What do I think of the four main themes — Staying Connected, Finding Focus, Using Intelligence, and Exploring the World — of iOS 15? Glad you asked.
Staying Connected
FaceTime
It started with some changes to FaceTime: Zoom-esque call scheduling, Portrait mode (why?), voice isolation (neat), spatial audio (can’t decide if it’s a gimmick or not), and Share Play.
Share Play lets you watch/listen to content with the people in your call — music, movies, and a screen share. Share Play seems like if Hulu’s Watch Party or Spotify’s Group Session had a video call component. I don’t imagine I'll use it to watch anything lengthy with someone, but I can see this being fun when I want to see someone’s reaction to a short clip.
Messages
Okay so if you know me — which you probably don’t — you know that I’ve been pining for the ability to scrub voice messages. After this section of the keynote, no one said anything about scrubbing and I was pretty disappointed. So, the first thing I did after installing the developer beta on my iPhone was:
Open messages and side scroll the last voice message I sent. Oof.
Okay so maybe if I long press?
Hmm… okay. So that’s new. Can I tap into the view?
No more having to to restart a voice message because you didn’t hear something at minute 3. Yeah, I’m happy.
There’s also a new layout for multiple photos in conversations and a system-wide “Shared with You” that shows you songs, photos, news articles, etc. that were shared with you (see what they did there) in the respective apps.
Finding Focus
Focus
This one allows you to customise what apps and people you allow to send you notifications when in different modes — e.g. driving, do not disturb, and sleep. Your focus status can also be shared (and overridden).
Using Intelligence
Spotlight
To think that the morning before the keynote, I was thinking about how cool it was that Google Photos allowed you to find a photo by searching for the text in the photo and how it would also be cool if Photos would let you do the same.
Little did I know that a few hours later, I’d find out that Apple built this into iOS 15 Photos (well, only into Spotlight for now) and that it works better than Google’s implementation — look at all the photos Google missed between July 8th and June 30th (Apple’s results seem kind of chronological) — without having to use the cloud.
Live Text
Not only can you lookup text in your photos, but you can also select it like on a PDF or you can press the little icon at the bottom right to bring focus to the selectable text.
You can also insert text from the camera by tapping an input field.
Pretty smart.
Exploring the World
Next we were shown updates to Wallet, Weather, and Maps.
Wallet
Not only can you use your iPhone as your car key, but you can also use it as your house, corporate building, and hotel key. Of course this is up to third party manufacturers adding support — and I am in South Africa so I doubt I’ll encounter this anytime soon — but this is cool nonetheless.
Talking about being in South Africa and not being able to use cool iOS features, if you live in one of the participating US states, you can also use your iPhone as your driver’s licence and ID card.
*insert and dismiss comment about how loosing your iPhone is now also losing your x, y, and z*
I don’t know, be responsible.
Weather
Oh and weather really looks really pretty and kind of reminds me of Carrot.
Along with the facelift, we now get weather maps and data cards showing: UV index, sunrise and sunset, wind speed and direction, past (24 hour) and future (10 day) precipitation, feels like temperature, humidity, visibility, and pressure. Yay data.
Maps
Maps oh maps. Apple Maps. I don’t know why Apple Maps still gets a bad rap. I mean sure, when it first came out it was pretty bad. Okay, it was really bad. But now it’s really (pretty) good. It’s also really pretty.
There’s nothing like using your phone for directions to get around New York as a tourist, exiting the subway, walking down the street for a bit, seeing your arrow go the wrong way, and then doing a 180 while remembering which side of the sidewalk you should be on. Instead of walking with your fingers crossed, you can now use AR and scan the buildings around you when you resurface to know which way to go.
I’d go back just to try this out… and maybe stick around to use the other unsupported features 🤷♂️.
Three Little Bits
You can access Spotlight from the Lock Screen by swiping down.
New Apple TV Remote:
The new combo address bar and toolbar in Safari is going to take some getting used to
That’s not all that’s new to iOS but in the words of Coach Greg, I am “ENDING IT HERE.”
There are some health, privacy, and Siri changes (to name a three) but those weren’t covered in this portion of the keynote. Want to know what I think of those? Subscribe now (for free) and you’ll get my thoughts on macOS Monterey (Big Little Lies), watchOS 8, and the other announcements in your inbox over the next few days.