Apple announced iOS 15, a major update with powerful features that enhance the iPhone experience.
Here are some of the new updates that can enhance your daily life:
FaceTime
Users can now share experiences with SharePlay while connecting with friends on FaceTime, including listening to songs together with Apple Music, watching a TV show or movie in sync, or sharing their screen to view apps together.
Not only can the FaceTime update allow entirely new ways to connect, but calls also extend beyond Apple devices! This is possible with the ability to create a link from any of your Apple devices and share it through Messages, Calendar, Mail, or third-party apps, so anyone can join a FaceTime call from their web browser on Android and Windows devices.
Tools to Find Focus
Focus is a new feature that filters notifications and apps based on what a user wants to focus on. Customers can set their device to help them be in the moment by creating a custom Focus. This feature can be helpful during the work hours or while you are winding down for bed. Users can create Home Screen pages with apps and widgets that apply to moments of focus to only display relevant apps and reduce temptation. When a user’s Focus is blocking incoming notifications, their status is automatically displayed to others in Messages, reflecting that a user is not currently reachable.
New Notifications Experience
Notifications have been redesigned, adding contact photos for people and larger icons for apps that make them even easier to identify. To help reduce distraction, a new notification summary collects non-time-critical notifications for delivery at a more opportune time, such as in the morning and evening. Using on-device intelligence, notifications are arranged by priority, with the most relevant notifications rising to the top, and based on a user’s interactions with apps. Urgent messages will be delivered immediately, so important communications will not end up in the summary, and it’s easy to temporarily mute any app or messaging thread for the next hour or for the day.
On-Device Intelligence Powers Live Text, Advanced Spotlight Search, and More
Live Text uses on-device intelligence to recognize text in a photo and allow users to take action. This can be useful during scenarios when users want to search for and locate the picture of a handwritten family recipe, or capture a phone number from a storefront with the option to place a call. With Visual Look Up, users can learn more about popular art and landmarks around the world, plants and flowers found in nature, breeds of pets, and even find books.
Spotlight now uses intelligence to search photos by location, people, scenes, or objects, and using Live Text, Spotlight can find text and handwriting in photos.
Photos includes the biggest update ever to Memories, with a fresh new look, an interactive interface, and integration with Apple Music, which uses on-device intelligence to personalize song suggestions that bring memories to life.
A Redesigned Browsing Experience with Safari
Safari gets a new design that makes controls easier to reach with one hand and puts content front and center. The new tab bar is compact and lightweight, and floats at the bottom of the screen, so users can easily swipe between tabs. New features, such as the customizable start page and web extensions on iOS, make Safari even more personal and powerful.
Explore the World with Apple Maps
iOS 15 takes Maps further than ever before with a brand new way of looking at the world through Maps, making it easier to navigate and explore. Users will experience significantly enhanced details in cities for neighborhoods, commercial districts, elevation, and buildings, new road colors and labels, custom-designed landmarks, and a new night-time mode with a moonlit glow.
Maps features a three-dimensional city-driving experience with new road details that help users better see and understand important details like turn lanes, medians, bike lanes, and pedestrian crosswalks. Transit riders can find nearby stations more easily and pin favorite lines. Maps automatically follows along with a selected transit route, notifying users when it’s nearly time to disembark, and riders can even keep track on Apple Watch.
New Keys and State IDs Come to Apple Wallet
Apple Wallet adds support for additional types of keys, making it possible to access everyday places with just a tap. iPhone can also be used to unlock a user’s vehicle, home, office, or even a hotel room — all through keys stored in Wallet.
Those of us who tend to forget their wallets at home will no longer have the issue of being without their driver’s license or state IDs. The Transportation Security Administration is also working to enable airport security checkpoints as the first place customers can use their digital Identity Card in Wallet. Identity Cards in Wallet are encrypted and safely stored in the Secure Element, the same hardware technology that makes Apple Pay private and secure.
New Privacy Features
iOS 15 introduces even more privacy controls to help protect user information. With on-device speech recognition, audio of Siri requests is now processed entirely on iPhone by default. App Privacy Report offers an overview of how apps use the access that has been granted to location, photos, camera, microphone, and contacts in the last seven days, and which other domains are contacted.
Find out more about the additional updates on here.
