iPhone UX on home screens is broken, welcome to 1999
The iPhone home screen and App menus have been a problem for me for a long time now. As I designer, the icons never had consistency, the notification bubbles with it&#x27;s high numbers were bothering me, it was busy and it didn&#x27;t really feel great to use it.<p>As IOS14 allows to make shortcuts to these app icons with custom icons, which is great!<p>With that option now available, I&#x27;ve been designing a new UX&#x2F;UI with the goal of lowering screen time and information fatigue, remove clutter and distractions,... In one word, I want to keep my screen and my mind calm.<p>So i removed everything I could and minimised the information, icons, colors and even removed the text under the icons.<p>To be honest, the last week of using it, my Screen time lowered by 38% and that is including the time I tested the designed icons. There are also no notification bubbles anywhere now. I look at missing calls or messages through notifications but turned off most of others. NExt step is to try and turn those as well and just look at the phone couple of times a day.<p>Widgets are also great and more will come, but do we really need them? I only use one for the date + time (Color Widgets).<p>I also limited myself to only using one screen and moving all app icons to the library. It&#x27;s great and the motivation has been lowered to play mindlessly with these as now I need to search them.<p>It really feels like one of those phones from 20 years ago and I love it. It&#x27;s like a phone detox I never knew I needed.<p>One bug I noticed thought is that I wanted to have the icons with white background as well, but seems like IOS14 creates some weird shadow. Headspace icon for example has the same problem on a white wallpaper.<p>Anyone noticed that and knows a fix?<p>I think that would make it even better as it&#x27;d have a lot less elements on it.