If you had an iPhone 6 Plus back in the day, one of the best things about it was the fact you could rotate it into landscape and have the Home Screen do the same. It never worked on the smaller phones, and it all stopped when the iPhone X arrived.
But wouldn't it be cool if it came back, maybe as part of the iOS 17 update?
Sure it would. And this concept shows why that is.
Go landscape or go home
History might not remember the iPhone 6 Plus as the best iPhone Apple ever made, but it's what gave us the landscape Home screen as well as proper landscape views in apps. Those views brought us special widescreen views inside supported apps and while they remain, the rotated Home Screen doesn't.
But BasicAppleGuy thinks it should come back. And that's hard to argue with.
And now, of course, we have widgets.
It's been suggested that Apple is concerned about what the notch and Dynamic Island could mean for the rotated Home Screen, but this concept shows that's not a problem. And with the iPhone 15 expected to get a Dynamic Island all of its own, maybe Apple's already getting its ducks in a row.
"Despite the addition of the notch and Dynamic Island, the concept shows that a landscape iPhone Home Screen is still possible, with widgets and app icons coexisting on the same screen as they do in portrait orientation," the blog post outlining the concept explains. "And although I had to shrink the size of the icons a bit, they remain comfortably large enough to select without issue."
The Dynamic Island continues to work just fine in landscape as well.
"The second image shows a modified interface for Live Activities inside the Dynamic Island," the post continues. "The camera is still cleverly obscured in this example, but the platter and controls have been lowered, allowing for easier interaction while in landscape orientation."
Whether or not we'll get a landscape Home Screen with iOS 17, we don't know. And even if we do, it's possible it will be limited to only iPhones with the Dynamic Island — and if that's the case, we might not hear about it until the iPhone 15 is announced in September.
