iOS 18 Home Screen, Control Center and Lock Screen Changes Coming To Your iPhone

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you some of the changes coming to your iPhone's home screen with iOS 18.

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So there a lot of new features coming to the iPhone's Home Screen and also Control Center and even the Lock Screen. I think most users are going to be pretty happy with these. 

So here's the Home Screen and I've got some widgets and some icons for apps. I've got another one here. Now in the past if you were to move one of these they would always just fall in step as a list starting with the top left and continuing to the right and down with each row. You couldn't just place one anywhere you wanted. But now you can! If I tap and hold and then I drag, I can drag and you would expect this to snap here, right? Well guess what. You can now put it anywhere you want and it will stay there. So you can not only put some here but by moving all of these into different positions you can even leave blank spaces at the top. So you can have your app icons form any kind of shape you want and maybe show the wallpaper behind it at the top or along the left or right side, not just at the bottom. 

You can do more than that too. You can actually turn app icons into widgets. So watch what happens if I tap and hold on the Weather icon here. I've got these selections here. The first one indicates just keeping it as an icon. I can also go with one of three different widget styles because it recognizes that the weather app has these types of widgets. So I can select this one here and now it turns that app icon into that widget and I can tap and hold and go back to just regular widgets. What appears depends on what the app has. So, for instance, with FreeForm here I don't get any widgets. When you have a screen that already has widgets notice that when you tap and hold and search there below you have this little handle now and you could drag the handle to make this bigger widget here, smaller widget, or compress back into the original size. So you have a lot more control without having it dig into things and recreate widgets from scratch.

But a really big new deal is the customization of the entire Home Screen itself. So if I tap and hold anyone of these, I'll just tap and hold Search there, you could see I've got the regular wiggle mode here. But I also have this Edit button and I can now go to Customize and I get this control here at the bottom. So Automatic, Dark & Light refer to Dark & Light modes. So I can go and say I want the Home Screen to be dark mode even if the mode for the rest of my iPhone is automatic. I can do the same thing for Light or just have it in sync with the regular Dark and Light mode. I can also go to Tint. If I do that all of the icons loose their color and instead pick up a color that I want. So I can pick any color from here. So if I happen to like this color or this color or this color I can pick it and I can even have the intensity of the color. Make it really bright there or almost void of color and I can make the screen look like I want. I've even got this little eyedropper tool here. When I have that On I can now select a spot on my wallpaper, so I'll move this around and select like this color here, and it sets it to that. So I can easily make it kind of match the wallpaper. 

I also have the ability to darken the wallpaper itself with this button here. Let's turn this Off to go back to normal. You probably notice the Small and Large there. If I switch to Large I get larger icons but without the names under them. So if you don't need those names you might as well have the icons be a little larger. 

It almost seems like Apple is going through a checklist of requests that Users have had. Here's another one. You can now take any app and you can set it to Require Passcode. So it can require a passcode or Touch ID or Face ID, depending upon what your iPhone has. So, of course, you need that to unlock your phone in the first place. But this adds another layer to it so if you hand your unlocked iPhone to a friend they can't suddenly switch an app to check something out. 

Now the Control Center, which is here on the Home Screen but also everywhere else in your iPhone. You get it when you drag down from the top right like that. But it looks different now. You've got these controls and you have, along the side here, the indication of different pages. So I've got My Favorites, I've got the Music page here, and I can set radio control device here. Now I can use this to scroll or I can just swipe like you would expect. Now when I want to customize I can do that by tapping and holding and you could see here the similar little lower right corner things and I can enlarge the size or decrease the size of various items. So, for instance, here is Rotation and I can enlarge it so I actually get an indicator there at the bottom. For Flashlight I can enlarge this to show On or Off, that kind of thing. 

I can also add Control here. When I do I get this big list of controls. This is just what comes by default with a newly reset iPhone. So there is a lot of different things that you can add. You can Add so much you can actually have multiple pages on Control Center. Not just stuck with that first one that's Favorites. Better yet more of these will get added as you add more apps. The app developer's will have the ability to actually specify what controls can be added. So Control Center can really be this one place where you can go for all On/Off switches and controls of levels and different things without having to go into an app to change that setting. 

There's one more place where you can control things that you couldn't before. That's on the Lock Screen. Let me get to the Lock Screen, like this, and now I'm going to tap and hold and just like before it can show me my Lock Screens and I can swipe between them to change them for whatever mood I'm in or whatever I want to do. I've got Customize at the bottom. When I go to Customize a lock screen notice that the buttons at the bottom left and bottom right now have little Minus buttons there. So if you find you sometimes accidentally trigger the flashlight and you want to get that Off of the Lock Screen you can actually remove it. Better still once you remove one if these you can tap and then add another control that you want. So there are a bunch of different options here that you can add, of course including adding Shortcuts, which means you can basically have this little spot on the Lock Screen do almost anything you want.

A lot of people have had these features on their wish list for years and finally in iOS18 you'll be able to do all of these different things. iOS18 will be Beta tested throughout the summer so things could still change. It should be released for everybody this Fall. Thanks for watching.