Repositioning apps on the iPhone and iPod Touch sucks. How can Apple fix it?

Despite certain areas ripe for improvement, the iPhone is awesome.  This “awesomeness” is due in large part to the magnificent interface that is extremely intuitive and beautiful at the same time.  But one of the biggest things that “suck” on the device is the act of relocating applications; you know, changing the position of the app icons on the home screens.  Read on to find out how Apple can fix this. To me, changing the position of apps makes for the most difficult gesture on the iPhone/iPod Touch.  Anyone who has had to rearrange the position of ten or more apps in one sitting can attest to this.  It is especially true when the amount of third party apps fills multiple home screens: attempting to apply any kind of grouping methodology for said apps becomes a hassle.  If a user decides to organize his applications by category across the nine home screens of the iPhone, that task would be… well, let’s just say it wouldn’t be fun.  For example, say I want to place all game apps on one home screen and all my productivity apps on another.  Completing this would require dragging, one-by-one, each one of the applications to the particular screen, meaning I would need to drag 24 separate apps at least once (2 screens of 12 apps each), if the said home screens are completely filled with apps.  Like I said: not fun, and even more importantly, time consuming.  It gets even worse if a user decides to switch around the order of the screens.  To use the previous example, let’s say I currently have all game apps on home screen three and all productivity apps on home screen four.  I later decide to change that around.  Doing this would require me to take all apps from screen four and drag them to an empty screen (such as five), then drag the apps from screen three to screen four, and only then drag the apps from screen five – that were previously on screen four – onto screen three.  If that was at all confusing, see the gallery that’s below to see what I mean.

For those reasons, I think the process of re-arranging apps would be much more user-friendly if the user were able to change the location of the apps on the home screens using iTunes (on the desktop).

User interface

Implementation of said functionality is simple: in the device management section, Apple could add a “screens” view to the Applications tab (see gallery below for image).  This view would show (surprise!) – the home screens of an iPhone/iPod Touch.  From there, the user could drag and drop applications from one screen to another.  This would save the user the horrible process of rearranging applications on the device itself.

A possible problem

Since so many users install applications over the air (wirelessly through the App Store), a certain problem might exist with my suggested solution.  For example, a user may have arranged the applications in iTunes but not have performed a sync to the device.  After arranging the apps in iTunes (and not performing a sync), the user may have installed an app onto the iPhone over the air.  Upon synchronization, iTunes would have a discrepancy between the way apps are arranged on the iPhones versus the way they are arranged in iTunes.  To prevent this from happenning, Apple could require a sync if apps were re-arranged through iTunes on the desktop.

And solved…

The above method might be a rather restrictive process for some and can be improved on, especially as we continue to move in the direction of wireless synchronization.  To counter this restriction, a service such as Apple’s own MobileMe could help.  It could sync the location of apps on the iPhone’s home screen to iTunes.  In other words, the location of applications on the iPhone’s numerous home screens would be synchronized through MobileMe.  This way, whether the user repositions an app on iTunes or on the iPhone, the two sources will be kept in constant synchrony: move an app to a different home screen on the iPhone and iTunes will know about it, and consequently, make the same change in iTunes.  Purchase an app OTA on the iPhone and iTunes will know about its place on the iPhone.  Perfection…

But until Apple reads this blog (or thinks of this itself), we will suffer through the laborious process of arranging apps only on the iPhone/iPod Touch.

Check out the illustrations below to get an idea of exactly what I mean.

PS: wherever the iPhone is mentioned, please realize that this also applies to the iPod Touch.

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