Enlarge / iOS 18's home screen color tinting and grid-based app icons in action. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apart from the much-ballyhooed (and delayed) Apple Intelligence, a big change to home screen customization and app icon placement is one of iOS 18’s flagship features, alongside an overhauled Control Center.

With the public launch of iOS 18 this week, we’ll be delving into those flagship features one by one, and I’m starting with the home screen because I have often criticized the iPhone’s home screen experience in the past. iOS 18 promises the biggest update to home screen customization since, well, ever.

Let’s walk through how to use the new features, explore how they work, and try to answer the most important question: does the iPhone finally offer the kind of home screen flexibility that users have been asking for?

Enlarge / Emojipedia sample images of the new Unicode 16.0 emoji. (credit: Emojipedia)

The Unicode Consortium has finalized and released version 16.0 of the Unicode standard, the elaborate character set that ensures that our phones, tablets, PCs, and other devices can all communicate and interoperate with each other. The update adds 5,185 new characters to the standard, bringing the total up to a whopping 154,998.

Of those 5,185 characters, the ones that will get the most attention are the eight new emoji characters, including a shovel, a fingerprint, a leafless tree, a radish (formally classified as "root vegetable"), a harp, a purple splat that evokes the '90s Nickelodeon logo, and a flag for the island of Sark. The standout, of course, is "face with bags under eyes," whose long-suffering thousand-yard stare perfectly encapsulates the era it has been born into. Per usual, Emojipedia has sample images that give you some idea of what these will look like when they're implemented by various operating systems, apps, and services.

Unicode 16.0 also adds support for seven new modern and historical scripts: the West African Garay alphabet; the Gurung Khema, Kirat Rai, Ol Onal, and Sunuwar scripts from Northeast India and Nepal; and historical Todhri and Tulu-Tigalari scripts from Albania and Southwest India, respectively.

Enlarge / It's never explained what this collection of app icons quite represents. A disorganized app you tossed together by sideloading? A face that's frowning because it's rolling down a bar held up by app icons? It's weird, but not quite evocative. (credit: linuxct/hydra)

You might sideload an Android app, or manually install its APK package, if you're using a custom version of Android that doesn't include Google's Play Store. Alternately, the app might be experimental, under development, or perhaps no longer maintained and offered by its developer. Until now, the existence of sideload-ready APKs on the web was something that seemed to be tolerated, if warned against, by Google.

This quiet standstill is being shaken up by a new feature in Google's Play Integrity API. As reported by Android Authority, developer tools to push "remediation" dialogs during sideloading debuted at Google's I/O conference in May, have begun showing up on users' phones. Sideloaders of apps from the British shop Tesco, fandom app BeyBlade X, and ChatGPT have reported "Get this app from Play" prompts, which cannot be worked around. An Android gaming handheld user encountered a similarly worded prompt from Diablo Immortal on their device three months ago.

Google's Play Integrity API is how apps have previously blocked access when loaded onto phones that are in some way modified from a stock OS with all Google Play integrations intact. Recently, a popular two-factor authentication app blocked access on phones with modified firmware, including GrapheneOS, which aims to surpass the security of Android's stock system. Apps can call the Play Integrity API and get back an "integrity verdict," relaying if the phone has a "trustworthy" software environment, has Google Play Protect enabled, and passes other software checks.