The subliminal side of iOS 16
After even more thought, speculation, and analysis of the iPhone software design, I began to realize my home screen desperately needed an update. We have been led astray until now. The new IOS 16 and its increasingly customizable (yet still very limited) options for home screen organization coincided perfectly with this foreshadowesque ponderance and its subsequential revelation. I had the safari app next to my photos next to Shazam next to Craigslist. What a mess! I thought. No wonder my life is in shambles. Organize your home screen in alignment with your highest self and everything else in your life will follow suit. The previous all-apps-are-equal default interface perpetuates the illusion that the iPhone created from the start. As to how this has been so overlooked, so low on Apple’s priority list I am baffled. Or was it intentional? Don’t listen to me. Or do. With such massive aspects of our lives condensed into app form, the least I could do was try to see them for what they truly are, and edit accordingly.
The new iOS 16 has upgraded these so called ‘widgets’ (wtf) that make me hate the iPhone less. They make so much sense. For the USBank app to be right there next to my cooking game is counterintuitive, confusing, and certainly not user friendly from a humanist standpoint. Now the more basic/primitive/quotidian condensations like Notes, Weather, And Maps have widgetification options that allow us to make them bigger than regular apps, and hence, deservingly so, better adjusted with their intrinsic value as a digitized function.
I have widgeted the clock app, maps, weather, and calendar. I would love to see a Safari widget considering its gargantuan scale of use amongst other apps. App equity manifested through physical UX design is what I’m pushing here. I feel like this would make people less insane. It certainly has done me some good… I know I am not alone. My fellow Americans have never been more insane and I credit technological developments. That is the defining feature of this era after all. A lot of our population would be better off without it, or more mentally grounded at least. But fear not. Things are so wild because we are at an apex point in our evolution as a species.
A note on the always warmly welcomed emoticon additions that accompany these software updates: The degree to which more human emotions are made emoticon is in linear relationship to the fusing of our lives with Apple products. Maybe exponential. And hey, I don’t mind. The organic expressed through the inorganic. Life made dead. It is then revived again when we use emojis as mortal beings, then killed again when we, say, send them off in a Tweet. Is it just me, or does each iOS update feel like the marking of the end of an era, and the beginning of a new one? This is what we have been destined towards all along. No I’m not sure about my stance on free will. I’ll save that for another time.