This fall, Apple will launch the iPhone 16 series (read everything we know so far here). But before then, on Monday, June 10, Apple will unveil the software that will run on that hardware—and on plenty of current iPhones, too. Now, we have some indications of what’s coming, and it’s going to be big.
According to industry insider Mark Gurman from Bloomberg in his latest Power On newsletter, the iPhone screen will be customizable in all-new ways.
First of all, the iPhone home screen will be completely different. It will, Gurman says, “Let users change the color of app icons and put them wherever they want. For instance, you can make all your social icons blue or finance-related ones green—and they won’t need to be placed in the standard grid that has existed since day one in 2007.”
This will make every iPhone look radically different from how it has, and from every other iPhone. Place apps so they look like eyes and a mouth, color action games so they’re blood-red, platform games a gaudy yellow, or leave one whole home page free of all apps apart from the bottom drawer, perhaps.
There are no further details yet of exactly how this will be done or how extensively app icons can be recolored, but even the move away from the grid is a striking change—though not for Android users who have had this capability for years.
The June 10 keynote is expected to focus heavily on AI, which, Gurman says, will also provide at least one remarkable new look to the iPhone: AI-generated emoji.
Gurman says, “One standout feature will bring generative AI to emojis. The company is developing software that can create custom emojis on the fly, based on what users are texting. That means you’ll suddenly have an all-new emoji for any occasion, beyond the catalog of options that Apple currently offers on the iPhone and other devices.”
How often have you been searching for just the right emoji, only to settle for a less exact option, leaving the person you’re messaging thinking, “What on earth do they mean by that?”
There will be plenty more changes coming: Gurman has previously claimed that Apple employees have told him that iOS 18 will be the biggest iPhone software release ever.
