What you need to know
- Apple is reportedly bringing a list view for the Home screen in iOS 14
- The list will exist as a separate page showing all of your apps
- The list can be filtered by different criteria, such as unread notifications
Apple is reportedly working on a new page for the iOS Home screen, one that will hopefully help you to better locate all of the apps that you have installed on your iPhone. According to leaked iOS 14 code obtained by 9to5Mac, this new view will show a list of all currently installed applications, including their icons, making things easier to find.
In addition to a list, 9to5Mac reports that this list view will include the ability to filter by different criteria, as well as Siri suggestions:
Furthermore, the list view will include several different sorting options and other details. For instance, you'll be able to filter applications such that you see all apps that currently have unread notifications. There will also be support for filtering apps by recently used, giving you better awareness of the apps you use most and least often.Finally, this new list view will include smart suggestions powered by Siri to suggest which applications you might be searching for based on time of day and location. For instance, the list view might recommend that you open the Music app when you arrive at the gym.
As noted by 9to5Mac, watchOS already features a list view for watch apps, making scrolling through and finding them more manageable. What is being described in this report sounds like an expanded, much more powerful version of that.
From the sound of things, this will be an additional page of the default iOS Home screen setup, much like the Today widget view is, rather than an update of the primary Home screen itself. It sounds like this list view could be very useful for people who install a lot of apps on their iPhones, particularly if they tend to let app organization slip.
Personally, as someone who has their Home screens set up the way he likes them, I'd much rather have alternative view options for the Home screen, rather than additional pages. For instance, I'd love an option to put widgets on the first page, with the Dock still available with my absolute, must-have apps. App-filled Home screens would still exist; the widget view would just be a selectable default.
Keep in mind with all of this that it's still a little early, and iOS 14 remains in the development phase. Features like this list view could change ahead of Apple's official reveal or could be removed entirely. As we've seen with the iOS 13 release cycle, Apple could also push these features to future updates coming a little later down the line.
