While in previous years Apple any major user modifications to the system environment iOS did not allow, with the arrival iOS 14 has turned things around. It now offers its users widgety for a fairly large customization of the home screen, but also the ability to change the icons of any applications via the Shortcuts application. Although these changes have not been completely complete so far, as launching applications has somewhat prolonged, this has changed with the advent of iOS 14.3 will change.
Fantastic change in iOS 14.3 beta 2 - shortcuts added to the Home Screen now use compact UI and don't launch the Shortcuts app anymore.
Which means custom icons like our own MacStories Shortcuts Icons will now run shortcuts in place, just like widgetwith 😍https://t.co/9J47uU6ZlN pic.twitter.com/aHAS8iD0BW
— Federico Viticci (@viticci) November 18, 2020
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Currently, changing application icons only works as imaginary remote access to them via shortcuts. In other words, changing an application icon via Shortcuts is not a change in the true sense of the word, but only the creation of a shortcut of the given application on the desktop with its own design. Furthermore, the shortcut launched in this way still needs to first launch the Shortcuts application to activate the application it represents, which will perform the given action for it. And that is exactly what will change now. In iOS 14.3 – or rather in its second beta – namely Apple reworked the functionality of launching application shortcuts from the desktop in such a way that, to put it simply, it removed the intermediate step in the form of a full-fledged Shortcuts launch. This is now replaced by just a banner that comes out from the top of the screen, which informs about the use of the Shortcuts application to launch the respective application launched via a shortcut on the desktop. In other words, this means that setting custom application icons will now be much more usable and, in a way, more intuitive. We will advise you how to set custom icons for applications in our older article here.
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