I need to try a fruit phone.

why?
they are to basic for me, which is why most who are technologically challenged are drawn to them.

 

Ya know, "Fruit Phone" has a whole different (and mean) connotation here in the San Francisco Bay Area...

I'm jus' sayin'...

 

Oh, wait...you mean like this?

 

It's not baaaaaaaaaaaad, says the sheep of their fruit phone.

 

i know they added widgets.....no idea on homescreens

 

With iOS14 you can add widgets to your homescreen (in one of 4 sizes as I recall - it's not as free-form as Android). You still have to fill your home screens from the top-left corner as always (kinda stupid, especially since the top is the least accessible place on the screen) - to create gaps you'd need to add an empty, transparent widget (which I think someone has now created, not certain). So it's more possible to customise the homescreen than it used to be, but it requires workarounds to do more than the very basic stuff. I've seen some icon customisation too, but I believe that's also via a workaround app rather than a native launcher feature. There are no 3rd party launchers (at least not without a jailbreak, which seems to be a constant struggle with Apple and hence a lot of work to maintain).

Their "widget stacks" are a nice idea though (several widgets in one, you swipe up to change which one is showing). Or they will be once more apps support them, since at the moment only a few 3rd party apps do (it is a new feature and many have not yet updated). They also introduced a sort of app drawer ("App Library"), which lives at the far left of your list of screens, and which stores all of your apps in system-defined folders (no user customisation, though the "search" option there brings up a nice alphabetical list, which I personally think would be a better default view). This does mean that you no longer need to keep every app on a homescreen, or create folders to hide away the apps you rarely or never use. On the plus side you can uninstall a lot of pre-installed apps, which most Androids don't allow, as well as hide apps from your homescreen.

You can set 3rd party apps as defaults for some things now (e.g. the iPad I'm using uses Firefox as its default browser rather than Safari), but there are still some things where you can't do this.

So in terms of customisation they are still a long way behind (and the iPad even more so, as it lacks the app library and the ability to mix widgets and apps/folders on your homescreen).

But they do now offer a flagship-level phone in a one-handed size, noticably more compact than the nearest equivalents in the Android world (e.g. 26mm shorter and 4mm narrower than the Xperia 5 II, 20mm shorter and 5mm narrower than the smallest Galaxy S20). And while I don't think I'm going to jump platform imminently, for me that is a powerful argument for doing so - sufficient that the threshold for how much Google would have to annoy me for me to jump ship has decreased significantly, and if Android manufacturers don't respond to this and continue to cater almost entirely to people who like large phones I may take the hint on my next phone replacement (iOS remains boring and inflexible, which is the big barrier, but it's better than it was).

 

Fruit phones are only allowed in the house if its work related