Got an iPhone? Then you’ll want to hear about Apple’s big
plans for it - iOS 10 is coming, and it’s bringing some major
changes.
The new OS got revealed on stage at WWDC this week, and while it might
not land on your phone until the Autumn, developers will be
spamming that download button tonight so you’ve got plenty of apps
to look forward to.
In the meantime, we’ve got a primer on all things iOS
10. Scroll on down to find out what’s new.
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Want a one word summary of Apple’s greatest innovation
for iOS 10? Emoji, and we’re only half-joking.
The formerly sober, if efficient Messages app has been
transformed into something that’s vibrant and fun. That means emoji
display in a larger format than ever before, you can comment on
messages with emoji and change individual words in a text to emoji
with a couple of taps. Seriously, Apple has gone all in those
yellow nuggets of joy making Messages a lot more akin to WhatsApp
or Slack than its formerly straight-faced guise.
This philosophy extends to more complex stuff like
replying to messages with a full screen effect (laser machines,
balloons and bursts of confetti are all available) or hiding the
content of a message with ‘Invisible Ink’ that you can swipe away.
Granted, some of these new features are immensely twee but they go
a long way towards making Messages a distinctive app with its own
identity rather than something you use out of sheer obligation.
Apple’s also made some more practical tweaks to
Messages that iPhone users will no doubt appreciate. You can get
rich links to a website (a.k.a. the ones where that preview a web
page’s headline and lead image), the ability to play videos within
the app and send hand-written messages.
If you’re most excited about the emoji, then that’s OK.
Apple is too.
iPhone owners have been itching to get rid of Apple’s
own apps from their device since it first launched. Eight
years later, you finally can.
All the major iOS apps, including Mail, Weather and
Contacts, are now available to download through Apple’s App Store,
meaning they can be updated individually by Apple and deleted by
you as well. So you no longer need to download a whole new version
of iOS simply to see a refreshed Notes and can also give Stocks a
long-awaited boot off your 16GB of storage. It’s a win-win
situation.
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After a somewhat shaky start, Siri has rapidly cemented
itself (or herself, or himself, depending on your preferences) as
an integral part of the iOS experience. And from the sounds of it,
your favourite sassy AI assistant is only going to get more useful
in iOS 10, because Apple has finally opened it up to
developers.
That means you can now tell Siri to text your mates not
just in Apple’s own Messages app, but in WeChat or WhatsApp or
Slack.
It means you can tell her to call your cousin in
Australia on Skype, pin a recipe your like on your Pinterest board,
or ask her to find you an Uber when it’s 1am and you’re pretty sure
you’ve missed the last train home.
The possibilities are vast here, and again, it’s great
news for people who don’t like pushing buttons – or who are using
CarPlay and don’t want to take their hands off the wheel.
We’d always suspected that 3D Touch would prove to be
like Touch ID, underwhelming on first impressions but great once
Apple learnt how to get the best from it. That certainly seems to
be the case with iOS 10, with a host of lock screen features having
been added to the innovation.
You can now reply and keep track of a Messages convo,
check the status of your Uber and get further detail from your
notification without having to unlock your iPhone. Just hard press
down on the relevant pronouncement and to get familiar with its
contents.
And there are further tweaks to 3D Touch once you’ve
logged into your phone with the ability to watch video highlights,
or view the number of unread messages you have from your most used
contacts. So Apple’s getting the hang of its pressure sensitive
tech, and just in time too.
If you hate physically pressing buttons, you’re going
to love iOS 10’s “raise to wake” feature, which uses your iPhone
motion sensors to turn on the screen when you pick it up. You’ll
see notifications and messages without having to tap the home
button – saving precious energy you’ll need later in the day.
You’ll also be able swipe right from the lock screen to
open the camera app straight up, which sounds marginally faster and
easier than the current “swipe up from the bottom-right corner”
gesture.
Music Apple Music has had a solid, if unspectacular,
start to life and a big part of its problem has been the way it
looks.
Frankly, it’s a bit of a mess. Mercifully, it’s getting
a spruce up in iOS 10 - much cleaner, much simpler and we expect
much easier to use.
As well as those cosmetic improvements it also now has
a Spotify-aping curated playlist on the For You tab, although
actually it may well turn out to be ‘Spotify-beating’ given that
it’s daily rather than weekly. Oh, and Apple Music Connect, the
fairly rubbish social music thing, appears to be dead. Thank
heavens for that.
It looks like Apple is getting serious about the smart
home with iOS 10, adding a new app to your homescreen called,
funnily enough, Home.
You’ll be able to control all your Homekit-enabled tech
from one place, with different Scenes making multiple changes with
a single tap. Time to head for bed? One press and the doors lock,
thermostat tops up the temperature, and the blinds close - assuming
you’ve already given control of your home over to the robots.
Got a smart doorbell? You’ll be able to see who’s
calling from the iPhone lockscreen, without having to jump into an
app first. You’ll also get geofencing, so the lights could come on
automatically as you’re walking up the drive after work.
You can customise Home with your own wallpaper, and all
your accessories can be found in the one place - no matter who made
them. It’s about time HomeKit actually turned into something simple
you can use every day, and Home looks like it’ll be just the
ticket.
The basic iOS phone dialler doesn’t sound like the
first place you’d look for a whole slew of updates, but Apple has
delivered in spades with OS 10. It’s now your go-to app for
answering calls from WhatsApp, Messenger and Slack. Oh, and your
own phone number, we suppose.
If you get a lot of nuisance calls, the dialler now
checks if they’re spam with a third party extension before they get
to you. Not who you were expecting? Reject and block the number
without having to pick up first. Let the call go to voicemail and
it’ll transcribe your messages for you too, so you don’t have to
scramble for a pen whenever someone rattles off their number.
Contact cards have been overhauled with shortcuts to
the ways you most regularly get in touch with your mates - no more
scrolling through a list of numbers to find the right number to
dial. FaceTime, WhatsApp and work emails are just a tap away.
You’ll even get a full-screen picture whenever they try
to call you - even if the phone is locked.
That’s lots to like about Apple’s news aggregator, not
least that Stuff is on it (and even briefly featured in the
keynote), but it’s hardly essential yet. The updates revealed
tonight won’t fully change that, but it’s at least moving in the
right direction.
For starters, it’s had a redesign; it’s a lot cleaner
and simpler in design and indeed closely resembles the reworked
Music in style. It also now has subscriptions: you’ll be able to
subscribe to (and pay for) premium content from your favourite
publications, if they have any. Finally, you’ll be able to get
publication-specific notifications: so when Stuff publishes a new
review, you’ll get a lock-screen notification about it.
Really, these changes are bigger deals for publishers
than for users but the more attractive it is to the media, the more
they’ll get onboard with it - and ultimately that’ll make it a more
attractive app for everyone.
We’ve been in love with Google Photos since it launched
at Google I/O 2015, but now Apple’s own Photos could give it some
serious competition.
Like G Photos, Apple’s app will now organise and
auto-tag your images by using deep machine learning to recognise
faces, places and events.
Click on the Memories tab at the bottom of the photos
app and you’ll be able to see collections of related images - for
instance all the photos from one particular day out - laid out
nicely with added maps and location info alongside them. It’ll even
make movies for you, adding music according to a theme of your
choice.
So far, so Google Photos then - but unlike its rival,
none of these computations will take place in the cloud, with Apple
stressing repeatedly that they’ll all be confined to your phone.
How bothered you are about that depends on how worried you are
about Google accessing all of your images (and, we guess, about,
um, what kind of photos you take).
iOS Maps has never really recovered from its horrendous
beginnings, with Google Maps remaining the go-to app for all things
location-based, but Apple seems to be steadily moulding it into an
impressive alternative – and one that, like many other
once-walled-in parts of iOS, is now open to third-party
developers.
The upshot of this is that iOS 10 will make Maps more
of a platform than it has been to date. The example Apple’s Eddie
Cue showed off on stage? You can browse for a restaurant, make a
reservation using OpenTable, book an Uber car to get you there, and
pay for the latter using Apple Pay – all without leaving Maps.
Maps is also getting more proactive with its
suggestions, using the information it knows about you from other
apps to make suggestions. If your calendar says you’re due to be in
a location on a particular day, and you open up Maps nearby, it’ll
mark that place for you automatically.
The built-in navigation is also getting an update,
showing traffic levels on your route, giving you rerouting
suggestions if traffic is heavy ahead, and suggesting places you
might want to stop for food or petrol. So Apple’s Maps still trails
behind Google Maps, but the distance between the two has lessened
dramatically.
iOS 10’s keyboard is going to be a pretty smart cookie,
by the sounds of it – and it’s all thanks to Siri’s big ol’ “deep
learning” brain.
Yep, Siri’s intelligence is being integrated into the
keyboard, which means QuickType’s autofills and reply suggestions
will get more context sensitive. If, for instance, your friend
messages you to ask where you are, the keyboard will suggest you
reply by supplying your location data.
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