More than a month after I installed iPadOS 15 on my iPad mini 5 and realized this operating-system update had left me with a major home-screen cleanup, I’m still fussing with the placement of app icons and widgets. This says a lot about my own interface persnickitiness, but it also speaks to some sloppiness by Apple.

The first stage of this OS transition was nerd rage at how iPadOS had littered the screen with unrequested widgets and blown up an app grid I had spent far too much time poking and prodding into place. (The app-rearrangement user experience, in which dragging one app to another’s place could easily result in the system deciding you really wanted to file both icons in one new folder, was already nerd-rage fuel before iPadOS 15 shipped.) Even more annoying, many of these new, randomly distributed widgets were app-sized morsels incapable of displaying any useful information.

I started untangling this hairball as I’d originally tidied up my iPad: one home screen at a time. I dragged the icons for my most-used apps–the usual social-media suspects, mapping and photo apps from Apple and Google, the messaging apps I lean on most often–to the first home screen–then plopped Apple’s weather widget in the top-left corner.

(That widget does not tie into the Dark Sky weather app that Apple bought in 2020 and has yet to turn into a built-in iPad weather app; because reasons, it instead leans on the IBM-owned weather.com.)

Then I marched through additional home screens: One got a calendar widget spanning the top third of the screen with alternate browsers and productivity apps below it; another got NetNewsWire’s widget showing my RSS feeds as well as news, e-book and local-info apps; yet another collected apps for the various streaming-media services I use; one more gathered travel and finance apps, plus Apple’s Screen Time widget to tell me to spend less time on this tablet.

Done? No. If I keep swiping to flip leftward through this procession of home screens, I get back to the Today View screen Apple introduced in iPadOS 14 as a sort of widget prison. In 15, this special home screen still only lets me plant widgets in its left half (viewed in portrait mode, my usual iPad use case), even though every other home screen in iPadOS 15 allows me to put widgets where I please.

(“Where I please” means in a grid that grows from the top-left corner, because relentlessly design-centric Apple still exhibits next to zero appreciation of how a little negative space could make home screens easier to navigate and look less alike–a convenience I’ve appreciated on Android for years.)

If this parcel of screen real estate must feature this fixed layout, I’d be content to park the App Library–the automatically-categorized set of folders that freed me from having to create an “Apple, etc.” folder for the apps I never use–in Today View’s right half. But I can’t do that–and while iPadOS 14 let me get rid of Today View entirely, that’s nowhere to be found on my iPad. Maybe Apple will fix this in iPadOS 16? Preferably without blowing up the app grid I’ve rebuilt over the past few weeks?