My 2016 Homescreen

Reading, writing, and listening dominate

On this first day of 2017, I figured I’d once again post my year-end homescreen on my iPhone for 2016 (just as I’ve done in 2015, 2014, and 2013).

So, first and foremost, as you can see, not a ton has changed. This isn’t too surprising to me as we’re now almost a decade into the iPhone (and almost 9 years into third-party apps) and the ways I do things on my phone are increasingly set in stone. And, as such, with third-party apps, it’s increasingly hard to break onto the homescreen.

The apps making an appearance this time around (as opposed to last year) are Audible, Bear, Economist, Instagram, NYTimes, Podcasts, and Ulysses.

Let There Be Listening

The inclusion of both Audible and Podcasts show my increasing usage of the iPhone for listening to things (beyond just Music, which is also still there, of course). Long-time readers will know about my “hack” to get almost anything read to me on my iPhone using the accessibility settings — and this is a huge part of my Pocket and now NYTimes usage as well. Meanwhile, The Economist app features its own great audio portion, with each week’s articles read not by the iPhone’s great Alex voice, but instead by real, live British people. How quaint, I know.

In other words, six of my homescreen’s twenty-eight app slots are used predominantly for audio purposes. And really it’s seven if you include that old-school app called “Phone”. And, of course, I often use my listening “hack” on Safari as well — though I wouldn’t say that’s the predominant use case for that particular app.

With the recent release of the AirPods — which are amazing, my favorite new Apple product in a long time; more on them soon — I expect my use of the iPhone for listening purposes to increase even further in 2017. I also believe there’s a lot of opportunity for this decidedly old-school interaction layer (voice/listening) to be used in new and exciting ways going forward. This is thanks not only to the AirPods but also the Amazon Echo, Google Home, the continued build-out of Siri, and the like. (This is something I quickly mentioned in an interview with VentureBeat for some thoughts on tech in 2017, but it’s worth its own post at some point soon to elaborate.)

Writing Workflow

Another thematic trend on my homescreen has been apps for writing and/or organizing my thoughts. This is where Bear, Ulysses, Medium, and even Reminders and Slack come into play.

Bear is the latest addition to my homescreen as it has replaced the built-in iOS Notes app. I’ve never been a huge fan of Notes, with its continued odd adherence to some skeuomorphism — paper background really, Apple? — even as every other built-in app has moved on. I’ve also found its implementation of iCloud sync to be very hit-or-miss (this has improved over time, but I still run into some issues). I’ve used other apps such as Simplenote and Vesper (RIP) in the past, but usually ended up back with Notes simply because of the power/ease of the default apps. But Bear is good/interesting enough that I’m now using it to organize my thoughts for what I may want to write about and/or post to my newsletter. I particularly like the share-sheet functionality, which allows you to append things to existing notes (yes, you can do this with Notes too, but it’s not as seamless). Bear is so good that I actually pay for it ($1.49 monthly or $14.99 annually). Imagine that!

Speaking of paying, whereas Bear is a freemium app (you pay to upgrade to more functionality), Ulysses is a full-on paid app that I happily paid for and use. And at $25 currently for the iOS version (the Mac version is currently $33 thanks to a discount for the holidays — it’s normally $45), it’s hardly “cheap”. But again, in my book it’s worth it as it’s the way I predominantly write on my iPhone (and mainly these days, iPad). It’s a great, powerful text editor that still maintains an admirable level of simplicity. And it can publish right to outlets like Medium and WordPress.

Don’t Call It a Comeback

Lastly, the other “new” addition to my homescreen is Instagram. Yes, Instagram. Hardly a new app, but one that made great strides forward in 2016. Don’t call it a comeback though, it has literally been there for years — just not the past couple of years because they had refused to update the icon to iOS 7 — iOS 7! — design standards. But I always said that when they updated that icon, it would be back on my homescreen, and sure enough, with the help of some ombre, that was the case in 2016 — finally.

The Dearly Departed

As for the apps that were on my homescreen last year that fell off of it, we have ESPN, Flipboard, Foursquare, the aforementioned Notes, Periscope, Tumblr, and Weather.

Not too much explanation needed here, but briefly: ESPN is still on my second screen and used a ton, but I mainly interact with push notifications. Flipboard is also still on second screen, but my usage as a way to find new, interesting things to read has declined over time and with a lack of core updates to the app. Foursquare is another that’s on second screen as it’s not a daily thing; mainly just when traveling or finding some place new to eat (meanwhile, Foursquare’s Swarm app is still on my homescreen and still a daily use case for me — I love to keep track of where I’ve been). Notes I already talked about. Periscope moved to the second screen as well since it’s now baked directly into the Twitter app. Tumblr is a sad one for me — I still use it from time to time, but it’s absolutely feeling like a ghost town these days. Weather is now in the “More” folder since it’s easy to get to with a simple swipe to the right, in the widgets area of iOS.

Onward

That’s all for this year. We’ll see what 2017 has in store app-wise. I’ll be disappointed if one completely new app doesn’t break onto my homescreen. But the trends aren’t looking great…

Disclosure: Through GV, I’m an investor in Medium, Pocket, and Slack, and was an investor in Periscope before its sale to Twitter.