One of the most notable changes of the last year was the focus on iOS 12 working better and faster on older devices. You could see the improvements even on the one year old iPhone X. This year Apple also talked about iOS 13 being more optimized. Apps will launch 2x faster, smaller downloads from the App Store and Face ID now unlocks 30% faster.
Before the keynote, it looked like this year would be quiet for the iPhone and most of the improvements will come to the iPad, as it was mostly ignored last year. During the iOS segment, iPad wasn’t mentioned at all (later about that), but the segment itself was long and not because they tried to make it that way, there was just too much to show.
Mostly those were some little things, like the ability to download large apps over cellular (not all the countries in the world have limited mobile internet), low data mode (which is nice in Europe, where we don’t have roaming, but data is a bit limited when you travel to other countries) or emoji button which is now separate from the globe (very welcome addition in this part of the world, where almost everyone has 2 or more languages added). I will also add QuickPath here (that’s Apple version of the swipe typing. This is a feature Android had for years and I’m using Gboard on my iPhone right now, but would love to dump it, if Apple also adds haptics to the key presses).
But there were also some monumental changes, like the ability to select Wi-Fi network and Bluetooth device from the Control Center. This was on a lot of wish-lists probably from the day Apple showed Control Center. The other one – Volume Control is now on the side of the screen, I think even John Gruber would agree, this one grants a big fat finally.
The feature Apple started presentation of iOS with was Dark mode and it did look cool. Right now there are a lot of apps that feature dark mode on their own, but I don’t use it in all of them. I’ve realized that I’ve turned off dark mode on almost all “content” apps, like Pocket, Twitter, Bear etc. But have it turned on in Overcast, for example and I like the dark interface on macOS. I think here will be something similar. I’m sure I’ll use it, but hope I will be able to change it app by app.
Two apps that received big updates this year were Photos and Reminders. If in case of Photos there was the whole demo of the app, surprisingly reminders got a short mention. It looks like totally different app and I think it could be a great choice for someone in the middle – current Reminders are too simple for my needs, but something like OmniFocus is a total overkill. As I’m using GoodTask right now and it uses Reminders as a backend it will be easy to try new reminders out when the app comes out.
I didn’t like how Photos app looks, but that may just be presentation, will need to check it myself. The much better photo editor and the ability to edit video are great new additions. I liked the Years views, which is something similar to On This Day, but more discoverable. Also the ability to hide duplicates is nice, I wonder if later Apple will let you to remove those (after review, of course).
The other feature I loved was sound sharing through AirPods. This is amazing for travel. Last time we’ve had 10+ hour flight, I’ve had to pack two pairs of wired headphones and a couple of dongles, it looked bizarre. I also don’t share headphones with anybody, so from that point of view it’s amazing, sometimes I want to give my colleagues to listen, I can just share the sound.
Privacy and Sign-in with Apple
I was thinking of making it the whole separate post, but decided to leave it here. As always Apple is very straightforward about privacy – they don’t need your data, so you can trust them. One great example is location permission, in iOS 13 users will be able to grant access just for one time and you will receive notification if some app uses location data in the background.
The other privacy focused addition sounded great during presentation, but when some details came out a lot of questions were raised. Sign-in with Apple – a lot of apps, when you are signing-in using Facebook or Google, get more information then they actually need, so using this feature Apple will provide only the most necessary and you can even choose if you don’t want to share some information. Additionally, if you don’t want to share your e-mail, you can sign-in using randomly generated e-mail which will forward messages to the real one. Again, sounds amazing. But then, after the Keynote it was discovered that this feature is mandatory if your app uses any other “sign-in” provider. I’m all for new privacy focused features, but here one of the biggest companies in the world uses it’s power to dictate their service.
This is a very dangerous territory, right now it feels like the trust in Apple is unimaginably high, but what will happen when some key people will be changed? Do we really want to grant so much power to one big player? I think there are only good intentions from developers inside Apple who made this feature and people who decided it will be mandatory, but there is a little of fear for the future. Hope this fear is unreasonable.