IPadOS 15 Mini-Review: It’s All About the Home Screen

Apple last year released a meaty iOS update for iPhones, but some of the biggest changes haven’t been made to the iPad. This year the iPhone update is modest, does that mean the iPad update is the most important this time around?

Well, it depends on your point of view. iPadOS 15 brings almost everything iOS 15 brought to iPhones, but it also brings these major omissions from last year’s iOS 14 to the tablet. As a result, iPadOS 15 looks like a big update if you haven’t used an iPhone lately, but have used iOS’s new Home screen and app library features before. 14, he ends up feeling like it’s late for the party.

We posted a lengthy iPhone-focused iOS 15 review earlier this week. Think of this as a short addition to this iPad-focused review. Refer to the previous review for details on new features like Focus that are not specific to iPad or for a list of iPadOS supported by iPadOS 15.

Home screen

Let’s start with the Home screen, which has seen the biggest transformation this year, even though almost everything different was already available on iPhones when iOS 14 launched in late 2020.

Arguably the most significant introduction of iPadOS 15 is the app library view, which iPhones got last year. Swiping all the way to the right on the Home screen will bring you here, where you will find a search box and several folders containing all the apps you have installed on your iPad. Unfortunately, like in iOS 14, you cannot define these folders yourself; the software generates them automatically.

The real benefit here is that the Home screen is no longer the only place you can store apps, meaning you can remove apps from the Home screen while still keeping them accessible at the same time. via Spotlight search and visiting the app library screen.

So if you have an app that you use every now and then but not daily, like one for checking your investment portfolio, maybe, or an ordering app for a specific restaurant, you can keep that app installed and l ‘use whenever you want. but keep your home screen clean and focused.

When you try to delete an app on the Home screen, you will be asked if you want to completely delete the app or just relegate it to the app library.

Additionally, you can now hide or show home screen pages, which works well with Focus mode (see the iOS 15 review for more on this; it works the same on the iPad) to give you more home screen personalization than you’ve ever had before.

The iPad also gets something that the iPhone didn’t: access to the app library from the dock, which is much more convenient than swiping to the last page of the screen. Home.

Widgets

The other major addition to the home screen is support for free-form widgets. The situation with widgets has been a bit strange; Home screen widgets debuted on iPadOS a few years ago, but this more robust update first hit the iPhone about a year ago and is only now heading towards iPad with iPadOS 15.

While you could previously place widgets in a predefined location on the very first page of the Home screen, you can now place them anywhere on the Home screen and in several different sizes, including variations for some widgets that were not available on the iPhone.

You can either place the widgets side by side on the Home screen next to the app icons, or place them in a stack that takes up as much space as a single widget; you can slide your finger over it to switch between widgets there. This is all exactly as we saw on the iPhone when we looked at iOS 14.

Unfortunately, organizing icons and widgets on the Home screen is still a real headache. The approach of placing icons and widgets in “swing mode” and the cascading list format of the Home screen should go; their limitations only became more apparent as more customization and features were added.

Still, while you may suffer from the frustration of breaking your layout multiple times while trying to get everything where you want it, the combination of widgets and the app library completely changes the way the screen displays. home works on the iPad, if desired. he has. (If you don’t, you can just skip it all and use the iPad Home screen like you always have.)

Multitasking

When Apple announced iPadOS 15, it put multitasking at the forefront. What’s new here mostly includes more intuitive ways to access features that were there before, but they’re all welcome.

The new multitasking button

For example, app windows that are in full screen or split view mode now have a three-dot ellipsis button at the top. Tap or click which produces a small panel that lets you select either full screen, split view, or hovering.

Typing in full screen does exactly what you expect; this makes the app full screen. By tapping on the split view, the app occupies half of the screen and then drops you to the home screen where you can select another app to occupy the other half.

Previously, the path to split view was difficult. You would have an app in full screen, then you would swipe up from the bottom of the screen to bring up the dock, then you would long press an app in the dock and drag it to the side of the screen until you reach it. that he clicked in split view. Needless to say, this method was not the best. The new setup is better, and it has the advantage of being intuitive, which the old way was not. You’d probably never understand the old-fashioned way if we didn’t show it to you.

Finally, by tapping or clicking the scroll button, the app is transferred to a slide, which puts it in the form of an iPhone app and hovers over it on your apps in full screen or split view. You can always switch between apps or move them off the screen and turn them back on at will.