Looking Back On My 2019 Homescreen
A use for Siri and RSS strikes back!
Happy New Year, all. Per tradition (2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, and 2013), I’m back today to showcase how my iPhone homescreen looks on this first day of 2020 — highlighting the apps I used as 2019 came to a close.
As has been the case the past few years, 2019 didn’t look all that different from the year that came before it. To me, this continues to underscore just how hard it is for a new app or service to break through in our era of app saturation, where everyone already has all the services they use on a daily basis, and aren’t spending nearly as much time looking for what’s new. Because we just don’t have the time.
And yet, some interesting trends persist, at least in my own iPhone usage. I find myself using the swipe-down Siri app suggestions more and more. A large part of this was because 2019 was a big year for me using baby-related apps. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t want to put these on my homescreen (even if their usage warranted it 😊👶). So apps like Nanit and BabyTracker and Rest are constantly one swipe away in that suggested apps area, which I find useful. Very useful, even.
Perhaps as a result of using suggestions, I’m also using search quite a bit more (which is right above the app suggestion area, of course) to pull up apps I’m looking for. For example, this is how I was using Yahoo’s Fantasy Football app, which I would basically just use once a week to set my roster (and check scores on Sunday) but also didn’t want it on my homescreen given that usage.
Last year, I talked about being able to move some apps off my homescreen thanks to usage of the “widgets” area of the iPhone (the area to the left of the homescreen, when you swipe right). This continued in 2019 as it’s how I track stocks and big news headlines (which allowed me to move Apple News off my homescreen — the app is still well done, but I really don’t like how much they’re trying to push Apple News+, which I just could not care less about, certainly not enough to pay for). I also quite enjoy the “Trending on Google” widget (via the Google app). Always some good fun/eye-opening stuff there.
You’ll note that I actually moved Reminders back to my homescreen this past year even though I have the widget for it right there as well. I’m still not thrilled about this overlap, but I’ve found having the notification dot on my homescreen shames me into getting done the things I need to get done. And I still like having the other tasks I must do at a glance, hence the overlap.
In other changes, I moved Anchor from my homescreen simply because I still have yet to start that podcast which I keep threatening to do :) I just didn’t have the time in 2019 — did you see the part above about baby apps? 2020, perhaps? Anchor, now a part of Spotify, isn’t far: just on the second screen of apps alongside other creation tools like Giphy, Snapchat, Tumblr (here’s hoping for a comeback in 2020!), and others. I also moved Day One back there as I was finding too much overlap in my note-taking needs with Bear. (I still love Day One as an actual life journal.)
On to row 4, you’ll notice that iA Writer has been swapped out in favor of Ulysses. Honestly, I really like both apps (and Byword) as minimal (I mean this in the good sense — clutter-free) writing apps. And I go back and forth between which ones I use. This past year I’ve been on a Ulysses kick, so much so that I’m even paying for it now. It just seems to have the right feature sets I require. And with it on the homescreen, I’m doing more writing on my phone again. Like this post, right now. I’m hoping to increase my writing cadence in 2020 (yes, that’s always the hope, I know) and I feel like having that fluttering Ulysses app icon there on my homescreen will help.
Another big addition to this row: Reeder. Yes, a RSS reader. Yes, in 2019. And now 2020! Crazy, I know. But I honestly adore Reeder. With its native iOS/Mac experience, it has long been my RSS reader of choice. But usage dwindled over time as RSS yielded to non-stop social feeds. This past year, I decided to go “old school” in an attempt better sort signal from noise. And that was mainly because of some new functionality Reeder added. Notably, a “Save to Reeder” feature, which is fantastic.
What it does should be fairly obviously: Reeder creates a bookmarklet/shortcut on Mac and iOS that allows you to save any article you want to read later to its “Read Later” area of the app. Yes, this is the same functionality Pocket, Instapaper, and now even Medium has. But the brilliance of Reeder’s take on this is in your intent and its simplicity. You already use Reeder to explicitly find and read articles, and now instead of automatically importing them via RSS, you can more highly curate the ones you truly want from around the web via this save-for-later functionality (which works on your RSS feed articles too, of course).
This makes Reeder a perfectly simple yet highly customizable news reading app. And that’s exactly what I use it for while still using both Pocket and Instapaper — yes, my reading workflow is perhaps a bit overkill with three read-it-later services I regularly use (and even more if you include using such functionality in The Economist app, the NYTimes app, and even Safari’s Reading List from time to time). I was losing too much in my Pocket that I wanted to read because I was saving too many news articles that I felt like I needed to read for work and whatnot. So now I save those to Reeder. Instapaper I still use both because it seems to have a better parser — it can ingest WSJ articles, for example, while Pocket still cannot — and because it exports to my Kindle for longer articles I want to read. (The text-to-speech element of Instapaper is also superior to Pocket’s, IMO — Just please, please, please give me a way to have it read faster than 2x, Instapaper, please :)
Anyway, I’ve found great joy in rediscovering Reeder this year and if your workflow is anything like mine, I think you will too. It’s just so well made. And with their clever use of swipe/touch interactions, I can very quickly go through and sort many feeds — again, separating the signal from the noise.
That’s all in terms of what’s new and changed. Except for the look of Slack’s app in my tray, of course. It’s funny to look back on all the hoopla the change caused now. I still honestly think the new icon looks far better than the old, weird “S” one. But I know just me saying that will cause some people to lose their minds again. Even though everyone has clearly moved on.
On the topic of app icons, I wish more of them would give you options to customize. I’ve long loved this about Bear (and they app new ones all the time). Reeder did this as well in their most recent release. I’m someone who is constantly changing my wallpaper just to get a new look, so I love doing this for app icons as well. It’s just a nice touch to show your users you care enough to work on something so small that undoubtedly a very small minority of users will ever touch.
So there you go. Until 2021, the actual start of the new decade ;)
