Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Jose this week promised to make up for two years of underwhelming updates to iOS.
The event was intended to give developers insight into the capabilities of the new version of Apple’s iOS, and what they can harness before the official release in September. Developers have access to the first iOS 12 beta now, while everyone else has access to the public beta at the end of the month. While this public beta might be tempting to install, Apple is notorious for releasing extremely buggy public beta versions of iOS which are not suitable if iPhone is your daily driver.
iOS 10 and 11 often introduced more bugs and performance issues than useful features and improvements. iOS 12 has been unveiled as the better version of iOS, which deals with these known issues and improves performance on the older iPhone and iPad models. This promise was solidified by offering the upgrade to every iOS device that runs iOS 11, which means that every iPhone from the iPhone 5S onwards can be upgraded.
The performance upgrades were announced by using the 2014 iPhone 6 Plus as an example of an older device. Compared to iOS 11, iOS 12 is claimed to launch apps up to 40% faster, the keyboard displays up to 50% faster when requested, and the camera launches up to 70% faster from the lock-screen shortcut.
The only new iOS feature is grouped notifications. Users can group notifications by person or app if the person or app creates too many notifications on the iOS device. This feature has been a long time coming and has been a feature in Android since 2014.
True to its promise to jpin the fight against phone addiction, Apple introduced a new health app that doesn’t require any additional technology. The Digital Health Dashboard provides insights into how many times one picks up one’s phone, how much time one spends on particular apps and provides warnings when one is using an app too much. It can also be used by parents to monitor iPhone or iPad app time usage and block apps after a certain amount of time spent on them.
For example, if you feel Instagram wastes a lot of time, you can prescribe an hour a day and no more than that. iOS will warn you when you have 5 minutes left to use it.
Animoji, the facial-tracking emoji videos on the iPhone X, has been improved by introducing tongue recognition. A new extension of Animoji called Memoji allows users to create virtual avatar-style emojis to use as an Animoji. This is clearly following in the footsteps of Samsung’s facial tracking AR Emoji.
Siri gets an update but not as great as one would expect. Siri Shortcuts is a new feature which allows users to create recipes for phrases, similar to the IFTTT app, which can be used to execute multiple actions. For example, one can create a Siri Shortcut to the phrase “I’m coming home” to turn on a smart home heater, begin boiling a smart home kettle, find the fastest route home in the Map app and start playing a favourite radio station via CarPlay.
CarPlay gets an upgrade, with the integration of third-party map apps like Waze and Google Maps. A great step forward in the direction of a great smart car experience with the iPhone.
Group FaceTime, a highly anticipated feature, has finally been made a reality. The update will bring the capability to host 32 participant FaceTime calls, with a promise of similar clarity to traditional 2-participant FaceTime calls.
AR Kit has also been improved and iPhones which support AR will receive an app called Measure. It allows a user to measure a line on any surface and get the length of a real-world object, without the need for a ruler.
Finally, the Photos app receives smarter features, allowing users to share photos from events with everyone who was at the event, using the facial recognition software built into the app. The redesign makes the Photos app more user-friendly and provides the users with a glance at what happened a year ago and groups notable events. This brings the Apple Photos app closer to the powerful Google Photos app.
Overall, iOS 12 shouldn’t be anticipated for its new features but rather for its performance upgrades. This announcement has shown that Apple cares about its customers.
