Best Ipad Home Screen Layout

iPadOS 15 ruined my iPad's home screen

Gadgets

iPadOS 15 offers a lot of promise and potential. Even if some features like SharePlay are missing in the first version, others like Quick Note and a much simpler approach to multitasking already improve the daily use of Apple's tablets.

But Apple actually managed to botch the homescreen.

As my colleague Chaim mentioned in his review of iPadOS 15, the home screen layout no longer matches the vertical and horizontal alignment. I've been using the 12.9-inch iPad Pro since 2018 and from iPadOS 14 onwards, the homescreen grid was always 6 x 5, no matter how the iPad was held. This allowed me to set up dedicated lines for things like photo editing (I edit a lot of my review photos on iPad), audio apps, video apps, etc.

*See how icon positioning stayed the same on iPadOS 14? That was great.*

But with iPadOS 15, Apple threw a wrench into all of that. When the iPad is in landscape mode, I still get the 6 x 5 layout. But now, as soon as I switch to portrait / portrait, the grid inexplicably changes to 5×6, with the icons flowing into the line below. So much for my attempts at organization and order.

It's a frustrating change, and it results in a very obvious amount of wasted space on the sides of the screen. The vertical spacing of icons becomes almost weird on this large, pixelated display when you add some widgets, as you'll see later.

The best explanation I've seen for this icon density reduction is that it was necessary to support more flexible widget placement while still making everything look a bit consistent and aesthetically pleasing. It also has to do with how Apple maps widgets on the homescreen. In his review of iOS and iPadOS 15 at MacStories , Federico Viticci suspected that Apple decided to "return to a non-dense grid that allows both widgets and icons at the same time". But I'm just not on board. With iPads in particular, we've come to a point where at least the opportunity Because a more densely packed network would release new promises and creativity. Apple doesn't even allow empty gaps between icons or widgets. Instead, strangely enough, the company remains committed to its restrictive placement from the top left.

I'm sure there are a lot of fantastic widgets out there right now, and the new XL size – exclusive to the iPad – opens up more options for calendar widgets and other productivity tools. But personally, I just don't use them often, and I was perfectly fine with the old style of pegging widgets to the left of the main homescreen where they could be viewed when needed and then easily removed.

*iPadOS 14 only supported widgets in the "Today view".*

But then it goes on to iPadOS 15. And right at the beginning comes my first point of criticism. For some reason, Apple thinks it's appropriate to put multiple widgets on your iPad's homescreen right after the update, which messes up the order you were in before. It looks really bad. Here's mine on the first boot after the iPadOS 15 upgrade, which dropped us from five columns to four in portrait mode … on a 12.9-inch screen … all for the purpose of presenting widgets:

*Homescreen chaos. What a wonderful introduction to a new software update.*

Yikes What a clumsy way of introducing a new feature to customers. Why not just demonstrate those more flexible widgets to put in a post update video instead of breaking the actual home screens? I would get annoyed if a macOS update dumped a ton of random junk on my desktop, and I'm similarly annoyed with what Apple did here.

I can't be the only iPad user who installs iPadOS 15 and frowns when they see their home screen widgets break up a carefully organized grid of app icons.

– Rob Pegoraro (@robpegoraro) September 20, 2021

It also illustrates the significant tradeoff associated with widgets: once you add even one, you're in portrait mode down to just four columns for that home screen regardless of size. This is brutal on a display as large as the 12.9-inch iPad Pro. And again it's because of Apple's fixation on the grid. This is a problem that the company created itself. At least you can cram a ton of apps into the dock I guess?

With a little redesign, I was able to go back to where things were before – but only in the landscape orientation. As I mentioned earlier, the portrait orientation is now limited to a 5×6 grid (even if there are no widgets) and there is no setting to change this back to the old layout. All this wasted space. And what for? This is noticeable even with smaller iPads; In his review of the new iPad Mini, Marques Brownlee couldn't help but notice the padding on both sides of the home screen.

*The new iPad Mini has also wasted home screen potential.*

It's fair to point out that in iPadOS 14, if it was oriented vertically, the top and bottom of the icon grid wasted screen space. But I think it's much better for familiarity and muscle memory to keep the same app positioning and layout in both scenarios, so I found that to be acceptable. This? Not as much.

What frustrates me most about the new homescreen is that it is impossible to create lines for specific purposes as an icon always moves to the next line when you hold the iPad in portrait orientation. Sure, folders exist, but that's an added tip.

Some have suggested that iPadOS 15 now lets you customize completely separate home screen layouts in portrait and landscape modes, and it remembers what goes where when you switch between them. So you can create a different look for each orientation. That's neat! But the initial clutter of changing orientation is staggering, and separate layouts don't fix the problem of icons jumping around. Currently, you cannot delete an icon or widget from one layout and keep it in the other.

*With iPadOS 15, the home screen is 6 x 5 in landscape format and 5 x 6 in portrait format. (The total number of icons varies depending on the type of iPad and screen size.)*

With the new update, Apple has also given up the practical "Today" landscape view, in which the date and time were displayed with widgets underneath – and all of this while your apps are easily accessible. You now have the choice of placing widgets right on the home screen or, if you'd prefer to turn them off, you can swipe right for that fuzzy slide-over version that is finebut less elegant:

*The beautiful homescreen today view is gone, but you can still slide in widgets from the left if you want.*

Some will see this as a very minor inconvenience and will move on to upgrading to iPadOS 15 for all other benefits. Now that the app library is here, you can even access the complete opposite Direction and load your homescreens anywhere with widgets and just a few app icons. If that's you, don't let me stop you. Overall, it's a very good release.

But I really hope that in a future software update, Apple will add a setting to restore the old layout that kept everything more consistent. It would be even better if the company made the grid more customizable overall. If we give people a choice between new and old Safari designs, why not give them a choice between more things on the screen or a less dense grid that is better optimized for widgets? After all, there is already a section "Start screen and dock" in the settings. Customizing the grid to your liking is something Android phones and tablets are already getting right. It's not a big question.

To me, widgets aren't worth the fact that the home screen looks different depending on how I'm holding my iPad. And I'm not alone with other iPad owners MacRumors, Reddit and elsewhere to air about these changes. Some of them have downgraded to iPadOS 14.8 until there is a solution. This is the second time I've done this (I needed these screenshots), although I'll be missing Quick Note, the vastly improved multitasking, and other refinements of iPadOS 15.

I don't know how long I'll stay on the older software. As soon as iPadOS 15 gets a little more polished or adds SharePlay back in, I could update. But a familiar homescreen that works the way I expect it to counts a lot.

2021-09-23