Thinking about what feels different here, there are a couple of things that could be fun to implement:
- On iOS, opening and closing an app also scales and blurs/unblurs the wallpaper at the same time that it’s animating the app entering/exiting the foreground.
- Also, years ago, Apple added a very subtle 3D effect to the Home Screen. Essentially, when you’re looking at the Home Screen, as you tilt the phone, the icons and widgets move a few pixels in the direction of the tilt, which makes it feel like they’re popping out of the screen a little. To study the effect in detail, you can just look at the edge of an icon or the text below an icon and tilt the screen around and notice how it moves relative to the background image. It’s meant to be a very subtle effect, not some garishly dramatic effect.
I did that parallax background effect on a web site many years ago. Unfortunately (but understandably) accelerometer data is now behind a permission prompt on the web. Displaying a garish modal permission prompt so that you can do a subtle background transition doesn't make sense as a tradeoff.
I actually added the parallax effect back in my version of iOS 7 on the web (2013). It was meant for people to check the new design out on their phones before upgrading. You could even open/zoom into folders. Spend quite too much time on it, but it was quite novel back then.
https://streamable.com/pki7ux
That linked discussion doesn't say it is broken all the time (which your comment strongly implies to anyone who doesn't read the link)... and I had verified the parallax effect was working fine earlier today when I made my comment.
I hadn't rebooted my phone in quite awhile, so I'm not sure what the conditions are for that bug, but I think that discussion is wrong that rebooting is the only way to get it working again. I had surely accessed the App Library since the last reboot at some point, and yet parallax was working fine. But I can confirm that it does break (at least temporarily) after accessing the App Library.
- On iOS, opening and closing an app also scales and blurs/unblurs the wallpaper at the same time that it’s animating the app entering/exiting the foreground.
- Also, years ago, Apple added a very subtle 3D effect to the Home Screen. Essentially, when you’re looking at the Home Screen, as you tilt the phone, the icons and widgets move a few pixels in the direction of the tilt, which makes it feel like they’re popping out of the screen a little. To study the effect in detail, you can just look at the edge of an icon or the text below an icon and tilt the screen around and notice how it moves relative to the background image. It’s meant to be a very subtle effect, not some garishly dramatic effect.