There’s no shortage of various renderings and mockups attempting to envision goodies that Apple’s next major iOS software update might deliver. But this one that I just stumbled upon on YouTube by French creator “the Hacker 34” ticks many boxes without the kind of exaggeration or sci-fi stuff that other artists envision that you know will never see the light of day.
It starts by addressing the biggest pain point of iOS 14: widget interactivity.
As you know, iOS and iPadOS 14 brought completely redesigned widgets that can now live on your Home screen alongside apps. This is much more useful than prior iOS versions which used to relegate widgets to the Today view confined to the Notification Center and the Lock Screen. However, these widgets do not offer interactive elements and that’s a problem.
For instance, both the Chrome widget and the Gmail widget offer buttons to access various search and mail features. But tap any button and you’ll soon realize these are shortcuts that take you to the corresponding place within the app. You cannot mark an email as read or archive it from within the widget. The same goes for Apple’s stock widgets: no way to flag a reminder as done or a calendar event as finished from within the widget.
I have no doubt in my mind that this is something we’ll be seeing in iOS 15, and this concept does a great job imagining how that might work. I also think the video does a great job with the Split View multitasking feature on the iPhone, especially pulling down on a notification banner to instantly create a split-screen multitasking environment.
Hat tip goes to Edaval Mulli