Craig Federighi describes iOS 16’s new lock screen as “an act of love”
iOS 16’s lock screen redesign was an “act of love” to make the iPhone even more personal, according to Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi.
The new lock screen offers users a way to personalize your iPhone beyond just selecting a wallpaper.
“We knew this was a multi-act play, and we knew our next stage would be the lock screen.”Federighi told TechRadar.
“We saw a real opportunity to take that area that has really slowly evolved over time, but has never seen this kind of massive step forward, and make something really big – but something very Apple and very personal. So, this is an act of love this year.”
Alan Dye explained that “Our goal was to make iPhone even more personal – and definitely more useful – but also keep those key elements that make iPhone, iPhone intact.”
The design team had the goal of “to create something that felt almost more editorial, and give the user the ability to create a lock screen that actually ends up looking like a great magazine cover or movie poster, but doing it in a way that I hope is really simple to create, a lot of fun, and even with a lot of automation there.”
Part of the magazine cover look is having elements that intersect with each other, like the subject of the wallpaper appearing in front of the clock. Dye says that the segmentation has taken a long time to be perfect since “unless the segmentation is ridiculously good, it breaks the illusion.”
Machine learning is also used to determine how to adjust the lock screen image to perfection. Federighi says there is “A dozen neural networks that judge the photo based on whether it’s a desirable subject, whether there are people there, how they’re framed and cropped in the photo, their expressions. All of these things allow us to automatically bring out really cool and engaging options for people and then render them on screen in a way that makes them feel almost new.”
This information is used to offer users a selection of looks to choose from, rather than specific filters. yes
As for the notification changes, Dye offers the idea that flowing from the base of the screen is nice for customization “Because so often we see notifications completely obscuring the photo on your lock screen, which we didn’t want to do with this new design.”
