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33 comments Miguel López @mlopca

For me, the most interesting novelty of iOS 15 are the concentration modes. The problem of distractions that social networks and other applications have caused is something that particularly affects me, and that Apple itself provides tools to mitigate the problem seems to me the best thing to do. That's why I set my concentration modes as soon as I updated my devices last Monday afternoon.

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The concept is easy to understand, I myself predicted it a few years ago: allow certain applications to be able or unable to interrupt you depending on what you're doing. Apple allows us to configure these notifications through the new 'Concentration Modes' section in the iOS and iPadOS settings, and also allows us to select which application pages from our main page we can see.

It is this idea, that of hiding pages with applications that distract us, is the one that caught my attention the most when I saw it explained at WWDC21. Hiding apps like YouTube or Twitter during business hours has the potential to save a lot of procrastination, though it hides a fact we may not have realized: We're all too used to how we organize our apps on the iPhone or iPad.

I noticed this when I started organizing my icons. Suddenly I saw before me a much more complicated task than I thought: re-organizing all my applications to classify them into pages that I was going to see (or not) depending on the time of day. And that on the iPhone and later on the iPad, combining those applications with widgets. After an hour and a half, I did it. I set up focus modes and started testing this new way of using my devices on a day-to-day basis.

The switch to having app pages dedicated to each focus mode is very abrupt

It hasn't been the experience I thought it would be. The idea of ​​hiding app pages is a good one, but it has some sore points:

The result, in my personal experience, is that what was supposed to avoid distractions has become another layer of use and complication of my applications and more difficulty to organize and access the applications that I use frequently.

My conclusions, at least for now, are that I will go back to organizing my apps as I had them in iOS 14 to return to that reflex of knowing where my apps are at all times. What I will continue to take advantage of are the notifications: deactivate those of certain applications depending on the concentration mode that I have activated. That has a lot of potential to help me not get distracted.

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That same experience has also made me appreciate the detail that Apple lets us activate and deactivate all these options in our opinion: in Cupertino They have understood that each job and way of working is different and therefore they have allowed the user to adapt flexibly to these new modes of concentration. Personally I will continue looking for the best way for them to adapt to my way of working.

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