Apple pushed the iOS 14 public beta out last Thursday and I did the thing I always tell myself I'm not going to do, which is put it on my actual daily phone instead of some spare device I don't care about. I don't have a spare device. I have one iPhone and a strong belief that this time will be different. It was not different. By Saturday night my home screen looked like somebody dumped a junk drawer onto a piece of glass, and I mostly love it.
The headline feature, the one every outlet is going to write the same 800 words about this month, is widgets. You can finally drop a resizable widget right onto your home screen instead of burying it in that swipe-left panel nobody looked at since iOS 8. I've got a weather widget, a calendar widget showing the next three things I'm supposed to do, and one of those "Smart Stack" ones that's apparently going to guess what I want based on time of day. Right now at almost midnight it's showing me Overcast, which, fine, accurate, I probably am about to queue up a podcast instead of sleeping.
App Library is the other big one and honestly might matter more to me long-term than widgets do. It auto-sorts everything into folders like Social, Productivity, Utilities, and you can just... not have five home screens anymore. I deleted three of mine within an hour of setting this up. I've been carrying around a screen of apps I installed in 2017 and never once opened again (looking at you, some sleep tracker I paid $2.99 for) and App Library quietly swept all of it into one "Other" folder where it can't hurt me.
The thing nobody's home screen gets a widget for is how many apps just don't work yet. My bank's app — I won't name them, though if you follow me on Twitter you can probably guess in one try — throws an error the second it detects it's not running on a "supported" iOS version and won't even let me log in. Not broken, just refusing on principle. Had to open Safari and log into the actual website like it's 2009. A couple of my other apps crash on launch, one photo editor I use for the blog header images just closes itself, no error, nothing, like it's embarrassed.
Also: you can now set a default browser and default mail app that isn't Safari or Mail. I switched to Chrome as default about four minutes after updating, mostly out of muscle memory rather than any strong feeling about Safari, which is honestly fine now. Small thing, but it's the kind of small thing people have been asking Apple for since roughly forever, so it's nice to see it actually show up instead of getting talked about at a keynote and then quietly dying.
Battery life is worse. I'm not going to pretend it isn't. Betas always do this, the first one especially, and I knew that going in. I'm at something like 20% by 6pm on a day where I was mostly sitting on my couch not doing much of anything, which, pandemic, so that's most days lately. Worth it for now. Ask me again in three weeks when I'm the guy carrying a battery pack to get groceries.
There's a compact call UI too: incoming calls show up as a little banner at the top instead of taking over your whole screen, which sounds minor until the first time it happens and you realize how much you hated the old full-screen thing without ever quite articulating it. Same idea with Siri now, it's a small bubble in the corner instead of hijacking everything you're looking at. Somebody at Apple clearly got tired of the app you were using getting yanked away every time you asked what the weather was.
Anyway. If you're the type who installs betas, this one's more painless than most first betas I've run, which is not nothing given how many years I've been doing this on this exact blog around this exact time every summer. If you're not that type, wait for September like a reasonable person and just enjoy the widgets when they show up for real.