Apple dropped the iOS 14 public beta on Thursday, and me being me, I put it on my actual daily phone within about twenty minutes of the profile showing up on beta.apple.com. I know what the tech press says every single year: dont install a beta on your only phone, back up first, wait for the second or third build, blah blah. I backed up, at least. Small victories.
Two days in and heres where Im at: the widgets are genuinely good, the App Library is a mixed bag, and my Fitbit app has crashed four times since Thursday afternoon, which is annoying but not exactly a shock for beta software in July.
The widget thing is the headline feature and it's earned it. You can finally drop a calendar box or a weather tile right on your home screen instead of burying it in the Today View swipe-over panel where it's lived since iOS 8. Theres a "Smart Stack" widget too that rotates between a few of them depending on time of day, which sounds gimmicky on paper but Ive actually left it running since I set it up Thursday night. Small thing, but it's the first home screen change on iPhone that's felt like an actual change since, what, the 3D Touch app icons nobody used?
App Library is the other big one and Im less sold on it. It auto-sorts your apps into folders like "Social" and "Utilities" and you can hide entire home screen pages now, which in theory means a cleaner phone. In practice I spent about forty minutes on Thursday night dragging things around trying to get it to group my apps the way I wanted, and it mostly just grouped them the way it wanted instead. I have a folder called "Creativity" that contains, among other things, the Kindle app and a QR code scanner. Sure.
Siri finally stopped taking over the whole screen every time you talk to it, which, honestly, took long enough. Now it's a little compact bubble in the corner and you can keep looking at whatever you were doing. This is one of those changes that makes you realize how bad the old version was only once its gone. Picture-in-picture works the way youd expect if youve used it on iPad already, and I got it going with a YouTube video in Safari while replying to a text, which felt like a mildly futuristic five seconds before I went back to doing one thing at a time like a normal person.
App Clips I havent actually seen in the wild yet since basically nobody has built one for real, so that ones a come-back-in-a-few-months feature. Same with a lot of the redesigned Maps stuff, cycling directions and guides, cool on paper, useless to me since Im not exactly biking anywhere with the heat sitting at 95 degrees most afternoons this week.
The bugs, for the record: besides Fitbit crashing, my keyboard has randomly lowercased itself mid sentence twice, and Bluetooth dropped my headphones once in the car yesterday, which hasnt happened on iOS 13 in months. None of it's dealbreaker stuff, but it's a good reminder that public beta still means beta, not slightly-early release. Apple markets these things well enough now that I think a lot of people forget that part.
Also, completely unrelated tangent, but has anyone else noticed how much slower installing a beta profile is now compared to a few years back? The whole flow of downloading the profile, rebooting, letting it verify, then downloading the actual OS update on top of that took my phone almost 40 minutes on wifi Thursday night. Feels like it should be one step by now, not four.
If youre the type who already knows whether youre going to install this, nothing above is going to change your mind either way. If youre on the fence: the widgets alone are worth it if you dont mind occasional weirdness for a couple months, put it on a phone that isnt your only lifeline to the world, and dont expect App Clips to matter until fall.