A landscape iPhone Home Screen would be awesome and this concept proves it

By Oliver Haslam
published

Yes, please.

iPhone concept showing a landscape Home Screen
(Image credit: basicappleguy.com)

If you had an iPhone 6 Plus back in the day, one of the best things about it was the fact you could rotate it into landscape and have the Home Screen do the same. It never worked on the smaller phones, and it all stopped when the iPhone X arrived.

But wouldn't it be cool if it came back, maybe as part of the iOS 17 update?

Sure it would. And this concept shows why that is.

Go landscape or go home

History might not remember the iPhone 6 Plus as the best iPhone Apple ever made, but it's what gave us the landscape Home screen as well as proper landscape views in apps. Those views brought us special widescreen views inside supported apps and while they remain, the rotated Home Screen doesn't.

But BasicAppleGuy (opens in new tab) thinks it should come back. And that's hard to argue with.

And now, of course, we have widgets.

It's been suggested that Apple is concerned about what the notch and Dynamic Island could mean for the rotated Home Screen, but this concept shows that's not a problem. And with the iPhone 15 expected to get a Dynamic Island all of its own, maybe Apple's already getting its ducks in a row.

"Despite the addition of the notch and Dynamic Island, the concept shows that a landscape iPhone Home Screen is still possible, with widgets and app icons coexisting on the same screen as they do in portrait orientation," the blog post outlining the concept explains. "And although I had to shrink the size of the icons a bit, they remain comfortably large enough to select without issue."

iPhone concept showing landscape Home Screen

(Image credit: basicappleguy.com)

The Dynamic Island continues to work just fine in landscape as well.

"The second image shows a modified interface for Live Activities inside the Dynamic Island," the post continues. "The camera is still cleverly obscured in this example, but the platter and controls have been lowered, allowing for easier interaction while in landscape orientation."

Whether or not we'll get a landscape Home Screen with iOS 17, we don't know. And even if we do, it's possible it will be limited to only iPhones with the Dynamic Island — and if that's the case, we might not hear about it until the iPhone 15 is announced in September.

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too.

Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.