Once upon a time, the iPhone had a single home screen, and life was simple. Eventually we were able to add websites as icons to our home screen, which meant we needed more space, so Apple added multiple home screens. Then a little thing called the App Store debuted in the summer of 2008 and everything changed. People suddenly found themselves with 3, 4, 7 pages of apps, and at 16 per page, it became quite daunting to both move about and find the app they wanted. There simply had to be a better way to do this. Over time - specifically in mid- to late 2009, Apple introduced two features that helped alleviate - but not solve - the clutter. One was a feature of the iPhone OS itself, and the other a feature of iTunes.
Interim Solutions
The iPhone-based solution was Spotlight search, introduced in summer 2009 with iPhone OS 3.0. Like its counterpart introduced in Mac OS X Tiger (10.4), Spotlight is easily accessible and fast as can be, and makes for an excellent app launcher, much like on the Mac. You can simply swipe left from your main home screen, type the first couple letters of your app, and tap the search result to launch it. Boom. Simple. It works fine, though for me it still feels more natural to browse by swiping back and forth between screens, so I don't find myself using Spotlight on the iPhone anywhere near as often as on my Mac (which is constantly).
The next, and even better attempt to fix the "too many apps" syndrome was bundled with the release of iTunes 9.0 in September 2009. Now, when your iPhone is plugged in to your computer, you get not only a full list of synced apps, but images depicting each home screen and their layouts, enabling you to quickly drag and drop apps between screens, even several at once. It's a great addition to the software, and one I use frequently, but there's one thing it can't fix: 7 full pages of apps is still 112 individual icons, no matter how logical your organization is. Many people were hoping for folders to consolidate similar apps and cut down on the amount of home screens they had to swipe through without having to just remove things from their iPhones. Of course, very few people - if any - seemed to have a realistic and usable approach to do so.
The Real Solution
It should be a shock to nobody that Apple found a great method. Let us feign surprise.
Feign!
Okay. Clearly, a desktop-like interface for creating and working with folders wasn't going to work here. The solution had to be something that felt natural within the OS, that fit with the way we already interact with our devices. Apple had already introduced what is essentially an "Edit" mode with firmware 1.1.3 that made it simple to move apps around and from screen to screen, so I suppose it was natural that folder creation and modification would be handled in Edit Mode. Or Wiggle Mode, if you prefer.
So to make a folder we just drag one app onto another? That's it? The OS even automatically names the folder based on the type and genre of the apps you put in the folder, which is great, simple and will probably suffice for a lot of people. For the rest of us, we can still name the folders to whatever we want as well. The UI for them is superb too: folder contents are revealed by the home screen background splitting and sliding apart, as if the apps live "behind" the home screen. The icons outside of the active folder then dim, making it clear that while in the folder, you're only interacting with the apps inside.
I probably don't need to explain at all why this is useful. I've spent a good deal of time moving apps around and organizing them in a certain fashion. I discovered a newfound love for word games after the App Store launched, and currently have ten of them on my iPhone, so I always want to keep those together on one screen. I have certain areas devoted to different things - brand new stuff and Lite versions I'm trying out live on screen #2, social-based apps are clustered together, as are utilities, photo-related apps, and my favorite of all my faux categories: "Games with round icons," seen here:
Needless to say, I live to organize and categorize, which is all well and good until I get new apps and it throws off my careful planning. Being able to move all of my "categorized areas" into folders is the one feature of iPhone OS 4 that's going to change the way I use my iPhone more than any other. Never again will downloading a new app or three mess with my organized app ecosystem, forcing a reshuffling of 7 or 8 screens of apps. In fact, I won't even have 7-8 screens of apps to scroll through anymore, so I'll be able to get to everything that much faster.
Needless to say, I'm very excited about Folders, so June/July can't get here soon enough.
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