One of the strange design decisions in iOS 7 is the use of the Helvetica Neue for the home screen. Previously they used a bold font, and this worked much better for your typical home screen background. Let’s have a look at an icon at two different positions on the screen:
The left one is much harder to read because of the background contrast. The font chosen by Apple demands a low contrast background, and can look very elegant in such a situation, but how many people will have such a picture around? I spent roughly an hour to find one for my iPhone, even though I knew I needed a low contrast background. But I still was caught out by micro contrast in some images, and this is just way too much work.
Apple has kind of responded with the bold fonts system setting, but then it also changes fonts all over the place, instead of fixing the problem: your typical home screen image has high contrast, so you need a way to make labels readable against such a background. This can be bold text ( for your home screen only, please), or you can take the frosted glass effect used for the pinned icons, and apply it behind the labels as well:
