iOS 16 review: Customization unlocked

In recent years, Apple’s annual iOS updates have focused on one feature for an overhaul, while minor tweaks have been made to everything else. Last year Focus was the, well, focus. The year before, it was the home screen.

This time it’s the lock screen. You can now change fonts, add widgets, customize the information displayed, and choose from a wider variety of wallpapers. Apple has also integrated the lock screen more deeply with the Focus modes fleshed out in iOS 15. And it’s laid the foundation for more than just notifications that third-party apps can show you before you unlock your phone.

Given the increasingly iterative nature of iOS releases today — with many key features arriving months after the original ship date of a new, fully-numbered version — we’re moving towards leaner first iOS reviews, with updates to appear in additional articles. time. So today we are going to look at the main new feature of iOS 16, but we will also discuss some other important features and changes.

The lock screen

While iOS 16 touches on most aspects of iPhone usage in several minor ways, it’s very much “the lock screen update”. It makes sense: Apple makes a lot of noise about shipping features that integrate hardware and software, and the iPhone 14 Pro’s new always-on display puts this emphasis on the lock screen.

But there’s plenty here for users of other iPhone models who don’t have that always-on feature. Following on from last year’s focus on Focus modes and last year’s home screen customization, this is the most significant step Apple has taken in customizing with the iPhone in, well, pretty much ever.

I know what you’re going to say: aren’t these all features that have been part of Android for ages now?

Yes, you’re right – mostly. In typical Apple fashion, there are some flourishes here that Android doesn’t touch, but in terms of functionality, this is mostly yesterday’s news for Android diehards. But what was already a win for Android users is largely a win for iOS users as well.

It’s easy to see the impact of the Apple Watch on this update: the new widgets behave like complications and the new lock screen works like a watch face. That sentence there tells you just about everything you need to know about the new lock screen. Imagine the Apple Watch and all the customizations, features, and limitations the watch faces offer. Now make all that phone size. There you go, that’s the new iOS lock screen.

To get started with these tweaks, just long-press on the lock screen with your finger. This will take you to an interface with horizontally scrolling cards, each representing one of your custom screens.

At the bottom there are three main buttons. You can tap “Focus” to change the focus mode that will be enabled when this lock screen is active. You can tap “customize” to change your widgets, fonts, wallpapers and more. And there is a “+” button to add a new custom lock screen to the row of cards.

It starts with wallpapers

When you press the + button, a panel with different background options will appear. These options fall into a few buckets. There are gradient backgrounds, where you choose a general color theme and define some features of a simple gradient. (It actually looks nicer than it sounds.)

There are collections that are a bit like Apple’s earlier approach to iPhone wallpapers: pre-made patterns in a few different color options.

You can also create a background of emojis on a grid or in a pattern across the screen, and you can even choose which emojis to display. You can choose up to six emojis to include in the background, using Apple’s standard emoji-picking interface.

My personal favorite bucket for wallpapers is the “Weather & Astronomy” category. These offer little customization, but they’re pretty hip. The obvious one here is changing the wallpaper visuals to match the live weather conditions in your area – and the visuals look like the ones the Weather app already paints.

There are also dynamic backgrounds for the Earth, Moon, and Solar System. The solar system shows the actual current relative locations of the planets as they orbit the sun, while the Earth system shows your location on a globe with a green dot, amid live updating cloud cover reflecting conditions around the world.

The moon and earth animate to different angles as you move from the always-on screen to an active lock screen, then swipe to the home screen. It’s a nice effect, and the moon wallpaper especially looks great on OLED iPhone screens.

But as neat as those are, I imagine most people will choose to use the wallpapers that photos from your library use in the Photos app. Tapping on “Photos” allows you to choose between individual photos on your phone.

Using machine learning, the iPhone analyzes all the photos in your library so you can get “featured” suggestions, which I found to be mostly for the money. There are even subcategories for these featured suggestions, including people, pets, nature, and cities. And of course, you can browse your entire photo library and choose any image you want.

There’s also “Photo Shuffle,” which is “a dynamic series of photos that shuffle together as you use your iPhone throughout the day,” according to the tooltip. You can set the shuffle frequency to change on tap, lock, hourly, or daily. Again, it presents you featured photos and lets you choose which categories to include, but you can still manually select any photo from your library.

This might as well be a place to note that for photo backgrounds, Apple uses some nifty AI tricks to crop out important objects in the image, such as faces or buildings, and allows them to overlap pieces of the time indicator. to create a beautiful effect. It’s shocking how well this actually works. Unfortunately it doesn’t work if you add widgets under the time. Other than that limitation, you can turn this on and off at will.

After choosing your wallpaper, you will be taken to the full lock screen customization view.