iOS 16’s lock screen is terrible for iPhone notifications

Source Domain: mashable.com

Before iOS 16, my iPhone’s lock screen was like a flawless, beautiful sandcastle. It had a background image I’d carefully chosen and lovingly cropped to the exact right proportions, and a handcrafted selection of notifications in a view that made sense.

And then Apple came over and kicked it like some childhood bully.

Of course, that’s all metaphorical. I didn’t actually have a sandcastle on my iPhone — that would be weird. But with the release of iOS 16 last week, Apple made some big changes to the lock screen, like new widgets and fonts, that have totally harshed the positive vibes I had going on.

I think we can all agree that no function of the lock screen is more important than offering users a quick glance at notifications. And now Apple’s gone and bungled that whole setup, possibly in service of accommodating the new Dynamic Island feature that’s exclusive to the iPhone 14 Pro. And if that change wasn’t bad enough on its own, the new default font for the clock can take a hike, too.

Let’s get into why exactly the new iOS 16 lock screen just isn’t working for me after a week of use.

Bottoming out

When Apple reengineered the iPhone lock screen for iOS 16, the philosophy seems to have been to unlock the full potential of widgets. These are little UI features that you can choose to drag and drop around the lock screen, all in the hope of creating something both aesthetically pleasing and useful. If you want to display the weather, phone battery life, or even the latest Facebook updates on your lock screen, you can do that with widgets.

And that’s fine! The only problem is that people who don’t want to do that (Hi! It me.) are stuck dealing with a lock screen that’s less functional than ever by default. That’s because widgets are supposed to live in the middle third of the lock…

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