I spent most of Sunday night doing something genuinely pointless: rebuilding the home screen of an iPhone I don't even use as my main phone. That's the iOS 14 public beta for you. Apple put it out on July 9th and I've been putting off installing it on my actual daily driver because betas eat battery and occasionally brick something you need, so I dug my old iPhone SE out of a drawer, wiped it, and used that as a sandbox instead. Turns out that was the right call, because I've already had two apps crash on launch and one widget that just shows a gray box no matter what I do.
The widgets are the whole reason anyone's talking about this beta. You can finally drop a resizable block on your home screen instead of just a grid of icons, small, medium, or large, whichever the app developer bothered to support. I've got the weather one up top (small, just temperature and a cloud icon, not fancy), a medium calendar widget under it, and then a big Reminders widget because I am, apparently, the kind of person who needs to see his to-do list every time he unlocks his phone now. It looks nice. I'll say that much. It looks like the kind of home screen people post screenshots of.
But here's my actual complaint: most of these widgets are just glorified live wallpapers right now. You tap one and it just opens the app. It doesn't do anything from the widget itself. I kept trying to check off a reminder directly from the widget like some kind of idiot before I remembered that's not how any of this works yet. Maybe that changes by the time this ships properly in September, maybe it doesn't. Given how Apple usually handles this stuff, I wouldn't hold my breath for real interactivity in year one.
Also, and this is a smaller gripe, not every app I actually use has jumped on WidgetKit yet. My podcast app doesn't have one. My banking app obviously doesn't (fine, I get it). So the effect right now is this weird patchwork home screen where three things look genuinely 2020 and the rest of the icons look like they wandered in from 2013. It's an odd in-between phase and I think that's just what beta season always looks like, I just haven't sat with it in a while.
Unrelated tangent, but not really unrelated if you were paying attention two weeks ago: I finally turned on a real authenticator app for my Twitter login instead of leaving it on SMS two-factor. I'd been meaning to do this for a year and only actually did it after the account takeover mess on July 15th, when a bunch of verified accounts — Gates, Musk, Apple's own account, a pile of others — got hijacked through what Twitter says was a phone-based social engineering attack on their own support staff. Not even a password thing. Somebody just talked their way into internal tools. Which, if you think about it for more than five seconds, is a lot scarier than a leaked password, because no amount of a strong passphrase on my end would've stopped that. SMS-based 2FA never felt like real security to me anyway, more like security theater with extra steps, and this was a good excuse to finally fix it on the accounts that matter.
One more thing worth flagging before I close the laptop: the big antitrust hearing with Bezos, Cook, Pichai, and Zuckerberg is supposed to happen this Wednesday in front of the House Judiciary Committee. Four CEOs, one hearing, presumably several hours of members of Congress asking questions that reveal they don't fully understand how ad auctions work. I'm not going to pretend I know how it'll go. I'll probably have it on in the background while I do something else, the way I do with most congressional hearings, half-listening for the one clip that ends up on every news site the next morning.
Anyway. Back to the widgets. I still haven't found a good use for the large size. It just feels like too much real estate for information I don't need at a glance, and I keep swapping it out for something smaller and then regretting it an hour later. If anyone's found a large widget that's actually earned its spot on a home screen, I'd like to hear about it, because right now mine's just cycling between three options and none of them have stuck.