iOS 10 home screen completely changes design, including loss of iconic ‘swipe to unlock’ feature

The new update brings a range of changes to the lock screen – but it’s how you get past it that will probably be the most remarkable thing

iOS 10 entirely redesigns the home screen, getting rid of one of the iPhone’s most iconic features.

The new update – released on 16 September – redesigns the lock screen so that people can find more information on it. Notifications are far richer and allow people to interact with them without actually opening the app, for instance, and it has a new “widgets” view that lets people see small versions of specific apps so they don’t need to actually unlock the phone.

But it’s that act of unlocking the phone that’s likely to prove the most notable change to the new operating system. Gone is the old method of “slide to unlock” that has been present in the iPhone and iPad since their very beginnings – and something slightly more confusing but more useful has taken its place.

The first change is that the devices will know when they’ve been lifted up and wake themselves up accordingly. They can still be woken up in the traditional way – pressing the home button or the sleep button on the side – but it’s easiest just to pick the phone up.

Once that’s done, unlocking the phone is done by putting your finger on the home screen. That opens up the various locked things in the widgets screen, for instance, which are otherwise hidden to keep users’ privacy.

But it requires another press to actually get through to the home screen. That’s done by pressing the home button – though if the phone is woken up with the home button in the first place, and the Touch ID recognises the fingerprint, it will let people straight into the home screen.

Part of the reason behind the change seems to be that Apple is keen to keep people on the lock screen, using the notifications and widget found there, rather than hunting through the pages of apps. Apps themselves can even be opened from that screen, using the “siri apps suggestions” menu that shows what apps the phone thinks its owner might want to open.

All of this makes more sense when it’s written down, rather than using it. And people will have the opportunity to do so by downloading iOS 10 for free.

The lock screen has been one of the most iconic parts of the iPhone, being the way it was advertised at its beginning and representing the first thing that people see when they come to use it.

In retrospect, the slide to unlock gesture might always have been doomed. Apple partially got rid of it in iOS 7 – which changed many things about the phone’s design – requiring people to slide the whole screen across rather than using the traditional "slide to unlock" button.

And its removal seemed to make more sense this year, with the real home button being removed and getting replaced by a flush button that doesn’t actually press down.

That’s rumoured to be making the way for the removal of the home button entirely, or its integration with the screen itself, in next year’s iPhone 8. That will presumably be helped by moving people towards not using the home button quite so much.