Apple held their annual developer conference i.e WWDC (Worldwide Developer Conference) at the McEnery Convention Center located in San Jose, California. The event took place on the 4th of June.
WWDC is an event where Apple unveils the new versions of operating systems for their entire line of products. And this year was no different. So in this blog post let's take a look at whats new in iOS 12 which is worth your attention.
iOS 12
Last year apple probably announced the worst iOS update ever in the form of iOS 11. iOS 11 was literally unusable when it came out & it took apple 4 major iOS 11 updates to fix it. After this apple announced that iOS 12 will not be a revolutionary update in terms of features & it will focus on the fixing stability issues which were not fixed by iOS 11. So we didn't have any big hopes for iOS 12 in terms of feature but Apple did provide some of the most wanted features. In the keynote, Apple's SVP Craig Federighi mentioned that iOS 12 will be focusing on making the operating system better. So all in all the purpose of this update is performance & stability.
ARKit 2.0
Apple announced a new AR file format called USDZ. Adobe CEO Abhay Parasnis then announced that Adobe will support USDZ. Apple also announced an app called measure which will help you to measure anything using ARKit 2.0. The company is also expanding AR to multiplayer capabilities.
Search capabilities in the photos app
Apple announced an upcoming feature which will be included in the photos application. With this feature, you'll be able to search the photos with only one keyword hence making it easy to find the photo you need. Apple is also going to add suggestions to improve the discovery of the photos.
Siri
Siri also got a bit of an upgrade. Apple introduced Siri shortcuts with which you can set a catchphrase to execute a bunch of commands. Apple also introduced third-party app integration capabilities to Siri which will help app developers to include Siri shortcuts in their apps.
Stocks app & apple news
Both of these apps got a UI revamp. Now stocks app will also show the news related to that stock. Also, there is a new sidebar in the Apple news application to find specially curated news stories from the editors to the Apple news. Both of this apps will now be available for iPad.
Apple Books
Apple went ahead and changed iBooks to Apple Books. Apple also added audiobooks to this platform. Apple Books app will also support the CarPlay.
Do not disturb mode & smart notifications
There is nothing new in DND mode but still, Apple made it a little more useful with this update. Now if you turn on the DND mode while sleeping, your iPhone or iPad will not send you notifications until you turn it off. We did not get the dark mode that we wanted for so long but apple did finally announce grouped notifications. The feature which Android is having from quite a long period of time.
Screen time
With this feature, you will get a statistic of how much time you are spending on a certain app. This feature will also let you set a time limit for your use of any app. This also brings more parental control.
Animoji & Memoji
Apple is adding new faces in the animoji section which will be - a ghost, a koala, a tiger & a T-rex.
In animoji now you can also track your tongue. Apple also introduced Memoji basically their version of Snapchat's Bitmoji, Xbox's avatars or Nintendo's Miis. You can now use these animojis and memojis in messages and in facetime calls.
Facetime
While we are on the topic of facetime let's talk about its new feature which will let users facetime up to 32 people. It'll now also work on MacOS and on the Apple watch.
My opinion
Although as Apple said this is not a really big update in terms of design but still this is a good update. Considering the fact that iOS 12 will be available to all the devices that are currently running on iOS 11 that is a welcome announcement for all the iPhone 5s users. ARKit 2.0 looks promising and Apple's interest in making AR the next big thing is good for AR's development. The search capabilities added in the photos app is a step in the right direction to catch up with Android and so are the Siri improvements and smart notifications. Updates to the iBooks.News and stocks app was needed to keep it alive and Apple delivered on that front by providing the much-needed updates.
Overall iOS 12 isn't that feature rich but it still brings some long overdue features to the platform. While stability and performance are not things that I can talk until I get to use iOS 12 but still I can say that they were needed and considering Apple's track record of delivering on the claims that they make I do think that iOS 12 will deliver the goods.
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