iOS 18 is a mess

Control Centre is a design disaster

Chris Langley
5 min readOct 10, 2024

iOS18 brings many new features to Apple’s iPhone lineup. Apple trumpets the new operating system by emphasising the extensive customisation options and, because it’s 2024 and we’re all addicted, shouting about the benefits of AI. In the company’s marketing, Apple uses two words to describe the iOS 18 experience: ‘Yours. Truly’. Unfortunately, Apple’s loosening of its infamous control has backfired spectacularly in one area of the operating system in particular: the Control Centre.

Source: Apple.com

For those of you who don’t follow all-things Apple, the Control Centre (yes, I’m British), is the menu that appears when you swipe down from the top-right corner of the screen on your iPhone or iPad. It includes all sorts of options and shortcuts: music controls, screen brightness, airplane mode, etc. Control Centre has been a feature of Apple’s annual iOS releases since iOS 7 in 2013. Here is how it looks in the latest version of iOS:

Control Centre on iOS18.

There are lots of options here. One can press the little ‘+’ symbol to edit the layout or add more features. There’s a lot going on here — and I’m not going to mention those little three glyphs on the right hand side — but I want…

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