Apple today previewed iOS 16, delivering the biggest update ever to the Lock Screen, and new sharing, communication, and intelligence features that together change the way users experience iPhone. “iOS 16 is a big release with updates that will change the way you experience iPhone,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering.
Trust Apple to turn an announcement for a personalized lock screen experience into an event. Android phones have offered personalisation options for years, along with the widgets and design features that Apple is introducing at WWDC with much fanfare. “Users can also change the look of the date and time with expressive type styles and color choices,” says a release from the Apple newsroom. Umm, yeah, it's 2022.
The widgets thing is inspired by the Apple Watch, “making it easy to get information at a glance, such as upcoming calendar events, the weather, battery levels, alarms, time zones, Activity ring progress, and more”. The only question here is – what took so long?
Ok, now a few good things:
Notifications have been redesigned to roll up from the bottom, ensuring that users have a clear view of their personalized Lock Screen.
Recall messages: Users can edit or recall recently sent messages, recover recently deleted messages, and mark conversations as unread so they can come back to them later. In addition, SharePlay is coming to Messages, making it possible to enjoy synced content like movies or songs and shared playback controls all while chatting in Messages, the company said.
Live Text and Visual Look Up Enhancements: Using the Live Text feature, users will be able to pause a video on any frame and interact with text. Live Text also adds the ability for users to quickly convert currency, translate text, and more.
“Visual Look Up takes photos further by introducing a new feature that allows users to tap and hold on the subject of an image to lift it from the background and place it in apps like Messages” – ok, this is mildly impressive and mildly useful.
So far, so neatly packaged – as we have come to expect from Apple. There isn't a lot going on here, but as always, Apple has managed to get the world excited about iOS 16 – and full points for that.
