Android and iOS have always had their differences when it comes to apps, widgets and icons, Android offering the more customisable interface while Apple has kept the simple icons with no activity on the home-screen.
A new iOS8 concept meshes widgets, icons and live information together, creating the iOS Block. The block is a larger tile on the home-screen, providing a smaller portal into the app, showing the live information.
Users would be able to open the app through the block, simply by pinching to zoom on the icon and opening the widget. If the user doesn’t want to make the app a permanent widget, they can simply pinch to zoom out to change it back into a still icon.
This new sort of widget is much more intuitive and allows users to set the small app windows for applications like Music and Weather, glance-able information that can be intractable without the need for a full-screen interface.
The way the iOS8 Block is designed really takes advantage of some of the prettier iOS first party apps, Weather looks like an extremely nice weather and instead of just making another interface widget, the iOS Block integrates the app UI onto the widget.
Apple has offered a very limited amount of customisation to their mobile OS, to the point Android and Windows Phone both outclass iOS by offering live information and interactive widgets that can be used outside of an application.
Since iOS is all about Apple having full control, app developers have never been able to explore the home-screen. iOS8 could be a big turnaround, Siri might be integrated into third party apps on the iWatch and iCloud may become a more developer friendly tool.
We already seen a huge change in the design and UI for iOS last year, but this year we want the added functionality and some new features to make the OS as good if not better than Android and Windows Phone.
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