As I make this video, iOS, the operating system running your iPhone has just updated to iOS16,
and this update is huge.
I’m going to be covering iOS16 in a lot of detail over the coming weeks, but one of
the most significant improvements has been the Lock Screen, so much so that I wanted
to make a video dedicated to it.
In this video, I’m going to show you everything that your iPhone’s Lock Screen can now do,
and show you how to get everything setup and customised, so that you can make the most
of the exciting new features that your iPhone now offers.
Stick with me until the end of the video, this update is really interesting, and it’s
definitely worth your while learning how to use this feature.
OK, let’s get into it.
Before we start, I want to take just a couple of seconds to just that you’re running the
correct version of iOS, because if you’re not, this video won’t make much sense to
you.
Open your iPhone, head to Settings, then General, then Software Update.
This section here should say iOS 16.0 or above.
If it doesn’t, and you’ve got the option of updating to iOS16, please follow the on-screen
instructions to update your phone.
Once you’ve done that, come back to this video and continue.
The first thing you’re going to notice about the Lock Screen is that it’s had a visual
overhaul, and now looks completely different.
Your Lock Screen now offers an enormous amount of customisation and personalisation, and
you can use a combination of wallpapers, or photos that you like, along with visual information
like the date and time, as well as widgets, both first party widgets and third party widgets.
So, let’s start by looking at how you can customise the Lock Screen.
One way you can do it is to wake up your phone, to bring up the Lock Screen, then press and
hold for a moment, until you see this screen.
The other way is to go to Settings, then Wallpaper, and you can see that you have the option to
customise your existing Lock Screen and Wallpaper, or you can add a new one by tapping this button
here.
If I press and hold again to bring up the Lock Screen customisation options, you can
see that I’ve created a couple of Lock Screens, and I can scroll between them by swiping left
and right.
So that’s actually one of the first changes in iOS16, you can setup multiple Lock Screens
and Wallpapers, and easily change between them, a bit like you can on your Apple Watch.
You don’t need to be all or nothing when it comes to Lock Screens now, you can have
different ones depending on what you’re doing, and switch between them very easily.
Let’s start by creating a new Lock Screen from scratch.
To do that, we swipe across until we see this Add New option, and then tap on the Blue Plus
to add one in.
Up at the top of this screen, we’ve got a number of preset options to choose from.
Photos will take you into your Photo Library, and allow you to choose a photo to make into
your Lock Screen.
The great thing about this, is that once you’ve selected the photo, you can pinch and push
with your two fingers to zoom in and out, and your phone can now better detect subjects
in photos, allowing you to utilise a depth effect.
To show you what I mean, notice how if I tap the ellipsis button down here at the bottom
right, and toggle depth effect on and off, parts of the photo come forward in front of
things like the widgets.
This won’t work on every photo, and it might be a feature that you don’t want, but it’s
there for you to play around with.
Depth Effect only works on the iPhone XS or newer phones.
If you change your mind and want to switch out to a different photo, tap the Photos button
down at the bottom left to go back into your photo library.
Notice how it says ‘natural’ down at the bottom.
If you swipe left to right, you can swipe through some colour options, like black and
white, duotone and colour wash.
Let’s turn our attention to the information up at the top of the screen.
I’ll tap on the date at the very top.
We can choose from a number of widgets up here, all of which will show you the date,
but all of which can show you some additional information if you like too.
So for example, stocks would allow me to see the date, and see what’s going on with the
Dow Jones in this case.
Under weather, I’ve got a number of options to choose from, including things like sunrise
and sunset, the amount of rain in the local area, the air quality index.
I’m a Brit, so I’m pretty much genetically predisposed to choosing the rain option.
Next, tap on the time underneath.
Here, you can choose from a number of fonts, colours and intensity of those colours, so
have a play around, and find something that works for you.
Next, tap on the Add Widgets button.
Here, you can add small widgets to the Lock Screen that will display real time information.
At the top of this menu, these are kind of ‘best of’ widgets, where Apple has collated
together a bunch that it thinks you might be interested in, but you don’t have to
choose from these, you can sort by App just below.
So, Batteries for example.
I can view the charge of my phone.
Notice the difference, if I tap on the small square widget, versus the rectangle widget,
in terms of how much space they take up in that bar.
You can put what you like in that bar, but obviously you need to play a bit of Tetris
to make sure that everything you want fits.
I’m not fussed about Batteries, so let’s keep looking.
Calendar is going to give me the option of adding in some calendar related information,
events I’ve got coming up, that kind of thing.
Could be great for tracking your meetings while you’re at work.
Clock is going to be great to see World Time information at a glance, or your Alarms.
Fitness is going to allow you to track your Activity Rings.
Home, if you use Apple Home, will allow you to view information about your Home at a glance.
Temperature, lights being on or off, all that good stuff.
News is going to be News headlines, Reminders for quick info about Lists, and Weather for
all Widgets related to weather.
This is a bit sparse at the moment, but that’s because this is brand new, and app developers
haven’t had a chance to roll out updated versions of their apps with Lock Screen widgets
included.
They will definitely be coming for a lot of your favourite apps in the near future, so
definitely keep coming back to this screen often, to see if there’s anything new that
you can add.
For now, let’s quickly add a few widgets to finish our screen off.
When you’re happy with your Lock Screen, press Add to add it in.
Choose Set as Wallpaper Pair to have this as both your wallpaper background, and your
Lock Screen.
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Notice that when we create a Lock Screen and add it, we’re taken back to this page.
This is because we can scroll through, and choose a different one when the mood suits
us.
Let’s finish up customising, by quickly viewing the other options when creating a
new Lock Screen.
This ‘people’ button is a bit misleading, as it actually offers more than just people.
Essentially, your phone is constantly looking for suitable photos in your library that might
make good wallpapers.
This is all done phone side, no information is shared with Apple about this, but as ever
if you’re concerned, Google the term ‘Apple Privacy’ and read up on Apple’s policy
for stuff like this.
When you tap on People, you’re taken to this screen.
‘All’ is basically all of your photos, and you would choose a photo to use.
People is a collection of photos of people from your photo library, I won’t click on
that as it’s photos of my wife and other photos that are private to me, but you should
definitely have a look on your phone.
Nature is pretty cool, your phone is going to pick out some nice shots of nature that
you’ve taken, this oyster shot from Whitstable is pretty good, I might turn that into a photo.
Cities is photos of cities that you might have taken.
I don’t know if these categories change depending on what photos you’ve taken, maybe
if you take loads of pictures of cars, you might have one called cars for example, or
whether they’ll change over time, but that’s how this page works.
Photo Shuffle lets you choose from those collections of photos, or even choose photos manually
down at the bottom of this page, and have the photos rotate out on your Lock Screen,
at a frequency that you choose.
You can have them swap each time you tap on the Lock Screen, or each time you lock your
phone, or hourly or daily.
Emoji lets you choose up to 6 emojis, and your phone then turns them into these fun
little wallpapers.
This one probably isn’t for me, but I can imagine loads of people will have loads of
fun with this one.
I’m kind of surprised Memoji doesn’t feature, maybe that’s coming in the future.
Weather is great, it creates a nice animated Lock Screen showing you the current weather
where you are.
Astronomy is really quite spectacular, and I’ll definitely be setting up a couple of
these to rotate through.
Colour, lets you experiment with some colour options.
If the idea of configuring these from scratch feels a bit too much like hard work, scroll
down and you can see that Apple have created a number of them for you that you can select
simply by tapping on them, and you can then configure those further if you wish.
You can switch between lock screens from this Lock Screen selection page, simply by swiping
through and selecting the one that you want.
You literally just press and hold on the Lock Screen to bring up this screen, swipe to the
Lock Screen you want, and tap to select.
To delete a Lock Screen that you’ve created, swipe up until you see the red bin icon, then
tap that, and it’s gone.
The final thing to talk about here is Focus, and this is a big one, so we’re going to
give this it’s own section.
You can link Lock Screens to Focus modes.
Focus modes, if you’ve not used them before, have been around for a while now, you can
set different focus modes depending on what you’re doing, and your phone will look and
behave differently for each focus mode.
So for example, in your Personal mode, you could have a photo of someone close to you
as your wallpaper and Lock Screen image, and then you could have a Home Screen with apps
like Instagram, Facebook, maybe games that you enjoy playing, basically whatever you
use your phone for in your downtime.
You would also have your phone setup so that all personal notifications can come through
while you’re in Personal mode.
But then, you could have a Work focus mode, which might include a less personal image
for your Lock Screen and wallpaper, and then a Home Screen where apps like Instagram and
Facebook aren’t visible, but maybe your email, the Files app, any communication apps
that you use for work, that kind of thing.
Essentially, it’s about removing distractions, which some people will find really helpful.
You can configure it exactly to your personal requirements, let me show you how.
I’m going to go to Settings, and then choose Focus.
I’m going to tap into Work.
Here in People, you can choose which people to either silence or specifically allow notifications
from.
So maybe your best mate is a bit of a nightmare for sending you memes during the workday,
well this would be an easy way to limit that particular distraction.
Your boss on the other hand, you’d want to allow them to contact you.
Obviously, you configure this for your personal situation.
With Apps, it’s the same theory, choose which apps you’d like to be able to notify
you while you’re at work, and all others will be muted.
Then beneath that, this is where we can customise the screens.
We can choose the relevant Lock Screen, like we just explored in the previous section.
But then we can also choose a Home Screen.
I’m going to tap on one of the suggestions, and notice down at the bottom, where it says
Edit Apps, this is where you can choose what apps you’d want on the Home Screen for this
particular Focus.
This is Work, so I’ll stick with most of these, but I might swap a couple out too.
I’ll add that in as my Work Homescreen.
You can even do the same for a Watch Face if you like.
You can have Focus modes switch on automatically via a schedule by tapping the Add Schedule
button.
You could have Work mode come on at 9am each Monday to Friday, off at 5pm for example.
Then below that, you can apply Focus Filters.
This is a more granular way to manage specific apps, during specific Focus times.
So for example, you might have a Mail account for your work, and a Mail account for your
personal life.
It wouldn’t make sense to disable Mail when you’re working entirely, nor would it make
sense to allow everything in, so this is where you can set up filters at an app level.
In the example of Mail, you could allow one inbox while you’re working, but mute another
inbox until you come out of Work mode.
Or you could mute your work email outside of work hours.
This works for first party apps right now, and I’ve got one third party app showing
here right now, which makes me think this might be something that apps need to be updated
for, in order for this to work.
But the beauty of this, is that when you attach a Focus to a Lock Screen, when you select
a Lock Screen, the Focus mode switches on with it, and vice versa.
So in a lot of ways, it’s almost like you’re getting a brand new phone for your personal
life, and for your work life, or however you want to set your’s up.
It’s really clever stuff, and well worth taking a bit of time to explore.
So that’s essentially how Lock screens now work in iOS16.
As I said at the start of the video, this is a huge change, to the new iOS, and definitely
something I’d recommend you experiment with.
Oh and if you’re like me, and if you’re picking up an iPhone 14 Pro or Pro Max in
the next couple of days, those widgets will work with the always-on display, so even more
reason to try them out.
What do you think?
Do you rate the new Lock Screen?
Any recommendations for how to get the best from it?
Drop me a comment, and let’s talk about it.
And as ever, if you found this video useful, do please consider leaving me a like, and
subscribing to my channel for more content like this in the future.
See you on the next video.