In iOS 11, one of our longest wishes came true with the new customizable Control Center. You could finally reorder, remove and add extra features to the Control Center. Granted, it was limited to the features Apple put in. Still, it was a good start. And we think iOS 12 is the perfect time to add third-party support for Control Center.
One of the first things I do after getting a new iPhone is to enable the battery percentage from Settings. The little battery indicator isn’t really helpful. It’s more of an estimation. If you’re going to use your iPhone all day, it really helps in knowing exactly how much battery percentage is left on your iPhone.
Control Center on the iPhone X is stuck between a rock and a hard place. We’ve been used to accessing the Control Center with a simple swipe up gesture. It works all the time. Now, Control Center is in the exact opposite place. And on the super tall iPhone X, that’s not an easy target.
At the bottom of the iPhone X, you’ll find the brand new Home indicator. It’s a little software white Home bar. The area is used for swipe gestures. For unlocking the phone, taking you home and even for invoking Reachability. When iPhone X lost its Home button, Control Center lost its bottom edge gesture privilege. So where’s it gone?
The iPad Pros have had an LED flash for a year now. In fact, every single iPad Pro on the market has a LED Flash. But iOS hasn’t added support for the flashlight feature for iPads. That changes with iOS 11.
With iOS 11, Apple has redesigned the Control Center yet again (that’s twice in two years). This time, all the controls are back to being on one page. And they’re all organized in self-contained widgets. Yes, the exciting part is that we can finally customize them as well.
A big side effect of the new customizable Control Center in iOS 11 is that things you were used to, just aren’t there anymore. AirDrop toggle is hidden behind a widget. And so is the audio outputs section. In iOS 10, the music widget was a separate pane. And there was a clear section for switching between different audio outputs. In iOS 11 the entire system has changed. There are now three different ways to do this. And two of them are quite quick.
iOS 11’s Control Center sports a new one-page design, a dark color palette and more importantly, the ability to customize, which has been one of the most requested features since Apple introduced Control Center in iOS 7 back in 2013.
Apple has given us a real, customizable Control Center with iOS 11. Right now, all you can do is edit the controls below the first 4 rows. Apple gives you a dozen or so new controls that you can add to the bottom of the new Control Center.
I’ve been running the iOS 11 developer beta since the WWDC keynote. The new features in iOS 11 have been generally fun to play around with, especially the iPad multitasking features. Some of them have left me scratching my head, one, in particular, has left me frustrated.
