features? For those, the Notes team has followed the Reminders approach: there are miscellaneous improvements and additions in this release, which speed up common interactions with the app and make managing or formatting your notes easier.

First, allow me to mention the one change everyone will likely notice right away: the paper texture is gone from Notes, which now comes with neutral light and dark backgrounds. It was fun for a while, but I’m not going to miss the look of fake paper in my digital note-taking app.

Goodbye, paper texture.

Also quite obvious at first sight is Notes’ embrace of the iPad’s native sidebar and multicolumn mode this year, along with deeper integration with the system pointer. Notes was one of the first apps to support a proprietary multicolumn mode back in the day, but Apple took iPadOS 14 as an opportunity to ensure Notes would behave consistently with other apps receiving iPad updates this year. For this reason, the old sidebar has been replaced with the standard iPadOS 14 one, which carries default behaviors such as the ability to collapse sections (in this case, folders), swipe on items to reveal quick actions, and even long-press them for more options.

The new sidebar on iPad supports context menus.

Notes, like Mail in iPadOS 14 uses a new rounded selection style for selected items in the middle column, which I find a pleasing visual effect on iPad. Speaking of this column, the ‘Pinned’ section can also be collapsed now, so if you’re anything like me and keep a long list of pinned notes36, you’ll be relieved that you don’t need to keep pinned notes onscreen at all times.

You can now collapse the ‘Pinned’ section in a Notes folder.

In browsing around Notes for iOS and iPadOS 14, you’ll also notice that the action menu for folders and individual notes has been redesigned with an emphasis on key actions like locking or pinning a note, scanning a document, sharing a folder, or sorting notes. There are two different kinds of updated action menus in Notes: when viewing an individual note, the new action menu replaces the share sheet and is based on a custom layout with large buttons at the top and Notes-specific actions underneath. If you want to show the regular share sheet with other app extensions, you need to select the new ‘Send a Copy’ option.

The Notes app in iOS 14 no longer defaults to showing the share sheet when tapping the ‘More’ button.

When viewing a folder, the action menu replaces the previous action sheet and contains the same options as iOS 13, plus new entries for sorting and folder creation.

The new action menu for folders.

I’d normally be against custom implementations of share sheets, but because Apple is only adding an extra step to open the standard share sheet, I think this is fine. Notes has grown into a full-featured, powerful solution for solo and collaborative note-taking over the years, and it could be tricky to find app-specific functions such as locking or in-document search in a share sheet polluted with contact suggestions and other app extensions. I’m not sure what this says about the current share sheet design, but I’m glad Apple has grouped common actions under a new menu.

The next change is available in the iPhone version of Notes only: you can now apply styles to text more quickly by long-pressing the ‘Format’ button (the ‘Aa’ one) to bring up a quick format menu. If you wanted to format your text differently in iOS 13, you had to press the Aa button, then interact with a menu that covered the keyboard at the bottom of the screen to apply styles, such as adding subheadings, turning some text into body text, or entering lists. In iOS 14, all you need to do is select the text you want to modify, long-press the Format button and, while you’re still holding down with your finger, swipe to the option you need and let go to apply it.

Long-press the button to quickly format text.

The quick Format menu doesn’t have all the options of the regular one (it’s missing indentation, bold, italics, strikethrough, and underline), but it makes formatting a document with headings and lists so easy, it’s a trade-off I can accept.

Notes’ last two changes in iOS 14 are pretty minor, or at the very least hard to evaluate unequivocally. According to Apple, the system scanner built into Notes has been improved this year with superior edge detection and image quality; I haven’t been able to test this functionality in practice since I haven’t scanned anything in several months.

Top Hits in Notes’ search.

Finally, as also seen in other apps, Notes’ search feature offers Top Hits in search results now, so you should be able to find your notes more quickly. In my tests, searching across ~200 notes was indeed faster than before, with Top Hits containing the note I was looking for most of the time; however, I prefer to navigate Notes by folder or access my most used notes via pins and widgets, so I don’t think I’ll be taking advantage of faster search and Top Hits much.

Home

Updates to the Home app this year involve three main areas of interest: design, automations, and HomeKit Secure Video. A fourth addition, named Adaptive Lighting, was also announced by Apple at WWDC, but it will require firmware updates by third-party light manufacturers that I haven’t been able to test yet.

The underlying structure and layout of the Home app aren’t drastically changing in iOS and iPadOS 14: accessories will still be displayed as tiles and organized in rooms as before. However, there are a couple notable differences in Home for iPad and iPhone this year. On iPad, unsurprisingly, Apple adopted a sidebar layout for Home: the main Home page, automations, and your rooms can now be accessed from a sidebar rather than tab bars, which speeds up navigation and takes better advantage of the tablet’s form factor. As we’ve already discussed with other system apps receiving sidebars this year, the departure from an iPhone-based layout is welcome, and I appreciate how much more quickly I can switch between rooms.

Home’s new sidebar on iPad.

The other UI update in Home this year is available on both iPhone and iPad, and it’s the inclusion of new indicators for sensor data and important status updates at the top of every page in the app. Both in the main ‘Home’ dashboard and in individual rooms, you’ll now see a series of circular indicators for messages such as the current temperature inside your house, how many lights are on, what outlets are switched on, which accessories require software updates or aren’t responding, whether the front door is locked or not, and more.

New status indicators in Home.

Apple’s goal with these new indicators is to provide you with a glanceable summary of the state of your home and connected accessories, and I think the company did a good job. In the main Home tab, you’ll see updates such as the total number of lights that are turned on and the overall temperature and air quality; in individual rooms, you’ll instead see more specific indicators such as the state of a particular light or sensor located in that room. Home’s new indicators aren’t just glanceable though – you can interact with them to perform actions in one tap, but the behavior changes on a per-indicator basis. If you tap a temperature-related indicator, for instance, a ‘Climate’ page will pop up with an overview of all the temperature sensors in your home or in the selected room; tap a light-based indicator, however, and you’ll be able to, say, turn off all the lights at once. Generally speaking, tapping an indicator at the top of a specific room will open the configuration screen for the selected accessories instead.

Different interactions with indicators.

I’ve been pretty critical of Home’s clunky and unintuitive design over the years, but I think these indicators are some of Apple’s best work in the Home app yet. The indicators make good use of rich iconography and colors, they’re glanceable, and they’re effective time-saving shortcuts to control your home with fewer taps. If anything, I’m surprised that these indicators weren’t used as the foundation for new Home widgets or complications on watchOS, which are perplexingly absent from both OS releases this year. I’d love to have the information provided by these indicators available to me on the Home Screen and my watch face next year; in the meantime, I have a feeling third-party developers will step in with their own solutions.

In addition to seeing and controlling accessories, Apple is also making automations more accessible and easier to configure this year. The company must have realized that there can be a steep learning curve to creating automations from scratch for most users, and they’re tackling this issue on two separate fronts: when you add a new accessory in iOS 14, the onboarding process will recommend basic automations for that accessory to set up right away; and automations will also be suggested in an accessory’s configuration page, which you can enable by flipping a switch.

Suggested automations in accessory detail screens.

I’m always in favor of opening up automation to people who may find the concept of triggers and actions intimidating, so I’m a fan of Apple’s approach here. Recommending automations during the setup flow (which has also been redesigned with a card-like appearance in iOS 14) is a great way to ease people into the idea of accessories performing certain actions automatically based on specific conditions, and it’s the kind of feature I wish developers could integrate in their apps for actions and Shortcuts too.

In my experience, suggested automations in accessories’ detail screens were also spot-on: one of my Hue lights in the kitchen, for example, offered a suggested automation that would turn on the light when motion was detected by the kitchen camera. So not only has Apple put together a system that recommends accessory-specific automations, but they’ve also made it intelligent enough so it’s aware of nearby accessories that could serve as triggers. Suggested automations can be enabled with one tap and you can also edit them if you want to tweak the defaults provided by Apple; furthermore, all existing automations that involve the selected accessory are now listed in its detail page, so you can easily see all the automations an accessory is already participating in.

HomeKit Secure Video, announced last year and rolled out to a handful of third-party cameras over the past few months, is getting two major new features in iOS 14: face recognition and activity zones.

With face recognition, compatible cameras will recognize familiar faces in your household and display the names of individuals in notifications and recorded clips stored in iCloud. According to Apple, face analysis only occurs on your local network via your home hub(s), and its results are synced across devices using end-to-end encryption without ever reaching Apple’s servers. You can enable face recognition in a camera’s configuration screen; once it’s turned on, you’ll have the option to enable integration with people already recognized in your Photos library, which means “portions” of photos in the People album and their names will be synced (also via end-to-end encryption) with the home hub to help in identifying faces found in camera footage.

Enabling face recognition for HomeKit cameras.

In theory, this sounds like a terrific addition to HomeKit Secure Video: if you’ve set up your cameras to send you motion detection alerts, you should now see from the notification itself that it was a person “known to your household”, as the Home app labels this option; similarly, you should see the names of recognized people in recorded clips saved by HomeKit Secure Video. But here’s my issue in practice: I configured face recognition for all my cameras months ago, and I enabled the Photos library integration for everyone in my household, but in spite of my attentive efforts, the Face Recognition section of each camera in the Home app is filled with hundreds (literally) of untagged face entries for my girlfriend and me.

I have hundreds of unnamed entries for people who are “known to household”.

We’re both saved as “known to household” faces in Home, and yet there are hundreds more of us just hanging there, waiting to be “tagged”. I either don’t understand how this feature is supposed to work, or something has gone horribly wrong on my home hubs, or iOS 14’s face recognition isn’t ready yet. My assumption is that this long list of faces is supposed to be a log of recently recognized people, but then again – how is it possible that the system isn’t automatically recognizing the two of us?

For this reason, and because we’ve been trying to take it easy with inviting friends over for dinner now that COVID-19 cases are rising again here in Italy, I haven’t gotten much value out of face recognition yet. I should also note, though, that we’re probably not the ideal household for face recognition: we don’t have kids, and we don’t have any HomeKit video doorbells (which are also getting face recognition support this year as well as integration with HomePod, which will be able to announce who’s at the door), and we don’t leave the house much these days. But from what I’ve seen so far, I’m not impressed with Home’s integration with Photos and face analysis on my local network; hopefully this is going to be improved soon.

Speaking of HomeKit Secure Video: compatible cameras are also receiving support for activity zones this year (as with face recognition, this is included with iOS 14 and your camera will not require a firmware update). With this feature, you can create a zone in the camera’s field of view where activity will be detected; all you need to do is tap anywhere on the camera view to add a series of dots until you create a closed shape that will be your selected activity zone. You can then either choose to detect activity inside or outside the drawn zone.

Setting up activity zones.

Activity zones, a common functionality of third-party camera systems, are useful for those times when activity that doesn’t relate to your household is picked up by the camera, potentially interfering with motion alerts. For instance, you may have a camera by your front door that also captures a portion of the street outside, and you probably want to exclude that portion of the field of view since you’re not interested in cars or people passing by unless they get really close to your door. You get the idea. Activity zones grant you finer control over what cameras take into consideration when monitoring activity, and I’m glad Apple added this to HomeKit Secure Video this year.

Last, there’s Adaptive Lighting. According to Apple, once enabled this mode will automatically adjust the colors and intensity of compatible lights during the day until you go to sleep to maximize productivity and eventually help you relax. Here’s how Apple describes it:

You can ease into morning with warmer colors, stay focused and alert midday with cooler colors, and wind down at night by removing blue light.

This sounds pretty nice to me, but I’m also the kind of person who disabled Night Shift because I don’t like a computer deciding the color and brightness of its display on my behalf. Perhaps my excitement over this feature is misplaced, knowing my habits. In any case, Hue appears to have confirmed they’ll be supporting Adaptive Lighting later this year, and I plan to at least try it out for a few days.

And More

You didn’t think I was done covering app updates in iOS and iPadOS 14, did you? Let’s take a look at what else is new in Apple’s apps this year.

Safari

Apple’s browser is having a relatively quiet year on iOS and iPadOS. The same can’t be said about the Mac version, but on iPhone and iPad this release is focused on performance, privacy, and translations.37

If I didn’t know any better, I would have said that Safari seems snappier this year, but instead I’ll just point out that Apple said they updated the browser’s JavaScript engine and they’re claiming up to 2x faster JS performance than Chrome on Android. What does any of this mean for you in practice? If you come across a website that seems…snappier than before, you can thank Safari’s updated JavaScript engine in iOS and iPadOS 14.

Privacy was a big focus for Apple this year, with different areas of both iOS and iPadOS receiving new privacy-related controls for users and APIs for developers, which we previously detailed here. Safari has joined the list of privacy-based enhancements with the Privacy Report, a new feature of the browser’s address bar menu (the one with the ‘aA’ button) that shows you all the cross-site trackers that are being blocked by Intelligent Tracking Prevention.

The current website is the top option.

The Privacy Report starts by showing you how many trackers were prevented from profiling you via on-device machine learning over the past 30 days, the percentage of visited websites that contacted cross-site trackers, and the most contacted tracker from all visited websites. Below this section, you’ll find a breakdown of trackers by website, so you can see which trackers were contacted by any given domain, or by tracker, so you can see what the most “popular” ones are. I try not to obsess over these details: I’m glad Intelligent Tracking Prevention is working, and I also use Content Blockers to make the modern web a more livable experience that doesn’t throw popups in my face every few seconds; but I never found myself actively seeking data from the Privacy Report to get more information on trackers. I’m sure someone out there will care that this data is surfaced now; personally, I trusted Apple was doing the right thing here before, and I didn’t really need a privacy report to confirm the data myself.

Perhaps the most important user-facing addition to Safari this year is a new native translation mode for webpages, currently in beta and available for seven languages: English, Spanish, Chinese, French, German, Russian, and Brazilian Portuguese. Here’s how this works: using on-device machine learning, Safari determines whether the webpage you’re on is in one of those languages; if it is (and if the language isn’t your system default already), you’ll see a new Translate icon pop up on the left side of the address bar, where the ‘aA’ button usually is. At this point, if you tap the translate button, the webpage will be sent to Apple’s servers for translation; this process does not happen on-device, but Apple says the contents of the webpage will be deleted from their servers after the translation is complete. On your end, all you need to do is a wait a couple seconds for the webpage to update with a full-page, inline translation.

A Spanish webpage translated in Safari.

I don’t speak any of the supported languages fluently, but I sort of know my way around Spanish and can get the basic gist of a story if I’m reading a Spanish news story. To me, translations seem good enough – in line with the Translate app and Chrome’s existing translation mode. In pure Apple fashion, Safari’s new translation is elegant and unobtrusive: no toolbars, no extra menus, just a single icon in the address bar. Safari automatically continues to translate if you navigate to another webpage on the same domain, and it only stops if you navigate to a different domain or if it detects a webpage in a different language. You can revert to the original webpage at any time by clicking the translate icon in the address bar.

Alas, there are no changes to Safari Reading List this year. Then again, this has been the case for the last few years. At what point do I just give up all hope?

Files

There isn’t much to observe in terms of new features in Apple’s file manager this year.

Files has gained an updated toolbar with a pull-down menu (previously discussed in the Design and iPad chapters), which helps in surfacing view and sorting options that used to be hidden behind a gesture. On iPad, grid view is denser, taking better advantage of the tablet’s larger screen to display more items at once. This is among my favorite tweaks of iPadOS 14; I’m using grid view more often than column view now, and, although I wish the grid’s density was configurable with a slider like on macOS, I like how it provides me with a bird’s eye view of all files in a folder.

The denser grid view in iPadOS 14.

Another nice addition to grid view: on iPad, you can now click the pointer on a file name to quickly rename it:

Click any file to rename it.

Two other small changes to Files this year include a new default ‘Shared Documents’ section in the sidebar that lists all your shared documents, plus support for external drives that use APFS encryption. Sadly, we still can’t create smart folders or saved searches, and there’s no Files widget to pin specific folders or files to the Home Screen.

Photos

Photos’ updates in iOS and iPadOS 14 build upon the major revamp introduced last year with an assortment of new options to filter and organize your photos. This is in addition to the new sidebar and photo picker, which I’ve already covered in the iPad and Design chapters, respectively.

A feature that has long existed on the Mac has found its way to Photos for iPhone and iPad: captions. If you want to add a description to a photo, swipe up and type out a caption in the new field; captions sync across devices with iCloud so you can also see them on the iPad and Mac. Besides adding descriptive labels to photos, the utility of captions is that you can later search your photos with words contained in them. So whether you want to annotate a picture of a document, a particularly good photo of your dog, or some inspirational images for your next tattoo, the combination of captions and search may come in handy.

You can add captions to photos in iOS 14.

In various sections of the app, including Library and Albums, you’ll see a new button at the top of the screen to access additional filtering and view options. These include buttons to zoom in and out of your photos (the zooming feature is now available in more views, including Favorites, Media Types, and Shared Albums), aspect ratio, and – the more notable addition this year – filters. Once selected, the new Filters screen allows you to filter your collection by favorites, edited, photos, and videos, which is a nice way to find the items you’re looking for without switching views inside the app.

New filters for the Photos app in iOS 14.

Another tweak that a lot of people are going to appreciate is the ability to hide the Hidden album – which Photos automatically generates the first time you hide an item from any of the app’s views. If you want to keep your secrets even more, well, secret, you can enable this option in Settings ⇾ Photos ⇾ Hidden Album.

Then there’s a long list of performance improvements: Live Photos taken using iOS or iPadOS 14 should autoplay with improved stabilization in the Days, Months, and Years views; you can zoom in further into photos to appreciate the finer details of your favorite pictures; and the Memories functionality should be smarter with a more relevant selection of photos and videos, enhanced stabilization, a larger selection of music that adapts to the length of a Memory movie, and improved framing when switching between landscape and portrait orientations.

Camera

When it comes to taking pictures, Apple’s efforts on the Camera app this year have focused on refining modes introduced last year, improving performance, and adding new features for professional and casual users alike.

For starters, the ability to toggle video resolution and frame rate while shooting in the Camera app, previously introduced with iOS 13.2 and exclusive to the iPhone 11 line, has been brought over to the iPhone SE, XR, XS, and XS Max as well. This is great news for owners of older iPhones (or the 2020 iPhone SE) who wanted the same video recording flexibility granted by last year’s iPhone 11 lineup.

QuickTake, another feature that debuted last year with the iPhone 11 line (and was also included in the 2020 iPhone SE), has also been ported to the XR, XS, and XS Max with iOS 14. QuickTake allows you to start recording video by holding down the shutter button in the Camera app; on compatible phones, you can also hold the Volume Down button to initiate QuickTake capture, which is an even faster way to start recording video while holding an iPhone with one hand. Additionally, there’s a new option in Settings ⇾ Camera to take pictures in burst mode by pressing the Volume Up button.

Also in Settings, you’ll find a long-requested option: mirrored selfies. When ‘Mirror Front Camera’ is enabled, your selfies will reflect the front camera preview rather than ending up flipped, which I know is something a lot of my friends have been wishing the Camera could do for years. Now, you can capture selfies knowing that what you see is what you get.

While casual users will appreciate the inclusion of mirrored selfies, camera professionals will rejoice at the ability to lock an exposure compensation value for photos and videos for an entire session while separately locking camera focus and exposure for a specific shot. I wouldn’t know where to begin with this, but I trust my more experienced professional connections that this is a solid addition to the Camera app.

There are changes for Night Mode, too: when using Night Mode on iPhone 11 and 11 Pro, the camera now uses the gyroscope to display a guidance indicator that helps you hold the camera steady. I hope this will help me in my quest to take sharp, well-lit night photos of the Colosseum.

On the performance side, Apple claims that iOS 14 helps you shoot photos up to 90% faster than before at up to four frames per second. You can try this by opening the Camera app and clicking the shutter button quickly – it does indeed seem faster than before at saving multiple shots in succession. Apple also says that time to first shot has been reduced by 25% in iOS 14, and Portrait shot-to-shot is up to 15% faster than iOS 13. Finally, you’ll find a new ‘Prioritize Faster Shooting’ toggle in Settings ⇾ Camera; when this is turned on, the Camera will intelligently modify how photos are processed, adapting image quality when rapidly pressing the shutter.

With all these intelligence- and performance-related improvements in iOS 14, I have to wonder how much better shooting photos and videos will be on the iPhone 12. We’ve probably reached the point where an iPhone can capture and process a photo faster than we can physically click the shutter, which is a fascinating (and remarkable) achievement to think about.

FaceTime

We don’t have actual numbers from Apple on FaceTime’s usage this year, but I have to imagine it skyrocketed because of the pandemic and associated lockdowns.

In iOS and iPadOS 14, Apple has increased FaceTime’s video quality to 1080p for the following devices:

iPhone X and later

iPad Pro 10.5-inch, iPad Pro 11-inch (1st generation), and later

iPad Pro 12.9-inch (2nd generation) and later

I can confirm that FaceTime’s video does look slightly better now; the issue is that my parents have a terrible Internet connection at home, so our video calls are still blurry most of the time.

Additionally, Apple has re-introduced a setting that first debuted in the iOS 13 beta last year, and which was later removed, to establish eye contact with someone else on FaceTime even when you’re looking at the screen instead of the camera. This option is now simply called ‘Eye Contact’ and you can find it in Settings ⇾ FaceTime.

Weather

Apple wasted no time incorporating some of the features from Dark Sky into the Weather app following the acquisition of the popular weather service earlier this year.

If you’re in the United States, you’ll have access to next-hour precipitation details in the Weather app starting with iOS 14. These details are displayed as a minute-by-minute chart that shows the intensity of rain or snow over the coming hour, and it’s available both inside the app and the widget. I hope this feature finds its way to Italy eventually.

Next hour precipitation details in Weather.

Severe weather alerts were also added to Weather in iOS 14, and these are available for the United States, Canada, Europe, Japan, and Australia. The Weather app and widget will display government alerts about certain severe weather events including thunderstorms, flash floods, tornados, and more. Tapping the alert in the Weather app opens an inline webpage with more details about the alert and affected area.

Severe weather alerts in iOS 14.

As for other changes in Weather this year, the multi-day weather forecast now includes the precipitation chance for each day:

And when searching for locations in the city list, you can now view the weather for a location without adding it to your list of saved locations in the app. I’m curious to see what else will come out of Dark Sky integration in Weather. Most importantly, however, I have a simple question:

Why is the Weather app not available on iPad yet, 10 years after the iPad’s launch?

Calendar

Aside from the new sidebar on iPad, the date picker, and new widgets – all of which I detailed earlier in this review – nothing else is changed in the Calendar app this year. Unless you count the subtle redesign of list view on iPhone as a change. You be the judge.

Are these bolder fonts and thicker color indicators the reason Jony Ive left Apple?

Voice Memos

Who would have thought that, between excellent support for multicolumn on iPad and a handful of new features, Voice Memos would turn out to be the most fascinating of Apple’s “smaller” app updates this year?

Just like Shortcuts, Voice Memos now comes with a set of default smart folders and lets you create your own regular folders to better sort your recordings. Smart folders automatically group Apple Watch recordings, recently deleted recordings, and your favorites; you can mark a recording as a favorite by tapping the ‘Love’ icon in the recording’s detail page. Regular folders don’t need an explanation, but if you’re the kind of person who saves a lot of meeting notes, interviews, or musical ideas in Voice Memos, I think you’re going to like the ability to organize them with folders.

Folders in Voice Memos.

My favorite addition to Voice Memos in iOS and iPadOS 14, however, is the following: Apple added an intelligent audio enhancement tool called ‘Enhance Recording’ that, with the tap a button, reduces background noises and room reverberation from your recordings, making conversations easier to follow.

Tap this button to enhance the audio quality of a recording in Voice Memos.

In my tests, although Enhance Recording was no magic fix for interviews recorded in crowded rooms (remember when we could do that?), it did help in cutting down background noise and bringing out a person’s voice more, even if it felt a little “robotic” once the effect was applied. If you don’t like it, you can turn off Enhance Recording at any time since it’s non-destructive. I’m fascinated by this option debuting in Voice Memos this year, and I think it could be highly beneficial for journalists or students who rely on Voice Memos on a daily basis. I also have to wonder if this kind of experimentation with audio effects is something Apple could bring to Podcasts in the future.

Podcasts

There are two new features in Apple’s Podcasts app in iOS and iPadOS 14 – a small number that may be justified by the team’s (rumored) focus on other projects for the future, such as original content.

The Up Next queue has been redesigned: it is now a carousel with larger episode artwork that you can scroll through to find the episode you’re looking for. Since you can scroll the list in iOS 14, you can no longer swipe on episodes to delete them from your queue; instead, you have to use a context menu or tap the ‘See All’ button to access a separate list of all episodes in Up Next.

The new look for Up Next in iOS 14.

Also new this year: a new ‘Episodes You Might Like’ section that recommends episodes you might enjoy based on your listening activity. Episodes in this section are taken from the entire Apple Podcasts catalog – they don’t have to come from shows you’re already subscribed to.

In my tests, there was a healthy mix of episodes from my subscriptions and recommendations from similar shows found on Apple Podcasts, and I’ve even discovered a handful of interesting shows I wasn’t familiar with before. This section’s pretty well done, and I’m curious to see how Apple will use it once they roll out their (inevitable) original shows.

Contacts

The long-neglected Contacts app has been updated with a handful of design tweaks and new options this year. There’s an updated interface to enable/disable groups, which lives in a sidebar on iPad. You still cannot create groups on an iPhone or iPad, which is frankly dumbfounding in 2020, but I want to believe this is a sign of better things to come soon. Right?

The editing screen to update a contact’s profile picture has been updated, and it now includes new options for colors and emoji, which work similarly to the Reminders app. You can mix and match emoji and colors of your choice in a profile picture, which adds a bit of fun to an otherwise boring app.

More options for editing profile pictures in iOS 14.

Lastly, in terms of visual updates, Contacts now uses a new style for table views and buttons, which feel modern and consistent with other system apps in iOS and iPadOS 14. Plus, what can I say – I like buttons that look like buttons.

Sweet, sweet buttons.

Everything Else

As is often the case with new versions of iOS and iPadOS, there tend to be dozens of other features and smaller details to be discovered in the nooks and crannies of both OSes. iOS and iPadOS 14 are no different, so let’s take a look.

Password Manager

The evolution of Apple’s built-in password manager for iOS and iPadOS is a story that’s been slept on for a while now.

For the past few years, Apple has increasingly focused on making it as convenient as possible to keep your online accounts secure by removing the friction typically involved with creating and managing strong passwords. In iOS 12, the company introduced a Settings area for iCloud Keychain with a redesigned account list and added Password AutoFill to create and save cryptographically secure passwords in Keychain, with support for third-party apps. At the time, I noted I was surprised iCloud Keychain hadn’t “evolved into a standalone Keychain app yet”. And last year, Apple added support for weak password warnings to Safari and Safari View Controller, giving users a convenient way to upgrade their weak passwords to stronger ones with just a few taps.

For those who have been paying attention, it should be clear by now that Apple has built a modern, powerful password manager that is deeply integrated with the system and supports recent advancements in this field such as Well-Known URLs for changing passwords, Security Code AutoFill, and domain-bound codes. In iOS and iPadOS 14, we can see the company taking another step toward the (I hope, inevitable?) release of a standalone Passwords app with easier access to the password manager and the introduction of security recommendations.

Apple has built a modern, powerful password manager that is deeply integrated with the system.

In iOS 14, the password manager has been moved out of the Accounts section and gained a standalone, top-level area under Settings ⇾ Passwords. In the new Passwords page, in addition to your lists of accounts and AutoFill settings, you’ll now find a section called Security Recommendations. The password manager could already recommend against adopting reused or easily guessed passwords, so you’ll find passwords that match these criteria listed in Security Recommendations. This year, however, Apple’s password manager can also find compromised passwords that have appeared in known data breaches.38 High-priority recommendations will be highlighted at the top of the page based on the severity of the warning and the type of account; for both high-priority and regular recommendations, the password manager will offer buttons to change your password on the account’s website and, new this year, either upgrade the password in-app or upgrade the account to Sign In with Apple.

The new Security Recommendations section.

The flow of actions and app integrations Apple designed around Security Recommendations is one of the most fascinating technical changes in iOS and iPadOS this year. When Apple detects that one of your existing passwords has appeared in a known data leak, you’ll get a notification. The system will show this notification for any account that uses a password that has appeared in a data breach, even if the breach occurred on a different service. The goal is to always ensure you’re using strong, unique passwords, and the notification should go a long way toward raising awareness.

The notification sent by iCloud Keychain for compromised passwords. Source: Apple.

Once you realize it’s time to change one of your passwords, the updated password manager gives you a handful of options to do so. The first one, which you’ll likely see most frequently in Settings for now, is to go to a website and upgrade your password manually. Apple makes this slightly easier for websites to handle if they adopt the Well-Known URL spec, but having to visit a website to change a password and save it is still a chore. For this reason, Apple has introduced new ways to upgrade your passwords on-device in less time: starting with iOS and iPadOS 14, you’ll be able to change your passwords on-device (either in Settings or inside third-party apps) without visiting a website as well as to upgrade an account to a Sign In with Apple one, foregoing the need to have a password altogether.

These features are made possible by the Account Authentication Modification Extension, new in iOS and iPadOS 14. If apps that deal with online accounts and passwords implement this new extension type, you’ll be able to:

Change your passwords from Settings ⇾ Passwords ⇾ Security Recommendations without visiting a website;

Change a password inside a third-party app with a custom UI;

Change a password inside a third-party app at login, if the system detects the password used to sign in appeared in a data breach;

Upgrade your account to Sign In with Apple.

To make this work, the Account Authentication Modification Extension talks to online services in the background and serves as a middleman between Apple’s password manager, the service, and the service’s native app installed on-device. By using this approach, apps can let users seamlessly upgrade their passwords to automatically-generated strong ones; everything will be saved in the system keychain, and users don’t have to worry about creating their own passwords, respecting service-specific password rules, or manually checking known data leaks. It’s all handled by the password manager and the Account Authentication Modification Extension.

The different ways of upgrading passwords in iOS 14. Source: Apple.

Apple has been building a modern, secure, flexible password manager designed to remove the complexity and friction usually involved with account management and password creation. This year’s updates are excellent, and I hope third-party developers will consider the Account Authentication Modification Extension and pay attention to Sign In with Apple as a valid alternative to traditional accounts.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: Apple’s password manager should become a standalone app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. It’s too bad this team’s amazing work is still somewhat hidden in the Settings app, and I hope the company will consider promoting Passwords to a built-in app in iOS 15.

Keyboard

I’ll cut right to the chase here: one of the few objectively great things to happen in 2020 is that Apple added emoji search to the iPhone’s keyboard in iOS 14. This long overdue feature isn’t without a few shortcomings, but it’s so convenient overall, even my nitpicky complaints can’t hide how excited I am about this single tweak to the keyboard.

You’ve probably seen emoji search in third-party keyboards before and you should have a sense of how it works, but I’m going to describe it anyway. In the emoji keyboard on iPhone, you’ll now see a search bar that lets you search for specific characters by name. When you enter emoji search mode, characters will be displayed as a list of scrollable items above the keyboard; by default, before searching emoji will be sorted by recently used. The rest is pretty straightforward: you type something, an emoji comes up, you tap it to enter it in a text field.

Finally.

I’ve never liked using third-party keyboards on my iPhone, so emoji search is new to me in iOS 14, and I can’t even begin to express how much time it has already saved me. I despised scrolling the emoji picker and its sometimes nonsensical arrangement of emoji, often wasting well over a minute just to find a single character. Emoji search fixes this, and it’s nice in that it even supports long-pressing characters to pick different skin tones and variations.

There are a few things I wish Apple would improve for emoji search in the future. Keyword search, although not as bad as on macOS, often doesn’t show results for queries where you’d expect a particular emoji to come up. The peach emoji, for instance, isn’t displayed when typing the names typically used to describe a certain anatomically posterior body part.39 I’ve occasionally run into other keywords not surfacing their common emoji counterparts, and I have to wonder if this a case of Apple outright banning certain words or their differential privacy technology falling behind. Switching back and forth between the emoji search keyboard and the regular QWERTY keyboard is also kind of strange: you have to press a key on the right of the space bar to return to the emoji picker, then you have to press the ‘ABC’ key on the left to go back to the normal keyboard. I still haven’t gotten used to the two taps in opposite places and I’d like Apple to simplify this. Plus, as I noted in the iPad chapter, the lack of emoji search in iPadOS 14 is inexcusable.

Still, despite these few issues, I’m relieved I can finally remove emoji search from my annual iOS wish list.

Also new in the keyboard department this year is contact AutoFill. This feature is part of Apple’s approach to data minimization – specifically, it’s designed to free apps from the potential liability of holding users’ data for those times when they only require access to a single item, in this case contact information.

Contact AutoFill in Fantastical. Even with Contacts access disabled, AutoFill can grant the app access to a single contact’s email address or phone number.

In iOS and iPadOS 14, the QuickType keyboard can suggest contact information (a phone number or email address) when the user is typing into a field that expects a contact. Rather than requesting access to the full Contacts database or invoking the contact picker to let the user manually select a contact, AutoFill can suggest a contact above the keyboard based on what the user is typing. According to Apple, the other benefit of this technique is that nothing is shared with the app until the user accepts the suggestion and enters text in the selected field. I hope more third-party developers will start taking advantage of Contact AutoFill soon.

Control Center

There are several improvements and new features in Control Center for iOS 14, particularly in the realm of audio controls and music. The most interesting ones are coming soon with iOS 14.2 as part of Apple’s rumored debut of new over-ear headphones, so let’s take a look.

Home controls. Available in iOS and iPadOS 14.0, Home controls are an optional set of accessories that dynamically suggest the most relevant HomeKit accessories and scenes you’d likely want to control based on signals such as time of day and frequent usage. Once enabled in Settings ⇾ Control Center ⇾ Show Home Controls, these new tiles will appear as two rows of interactive buttons underneath playback controls in Control Center, with ‘Favorites’ included by default.

The new Home controls in Control Center.

I’ve been impressed by the intelligent suggestions of Home controls in iOS 14: the system has been smart enough to notice I tend to control my living room and entrance lights during the day; in the evening, the ‘Blue Bedroom’ and ‘All Lights Up’ scenes replace them; then, late at night when I’m winding down, I always find the ‘Prepare for Bed’ scene in there. I’ve grown to trust Control Center to show me the appropriate scenes and accessories during the day, which has saved me the trip to the Home app to trigger those scenes manually (or using Siri with my voice). I also like how Home controls retain the ability to long-press accessories such as lights to change their color and intensity from a popup view in Control Center.

Another welcome improvement is the evolution of Favorites into a richer full-screen view that supports switching between rooms. When you open your Favorites, you’ll be presented with two sections for favorite scenes and accessories. At the top, however, you can tap the ‘Favorites’ heading to switch between rooms in your home and find all scenes and accessories for the selected room. Effectively, Apple embedded the entire interactive portion of the Home app (minus accessory configuration) in Control Center without adding much complexity to it, and I appreciate how quickly I can control every accessory around me without opening the Home app.

The new Favorites view for Home in Control Center.

If you don’t want the extra rows of Home controls in your Control Center, you can disable them but still add the old ‘Favorites’ toggle from Control Center’s settings. This way, you’ll be able to use the new, navigation-enabled Favorites view without proactive Home control suggestions.

Redesigned Now Playing controls. Starting with iOS 14.2, you’ll find a redesigned Now Playing tile in Control Center that features bigger artwork for the currently playing item and, more importantly, Music and Podcasts suggestions when nothing is currently playing.

Long press the Now Playing control to expand it.

Suggestions are displayed as a scrollable grid of items sporting the icon of the app that will play audio. These suggestions are based on your recent listening activity and cannot be customized to showcase your favorite albums or podcasts instead; additionally, in my tests with iOS 14.2 so far, it appears that the feature is limited to Apple’s Music and Podcasts apps, and I wasn’t able to “force” Now Playing to show me recommendations from Castro or YouTube instead.

New suggestions for when nothing is playing.

The best part about Now Playing’s suggestions is that they start playing inline with a single tap without launching the associated app. And, in addition to being available in Control Center’s Now Playing tile, they also show up on the Lock Screen for Now Playing controls when nothing is playing.

I’m a fan of this addition: it fits well in the context of iOS 14’s compact UI since it packs a lot of functionality in a relatively small interface element, providing users with useful time-saving shortcuts to start playing something in a couple taps; and, the Now Playing tile has been integrated with the redesigned AirPlay picker and speaker controls, turning this control into a one-stop solution for audio playback, AirPlay management, and speaker access. I just hope third-party apps will gain the option to provide their own suggestions in here too.

Music recognition. Now this is a cool one: also starting in iOS 14.2, you’ll be able to install a new Music Recognition tile in Control Center powered by Shazam. Anytime you come across a song you want to recognize, instead of quickly opening the Shazam app on your device, you can simply swipe down to open Control Center and tap the Shazam button there. If the audio scan is successful, after a few seconds you’ll get a notification featuring artwork for the recognized song with a button to open it in Apple Music.

The new music recognition feature in iOS 14.2.

Apple went beyond embedding regular Shazam as a system feature in Control Center though. The real power of iOS 14.2’s music recognition lies in how it can recognize audio playing inside apps even if you’re wearing headphones and nothing is coming out of your device’s speakers. Shazam’s music recognition works with both external and internal audio sources – a first for Shazam on iOS, which could never recognize internal audio due to system limitations before. But since Shazam is now owned by Apple, the company has started integrating its music recognition engine across the system, so you’ll no longer have to make sure audio is playing through the speakers to recognize songs.

I can’t tell you how many times I was watching a YouTube video or TV show, an interesting song started playing, and I had to remove my headphones to open Shazam and save the song. This is no longer the case with iOS 14.2 and, based on my initial tests, the feature works as advertised and successfully recognizes any song regardless of where it’s playing. The only issue I have with music recognition in Control Center is that, unlike the Shazam app, it doesn’t automatically save recognized songs into a ‘My Shazam Tracks’ playlist in the Music app; it’d be nice to have this as an option in the notification. But in any case, I’m going to use music recognition a lot, and I’m glad Apple has started doing new and interesting things with Shazam on iOS devices.

Headphone audio levels. If you enable the Hearing control while wearing compatible headphones (such as AirPods), Live UI will now show you headphone audio levels in real time with a decibel measuring.

Headphone levels in Control Center.

This updated control is useful if you want to quickly glance at whether your listening volume is at a safe level. I still struggle to follow its advice when listening to My Chemical Romance though.

Microphone and camera indicators. Lastly, as Ryan covered in his Privacy story in August, Control Center is now home to new indicators displayed at the top of the screen that show you recent microphone and camera activity from apps.

The new camera and microphone indicators in the status bar and Control Center.

Every time the microphone or camera are activated by an app or website on your device, you’ll see a colored dot (orange for the mic, green for the camera) in the side of the status bar, with more information displayed in Control Center. Will this be enough to convince people that Instagram and Facebook aren’t actually listening to them, and that the reality is more complex (and far creepier) than their (reasonable) suspicions? Only time will tell, but at least Apple is trying.

AirPods

Given the success of Apple’s AirPods and rumors regarding an expansion of the line into over-ear headphones, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the company has invested heavily into extending AirPods’ integration across all its OSes this year.

We already covered two major new AirPods features in iOS 14 a few weeks ago and I don’t want to rehash John’s article, but for context: Apple has introduced Spatial Audio in the latest firmware update for AirPods Pro, and they’ve rolled out automatic device switching for all AirPods models and Beats headphones carrying the H1 chip. Spatial Audio applies directional audio filters and various frequency adjustments to give you the impression that audio is coming from where your device is in the physical space around you. It’s fancy tech (the gyroscope is used to track your head movements), it’s a trippy effect, and I love it. I recommend testing it with content encoded in Dolby 5.1, 7.1, or Dolby Atmos (anything from Apple TV+ will work) or the Spatial Scenes app to get the idea.

As for automatic device switching: AirPods can now automatically switch between an iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch paired to the same iCloud account as soon as you start playing audio on one device or the other. In my tests, the transition is almost seamless, and I like the use of pill-shaped notifications to let you “switch back” to another device with one tap. Using AirPods with Apple devices is easier than ever now, putting third-party earbud manufacturers at a severe disadvantage.

You can switch back to AirPods on the current device with one tap.

In terms of other new AirPods features in iOS and iPadOS 14: your iPhone and iPad can now send you a notification when AirPods’ batteries are running low, giving you the heads up that you’ll have to charge them soon.

You hate to see it.

There is a new Motion API for developers to integrate with AirPods Pro (and soon other AirPods models…?) with access to the user’s orientation, acceleration, and rotational rates. In simple terms: this API opens a world of possibilities for gaming, fitness, and other apps that may want to do something interesting with this kind of data. Imagine, for instance, integrating the player’s head movements into a first-person videogame or tracking reps in virtual fitness classes with AirPods Pro’s Motion API. I’d be very surprised if Apple doesn’t end up doing something here with AirPods Pro and Fitness+ or AirPods headphones paired with Apple Arcade.

Siri

While the most important change to Siri this year revolves around its use of compact UI and shorter, more contextual responses, Apple has also shipped a handful of new functionalities and service-level improvements that should make the assistant smarter and better integrated with the web. Some of the enhancements to the Siri service are also available on iOS 13; other new features and app integrations are exclusive to iOS 14.

At a high level, Apple claims that Siri’s knowledge has been greatly expanded, with the assistant knowing 20 times more facts than three years ago. It’s hard to gauge the effects of this expansion in practice; Siri does now provide answers to questions such as “what causes seasons?” and “how do hybrid cars work?” by fetching data from various sources, but it’s difficult to tell for sure what’s new this year and what isn’t.

The ability to get more answers from the Internet without having to manually search the web is only available in English, German, French, Spanish, and Japanese for now.

In terms of new features Siri gained in iOS 14, there are a couple worth covering. You can now send audio messages from Siri, which will let you record an audio clip inline without opening the Messages app. Once the message is sent, you can listen to it from Siri’s compact message presentation card.

The UI for alternate media responses has also been updated this year so that “Maybe you wanted…” suggestions (which you may get when asking Siri to play a song) now live on a separate page instead of being displayed below the primary result.

Suggestions for related songs now live on a different page inside Siri.

If you’re driving somewhere, you can now share your ETA (a feature first introduced last year) with a specific contact via Siri. The recipient will get a notification about your ETA and they’ll be able to follow your trip in real-time in Maps.

Sharing ETAs with Siri.

To round out this year’s Siri updates, I should also point out that dictation (which has long been powered by Siri) now runs on-device thanks to the Neural Engine and that more language pairs have been added, bringing Siri’s translation capabilities to over 65 language pairs.

As I mentioned above, Siri’s story this year is mostly about its presentation of results rather than specific integrations with the system; hopefully, now that a new design is in place, Apple will go back to growing the assistant’s understanding of apps next year.

Accessibility

If there’s a team at Apple that never fails to impress us with powerful and empowering new features each year, it’s the Accessibility one. Apple believes in accessible technology as a fundamental trait of its products. Some outlets may (shortsightedly so) refer to Accessibility features as “hidden”, which entirely misses the point: these functionalities were created to serve the needs of a specific community of users, who are just as important to Apple as those who may not need these options. We all benefit from the work of Apple’s Accessibility engineers, who shipped some terrific improvements in iOS 14.

Back Tap. With this feature (available in Settings ⇾ Accessibility ⇾ Touch ⇾ Back Tap), you’ll be able to run any system action or custom shortcut on your device by physically double- or triple-tapping the back of your iPhone. Back Tap uses the accelerometer to detect taps, and it’s available on the following iPhone models:

iPhone 8

iPhone 8 Plus

iPhone X

iPhone XS

iPhone XS Max

iPhone XR

iPhone 11

iPhone 11 Pro

iPhone 11 Pro Max

The actions that can be configured for Back Tap are the same ones found in iPadOS 13’s initial mouse integration: you can perform system actions such as undo, take a screenshot, or open the app switcher, or you can associate any shortcut from the Shortcuts app to execute whenever you tap the back of your device.

Back Tap was designed to help users with motor disabilities save time on their iPhones, but it’s also the perfect example of an Accessibility feature empowering all of us, regardless of our ability levels, because accessible technology means more power to everyone (and how can something for everyone be “hidden”?). I love using Back Tap to open Search when I’m inside apps (which wouldn’t be possible otherwise) and to quickly run MusicBot in compact UI from anywhere. Executing shortcuts with Back Tap is particularly impressive: they start in compact mode immediately with no delay, meaning any action on your device – from HomeKit commands to Health-related shortcuts and clipboard management – can be instantly executed by tapping the back of your phone.

Magnifier. The Magnifier UI has been updated in iOS 14 with easier access to image controls (contrast, brightness, and filters are now top-levels buttons and they’re not nested inside a menu anymore), a multi-shot mode to take multiple magnified shots without saving to the camera roll, and support for people detection.

The Magnifier app offers more options and controls in iOS 14.

Multi-shot mode is a great addition to the Magnifier, and it should come in handy for those times when you want to capture multiple signs or pages of a document and inspect them all at once on your phone. You can of course control zoom levels and filters for each shot from the dedicated page in the Magnifier app.

Starting with iOS 14.2, Magnifier will also gain the ability to detect people around you and measure your distance relative to them. People detection is powered by ARKit, which displays a dotted line inside the Magnifier’s camera UI to tell you how close to you a recognized person is. In my tests, this feature performed well and felt like a perfect addition to the Magnifier, which has grown into a fascinating context-aware lens to aid visually impaired users.

Sound Recognition. With this new hearing-related Accessibility functionality, your iPhone will continuously listen for certain sounds and notify you, using local, on-device intelligence, when sounds may be recognized. There are four categories of sounds that can be recognized by iOS 14 (alarms, animals, household, and people), including common sounds such as smoke or fire alarm, dogs, door bell, water running, or babies crying.

You can enable Sound Recognition from Settings or via a new Control Center toggle.

When you get a notification for a recognized sound, you can snooze it if you’re aware of what’s happening and don’t need to be alerted again. In my tests with my dogs barking and the water tap left running for a minute, Sound Recognition worked as advertised and sent notifications in near real-time. This potentially life-saving feature for hearing-impaired users is an outstanding example of Apple’s advancements in machine learning and the power of the Neural Engine, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear fascinating stories about real-world use cases soon.

Headphone Accommodations. Available under Accessibility ⇾ Audio/Visual ⇾ Headphone Accommodations, these settings allow you to customize the audio for supported Apple and Beats headphones, including AirPods. Headphone Accommodations are designed to amplify soft sounds and adjust certain frequencies for an individualʼs hearing to help music, movies, phone calls, and podcasts sound crisper and clearer.

The custom setup for Headphone Accommodations.

Headphone Accommodations allow for a custom audio setup, which can be done with a guided tool in Settings, and they let you tune audio for a balanced tone, vocal range, or overall brightness; they support transparency mode on AirPods Pro as well. Based on the sound preference you select, the three amplification tunings support three different levels of strength each, allowing for the creation of nine adjusted audio profiles in total. You can also choose to apply these accommodations to media, phone calls, or both. This is yet another example of an Accessibility feature benefitting everyone, regardless of whether you consider yourself a hearing-impaired person or not.

Pointer control. In Accessibility ⇾ Pointer Control ⇾ Double-Tap to Drag, you’ll find a new setting to enable a Mac-like double-tap-to-drag behavior when using the system pointer on iPadOS. Once enabled, you can double-tap an item and start dragging it after the second tap without lifting your finger off the trackpad, and you can choose to use this with or without drag lock applied. If you dislike the default tap and hold behavior for drag and drop when using the pointer on your Magic Keyboard, this option’s for you.

And More

Finally, here’s a grab bag of everything else worth noting about iOS and iPadOS 14.

Set third-party default browsers and email clients. As John covered in his story a few weeks ago, you can now set third-party email clients and browser apps as your defaults in iOS and iPadOS 14. If you asked me years ago, I would have probably said this day would never come, but I guess something had to give considering the pressure put on Apple over anticompetitive concerns this year.40 Whatever the motivation behind Apple’s decision to allow third-party default apps, it’s the right thing to do, and it’s great to see a variety of available options already.

How to set a third-party default browser in iOS 14.

To set a third-party email client or browser app as default in iOS 14, you have to visit that app’s page in Settings and select it under ‘Default Browser App’ or ‘Default Mail App’. After doing this, all actions that open those apps, such as tapping a link in Messages or a web suggestion in Search, will be redirected to the third-party default instead of Safari and Mail. For years now third-party apps have offered custom settings to open third-party browsers and email apps; a system-wide setting means that all links, including those from Siri, Search, and Shortcuts41, will stop launching Safari and Mail. I don’t think I’ll ever enable this since I like Safari and Mail myself, but it was about time Apple added this ability.

In the first version of iOS 14 that launched to the public, a bug caused the user’s choice of default browser and email client to be reset after every device reboot. The issue was fixed in iOS 14.0.1, but another problem persists: tapping any mailto: URL from Safari still opens Mail’s default composer instead of launching your default mail app. I hope to see this fixed soon.

Apple Watch charging notifications. When your Apple Watch is fully charged, iOS 14 will send you a notification to tell you about it. Useful to know for those times when you’re placing the Watch on a charger to top it off before going to bed and using it for sleep tracking, or in the morning after waking up and before heading out for the day (if that’s still a thing for you in 2020).

iOS 14 notifies you when your Apple Watch is fully charged. This also works if you’ve paired multiple Apple Watches with your iPhone.

New share sheet options. There are two notable tweaks to the share sheet in iOS and iPadOS 14.

First, Apple built a (hidden) new UI to fix one of the most confusing aspects of document management and the share sheet in iOS 13: the difference between sharing a document with an app and opening it in-place without creating a duplicate copy. Now instead of displaying two similarly-named share extensions in the share sheet for share and open modes, iOS 14 will show an app’s extension once. Then, if the app supports both modes, you can long-press the icon to choose whether you want to share the selected document with the app or open it in-place. The difference between share and open in-place is known to few people who know what they’re doing with file management, so I think hiding these options behind a long press is fine, given the audience. The share sheet is cleaner as a result, and the functionality remains intact.

Long-press a compatible app in the share sheet to access the new open and share modes for files.

The other place where you can long press in the share sheet now is the row of contact suggestions at the top. If you’d like the system to not show a specific contact in there, you can long-press it and select ‘Suggest Less’. I’ve done this to remove my mom from sharing suggestions because, although we talk every day, I never want to send her links from Safari and the share sheet.

Long-press contacts to suggest them less or remove them from the share sheet completely with a new iOS 14 setting (right).

Also new this year: you can disable sharing suggestions in the share sheet altogether by turning them off in Settings ⇾ Siri & Search ⇾ Suggestions when Sharing. Doing this will revert the share sheet to its pre-iOS 13 structure with share extensions at the top, followed by actions.

New Find My notification for people. There’s a new option in Find My for iOS and iPadOS 14: in addition to being notified when one of your friends leaves or arrives at a specific location, you can add a notification for those times when they’re not at a particular location.

I’m onto you, Kyles The Gray.

You can set a custom recurrence for this notification by selecting time ranges and days of the week, making this an ideal option for parents and guardians who want to monitor kids’ locations and make sure they don’t leave the place they’re supposed to be. Or maybe you’re just a nosy friend. I don’t know.

Rename Bluetooth devices. iOS 14 lets you change the default name of a paired Bluetooth device. While connected to the accessory (you can’t do this if you previously paired to it but you’re not connected right now), tap the blue ‘i’ next to its name in Settings ⇾ Bluetooth, then enter the new name in the field that will appear on the details page.

Search iPhone storage. Finally, you can search the storage of your iPhone and iPad from Settings this year. The search feature is limited to searching for app names, and you can use it to find out which apps are using too much storage on your device and either offload or delete them.

Searching device storage in iOS 14.

Apps will be listed alphabetically in the list that comes up when searching your local storage, and you’ll be able to see when you last used each one, which should make the decision to let go of some of them a little bit easier.

Conclusion

Allow me to wrap up this annual iOS and iPadOS review with a euphemism: 2020 has been a complicated year for everyone.

As far as our corner of the Internet goes, that includes Apple designers and engineers as well: no matter your opinion of the company, it’s remarkable they’ve been able to pull off the (early) release of iOS and iPadOS 14 and advance their app ecosystems in substantial ways without any major public disaster. I’m not asking you to feel sorry for a trillion-dollar company: I’m saying that operating systems are, at the end of the day, made by people. And the people who work at Apple made all of this happen despite 2020’s best efforts to disrupt everyone’s plans.

In the four months I’ve spent testing iOS and iPadOS 14, I’ve realized there are two different lenses through which these updates are best evaluated: the expert’s point of view and the public’s unexpected reaction.

For you, the knowledgeable iPhone and iPad user who’s read this review, iOS and iPadOS 14 may not go down in history as groundbreaking updates. Yes, widgets are the hot new feature and every app developer’s doing them, but, on the surface, you may think both iOS and iPadOS 14 mostly revolve around smaller app updates, a few design tweaks, and several quality-of-life enhancements. That was my impression too when I started testing iOS and iPadOS 14 last June. But I’m asking you to look beneath the surface and consider how Apple hasn’t put the future of its platforms on hold this year.

There are several underlying themes at play in iOS and iPadOS 14. With compact UI – a design direction we can see in Siri, Shortcuts, widgets, and more – Apple is preparing for a future where glanceable interfaces will be the primary information delivery method of wearable devices and pocket computers. The Home Screen is growing beyond a grid of app icons, turning into a dynamic, personalized, intelligent dashboard that provides us with useful data and organizes apps for us. Privacy, which has always been at the center of Apple’s mobile operating system, is increasingly becoming a design philosophy for every new feature on our devices. The iPad may have gotten the shorter end of the stick this year with no widgets on the Home Screen and no updates to multitasking, but Apple has still managed to provide developers with a new path to follow for their iPad apps, which can now be more easily developed as desktop-class experiences compatible with a variety of form factors, including the Mac.

From the perspective of an avid Apple news reader, iOS 14 may be remembered as “the widget update”, and that’s fine. But it’d be shortsighted to ignore the high-level concepts permeating this year’s releases, which I believe are driven by a company with a cohesive vision for what’s coming next.

At the same time, we should consider the general public’s enthusiastic reception of iOS 14 and third-party widgets. I’ll put it thusly: for the first time since I started reviewing iOS and iPadOS on an annual basis, I’ve seen all kinds of users – the millions of people who buy iPhones and usually don’t read these reviews – be excited about an iOS update and the potential of getting more out of their devices thanks to apps. And all of this, I think, comes down to the beautiful mix of customization meeting users’ creativity.

To many, the obvious explanation behind the explosion in popularity of widgets and custom Home Screens is pent up demand. After all, Android users have been able to customize their Home screens with widgets and innovative icon layouts for years while iPhone users had been left out in the cold, stuck with a rigid grid of icons that allowed for no personalization whatsoever. It’s like a lid has been lifted on customization this year and people are flocking in – Apple saw this coming, you may say, and it’s just a fad that will be forgotten quickly. That may be true, but I think there’s something deeper going on here.

2020 is the year in which our smartphones have become, even more than before, essential windows onto the outside world. We may not have been able to take beautiful pictures of landscapes or record our favorite artist’s performance at a concert because of the pandemic and lockdowns, but our smartphones kept us in touch with loved ones, allowed us to communicate with friends, teachers, and colleagues, and kept us entertained during challenging times of fear and uncertainty thanks to their endless stream of distractions. Despite our distance, smartphones have kept us close; despite the long days in lockdown, they’ve reminded us that life was, and will be once again, better.

The way I see it, the much-needed escapism provided by the smartphone in 2020 has inevitably led to a desire for more personalization. This, I believe, is at the core of why widgets, alternative icons, and custom Home Screens are resonating so much with people this year: it’s human nature to personalize our possessions and turn the things we build an emotional connection with into unique artifacts that can only be our own.

When I was a somewhat rebellious teenager, I decorated my bedroom with posters of my favorite rockstars and videogames, much to the chagrin of my parents, who couldn’t tell the difference between Carl Barât42 and Shigeru Miyamoto. You may have done the same with yours; or perhaps you customized your diary, or your bag with pins and patches, or your desktop computer with Winamp skins and alternative Aqua themes. No matter the context, personalization transcends the design of an object to produce something new altogether. And so in 2020, Victoria drew a custom icon pack for her iPhone running iOS 14; Misu turned theirs into a Mac-inspired desktop; Katie spent hours decorating her Home Screen with a theme based on peaches. The list of examples goes on and on, resulting in fun, wild, creative, sometimes ridiculous-in-a-good-way iPhone Home Screens like I’ve never seen before. People with all kinds of backgrounds, with diverse skill sets and preferences, are discovering that their favorite computer doesn’t have to look like what it was designed to be. For the first time in the history of iOS, they’ve been empowered to express themselves through the most important device in their lives.

The creativity that iOS 14 opened up, regardless of whether Apple expected it or not, isn’t a silly fad: it’s beautiful, inspiring proof of our ingenuity transcending technology and turning our most used computer, the smartphone, into millions of different permutations of it – one unlike the other, each telling a different story.

As time goes on, our devices are becoming more and more personal. They know more about our habits and we expect them to provide us with a never-ending supply of suggestions, data, and daily utility. But at the same time, iOS 14 proves that the future of our devices is also personalized, because no matter what’s happening around us, there’s always going to be something else we’ll want to see in our phone, music player, and Internet communicator:

More of us.

Credits

This review wouldn’t have been possible without the help, feedback, and existence of the following people, animals, beverages, and apps:

My girlfriend Silvia, for her patience, love, design skills, photos and videos, and wisdom

Brian King, for bringing this review to life once again with his amazing animations and 3D graphics

Ryan Christoffel, for his outstanding editing skills and patience

John Voorhees, a friend and amazing colleague

Alex Guyot, for his work at MacStories and help this summer

Zelda and Ginger, for always keeping me company while I was writing the review

Myke Hurley

Stephen Hackett

Martyn Pysanczyn

Brett Terpstra

Simon Støvring, for helping me with JavaScript and saving me dozens of hours with Scriptable

Misu, for their iOS 14 System Theme Home Screen

Victoria De Las Casas, for her fall-themed Home Screen (icon pack available here)

Tom, for their sketches Home Screen

Poggy, for her doodles Home Screen (icons available here and here)

Katie Mae, for her peaches Home Screen

Veronica, for her pink-themed Home Screen

iA Writer, Working Copy, Timery, Shortcuts, and MindNode – essential apps that helped me create this story

Every app developer who sent me betas during the summer

Every engineer at Apple who always makes reviewing iOS and iPadOS each summer fun

@TiccisEspresso – you know I’m always going to need you

Every Club MacStories member

And finally, every MacStories reader, for allowing me to keep doing what I love. Thank you.

Some might say technical limitations. ↩

Technically, developers could offer multiple widgets per app in iOS 13, but the feature was rarely adopted, and those widgets didn't support inline configuration or multiple sizes. ↩

Some Apple widgets, such as Files and Fitness, only support two of the three available sizes. ↩

The Apple News widget is the only one to come with a custom "tall" size that takes up an entire Home Screen page. This widget size isn't available to third-party developers in iOS 14. ↩

Now that's a product name I haven't typed in a long, long time. ↩

Let's talk about the overuse of 'Edit' buttons in widgets' context menus. There are three separate 'Edit' options listed in the menu: 'Edit Widget', 'Edit Stack' (if it's a stack), and 'Edit Home Screen'. Each one is (thankfully) paired with a unique symbol, but I wonder if Apple could revise the terminology here to avoid repeating the same verb three times. ↩

Another Dashboard throwback! ↩

Obviously, performance is a huge cost to consider in terms of concerns surrounding widget interactivity; I wouldn't be surprised to hear Apple had prototypes of fully interactive widgets working internally and decided against them to prioritize performance and battery life. ↩

What I'd also like to see: integration with Shortcuts to enable/disable specific Home Screen pages programmatically. Just like you can change watch faces with Shortcuts in iOS 14, imagine if you could create automations to turn specific Home Screen pages on and off based on your schedule or other conditions. ↩

The pinching method lets you more precisely adjust the size of the Picture in Picture window since you can make it smaller than the default size. ↩

The UI for the 'Type to Siri' Accessibility feature is unchanged in iOS 14; once enabled, it still takes over the entire screen, bringing up the system keyboard. ↩

See the aside about compact UI regressions below. ↩

The same is true for shortcuts activated via Accessibility, such as those assigned to custom keyboard shortcuts (with Full Keyboard Access) or mouse buttons. Just like widgets and shortcuts activated from Search, these will run more quickly than iOS 13 and use compact UI without opening the Shortcuts app. ↩

It would be so good if Apple allowed iOS and iPadOS apps to offer those kinds of extensions. ↩

As before, iOS learns from your habits here, so if you select a result from an app that was hidden behind 'Show More', the next time you search that app will be pushed toward the top of the Search page. ↩

To toggle between the two color spaces, you need to tap the blue text label. ↩

Technically, these are two separate elements – UIRefreshControl and UIActivityIndicatorView. The new design and animation applies to both. ↩

If you're interested in a technical deep dive on all the changes to SF Symbols this year (including renamed symbols and updated versions for right-to-left localizations), check out this guide by Geoff Hackworth. ↩

"Secondary" is the name used for content areas in Apple's developer parlance. ↩

Oh, how I wish playlist results had a shuffle button in addition to the play one. Consider this footnote my official radar? ↩

Scribble also supports mixed languages, so you can write English and Chinese words in the same sentence and they will all be transcribed. ↩

As you can guess, at the moment of writing this, this feature was not supported in Google Maps. I am utterly shocked. ↩

No, seriously, the point is that you shouldn't know your passwords. Please consider using a password manager instead. ↩

As with Reminders, Apple likes to call "smart folders" automatic categories that can't be customized by users at all. On a Mac, a "smart folder" is a folder that you can create and fully personalize by choosing from different filtering criteria; on iOS and iPadOS, Apple is using the "smart folder" nomenclature to describe categories such as Today and Flagged in Reminders or Share Sheet and Apple Watch in Shortcuts. What's so "smart" about them? ↩

Fortunately, I went through a massive cleanup a couple years ago, otherwise I'd be staring down a collection of 1,000+ shortcuts. ↩

See this section from last year for more details on how this all works. ↩

After all, Apple did launch a new API for Nearby Interaction this year. With this framework, apps can locate nearby iPhones with a U1 chip. ↩

Too bad a certain name is already taken. ↩

To which you might reply: "But Ticci, you can do so from tvOS' Control Center too!", and that would be true. However, since I threw the Siri Remote in the trash two months ago (I have literally done this and sent video evidence to my friends) and started using the third-party Salt remote for Apple TV (which is a very good remote), I realized my new remote doesn't have a way to show Control Center because it's lacking a 'TV' button (which you need to long-press to show Control Center on tvOS). That's the only downside of the Salt remote, and I'm surprised there's no way to remap remote controls on tvOS yet. In any case, the Siri Remote is bad and Apple should feel bad for still selling that thing. Seriously. ↩

Look, I'm really trying to find an audience for these actions. ↩

Oddly enough, it's still not possible to reopen a specific reminder directly in the Reminders app – just its list. ↩

The languages are: English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, German, French, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Arabic. ↩

If you don't like this visual effect, you can turn it off in Settings ⇾ Music ⇾ Motion. You can also choose to only load animated cover arts on Wi-Fi. If your device is in Low Power Mode, animated covers are automatically disabled. ↩

Don't miss the subtle animation of the pill-shaped selection transitioning across different filters. It's fun. ↩

There's no need for this button on iPad since a list is always displayed on the right side of the screen. ↩

I know: if everything is pinned, is anything ever truly pinned? I'm asking the big questions this year. ↩

There are other technical changes for web developers in Safari for iOS 14, which are beyond the scope of this review. I recommend this article if you're interested in those. ↩

According to Apple, they're not using the popular Have I Been Pwnd? database for this feature. ↩

A guide dog is displayed instead. I mean, I love dogs, and guide dogs are especially good boys and girls, but really? ↩

The same goes for the ability to set a default music service on HomePod. ↩

The 'Open URLs' action will open a link in your default browser app despite being labeled as a Safari action. However, if you include multiple links in the action, it will launch Safari instead since I believe there's no API for third-party browsers to accept multiple links in the same request. ↩

"What became of the dreams we had? Oh, what became of forever?" ↩