The introduction of widgets in iOS 14 enables iPhone and, to a lesser extent, iPad users to customise their home screens, tailoring them to fit their needs. Widgets offer users – for whom the Home Screen has been a tightly controlled visual environment – the ability to design their Home Screen, making that space their own.
This is a huge paradigm shift. 1
The fact that David ‘Underscore’ Smith’s Widgetsmith shot to the top spot on unpaid apps tells you everything you need to know: Humans like to make a space their own (whether that’s a physical space, or a digital one). Here’s Smith:
You choose the fonts, colours and appearance. Take control of your home screen.
Whether this hunger for customization will make it to the entirety of Apple’s Home Screen remains to be seen. It’s possible to add bespoke icon sets to you screen, but it involves the use of Shortcuts as a workaround (this puts it beyond the capabilities of the majority of everyday users).
Regardless, if you’re working on icon sets, illustrations – or anything that will fit onto a Home Screen – it’s worth exploring how you might nuance your marketing to explore the exploding interest in mass customization for iOS.
There’s a lot of interest in this area right now and thoughtful designers have an opportunity to capitalise on that interest.
A huge paradigm shift for anyone in Apple’s iOS ecosystem who hasn’t explored jail breaking their phone, which, let’s be honest, is a sizeable audience.
Android users are another audience to whom customization isn’t new.
So why all the fuss? Simple: Apple’s scale. There are 1.5 billion iOS devices in circulation. That’s a massive market, one that’s well worth tapping into.
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