upgrade season / phone design
I often use the timing of a big upgrade (or update?) to change up how I use a device. I mean either hardware or software. I’ll change colors, backgrounds, font and font sizes, how stuff is arranged - whatever it’ll let me change.
I think it’s a great time to clean it up and try new rules and behaviors with it. Definitely easier to stick with changes if the device feels (or is) new, your muscle memory is not correct and you cannot autopilot it.
I chose the upgrade to iOS 18 to turn my phone around once again. I had felt annoyed about my phone usage and routines, so I craved change.
It’s quite dumbed down anyway and grayscale can be activated by pressing the button three times, but I craved more, and some new features allowed me more design freedom. I had a pretty cute light pink design and light mode, but after seeing this for so long now, I craved a simple boring black design like I used to have years ago.
So I changed the entire design, wallpaper, arrangement of icons and widgets, some browser stuff and decluttered my RSS reader and browser bookmarks and reading list. Not wanting any other colors to be so strong, I also enabled grayscale. If I need to see a picture’s colors properly, I can disable it quickly as usual with the button press.
I really enjoy the new tinting and large icons - makes it easier to design it like a very simple feature-phone-esque thing with large buttons for the most important services. I always shied away from turning on Assistive Access - it could potentially be too restrictive, but maybe one day I will try it. If you don’t know, Assistive Access is a feature since iOS 17 that lets you select what apps you want and then displays them very simply in a grid or row. It’s a very easy, stripped down version of the usual smartphone experience mainly for the elderly, cognitively disabled, or children. I love the idea, but I also love widgets so I don’t have to open anything and potentially get stuck on it just to see info.
I like it for now. Better than my old black boring phone layout since the icons now fit, too. I wasn’t a big fan of using Shortcuts to change icons.
Published 26 Sep, 2024, edited 7Â months, 2Â weeks ago