iOS 18 is Dumb

apple announced ios 18, along with some ai features. i downloaded the beta and jumped in completely blind, not looking at the keynote or twitter, and these are my thoughts:
this update is kinda stupid. it has a lot of good ideas, but it does a really bad job at actually implementing them

control center

so they decided to "redesign" control center. all they did was make it uglier, and customizable. the customization is kinda cool, but confusing. a lot of the buttons can be resized, but resizing them only makes them bigger. there is no added functionality, even in places where there should be. you can now also have multiple pages, which is cool i think, but at the same time, you could just scroll. plus, scrolling is vertical, which is kinda hard when a lot of the controls are also vertical.
my biggest gripe is that control center now uses a mix of circles and rectangles, as well as a lot of colors, resulting in a messy look.

the "+" button at the top of the page is especially confusing to me. tapping it doesn't even add a new object, it just begins customization. and why is the button always there? there is nothing like this in the rest of the ui.

customization

apple saw dynamic color with material you, and decided to emulate it on the home screen. now you can change the color of all the app icons. apps still have to manually support it, but the operating system can automatically detect app icons if they are on a flat colored background. eh, it looks kinda cool:

for a simulation of what this would look like now, enable color filters in aceessibility settings. i already know that in the future, app developers are going to start adding a slight gradient to their app icons, and make you pay money to unlock the version that works with this feature. awesome!
i also fear that this is going to make app icons become less and less creative. we have some really cool ones, but now they have to work with only one color. im sorry to the person who designed this beautiful icon for drumroll:

more reading: App Icons - Human Interface Guidelines

you can also put app icons wherever on the home screen. cool i guess. android users are having a field day with this one.
you can now also change the shortcuts on the lock screen. the current shortcuts, camera and flashlight, are good, so i just changed camera to shazam. cool.

fotos

the photos app was given a redesign... again. now, everything is on one page, which i don't like. you can customize it, but i just don't like it. the page when you open a photo is also different now. now, it has a design which makes it harder to use. the edit photo icon isn't a pencil, its a bunch of switches. and the photos themselves no longer touch the edges of the screen unless you tap them. why?

apple intelligence

now, of course, apple is adding ai features into ios. yay. siri has a new design, which is a rainbow border. all ai features are wrapped in a tacky rainbow border, which makes them feel, idk, like "wow! this is the future!". its ugly. you can now type to siri by double tapping the bottom of the screen. look, apple is a design focused company that makes products that are easy to use. double tapping a spot where youre not supposed to tap is not intuitive. my solution to this would be to copy the apple tv when you have type to siri on. if you hold the button for a short duration, you can see the keyboard. if you keep holding, you can say your request until you release the button.
some of the features are cool. priority notifications actually seem useful. but apple, nobody texts like this