Many years ago, Apple offered a landscape Home Screen interface for iOS exclusively on the “Plus” model phones. With the advent of the iPhone X and subsequent phones, however, Apple ditched this option altogether, meaning you can only view the iPhone Home Screen in portrait orientation.
This week, Basic Apple Guy published a new concept remaining what a landscape Home Screen might look like for the iPhone 14 Pro Max…
Should Apple reconsider adding a landscape Home Screen design?
The concept visualizes how Apple could adapt the current iOS 16 design to support landscape orientation. This includes support for widgets, the Dynamic Island, and more. Widgets, for example, automatically adapt to the landscape interface, similar to what Apple has already done for the iPad.
While a landscape version of the iPhone’s Home Screen would likely be a niche feature, there are still a number of potential use cases. In particular, the landscape design could be useful for people who dock their iPhones at their desks with an upright, floating design. The landscape interface could also be useful for car mounts as well.
Basic Apple Guy also shows off how the landscape Home Screen design could be useful for videos and multitasking features:
Video overlays and multi-tasking become ideal use cases for a landscape Home Screen. Videos now have greater affordance to expand while maintaining access and interactivity with the Home Screen.
Additionally, since the height of the iPhone is more than double its width, a landscape orientation provides the optimal environment to provide multi-tasking apps side-by-side. Like on the iPad, iPhone apps can be delegated to either the left or right of the display, pushed off to the side, or dismissed altogether. This gives the iPhone more options for lightweight multi-tasking than ever before.
Whether or not Apple has any intentions of adding a landscape Home Screen option to the current-model iPhones remains to be seen. But again, as we’ve seen on iPad, widgets shouldn’t prove to be a problem. You could also argue that the addition of the “Plus” model non-Pro iPhone is even more reason Apple should revisit the idea of a landscape Home Screen.
You can check out the full concept and all of Basic Apple Guy’s work on his website. Here’s his tip jar if you appreciate his awesome work and want to help support it.
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