The 9 Key New Features Coming to iOS 11
When iOS 11 finally goes live, your iPhone and iPad will get the shiny new software you've been pining after. Lucky you! Contained within iOS 11 are several key enhancements to apps and controls you use every day, and there are some useful capabilities being added to features you've maybe been ignoring. Here's the stuff we're looking forward to the most.
Siri's Voice
Your iPhone's assistant has a new voice, which sounds remarkably more human. And there's a male voice that works the same way. Siri does translation now, automatically translating answers to Chinese, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. It watches what you browse and see, and can automatically surface stuff you might like in other apps. Search for Iceland, Apple News will give you Iceland news. The goal here is to make Siri bigger than just a voice assistant. It's supposed to be proactive, and helpful—but like most assistants, it's not always great at doing those things. In related news, Siri slides into a new speaker called HomePod.
ApplePhotos
There are enhancements to Live Photos (remember those?). You can now grab whatever frame you want from a Live Photo and make that the front frame. Apple’s using computer vision to make them loop perfectly; you get Boomerang-style animations that perfectly highlight a key piece of action. There's compression news too: Apple's High Efficiency Image Format saves better images at half the size, and HEVC video encoding makes 4K videos take up less room too.
Apple
Maps
New cities, better navigation, speed limits, and lane guidance. You know, features you’ve been using in Google Maps for like 45 years. There's a new Do Not Disturb While Driving mode, which basically shuts up all your notifications if you’re connected to a car. It can see that you’re moving, and leave you alone. If you even TRY to turn on your phone, it’ll make you tap through a notification before you can do anything.
AppleYour Lock Screen
There are a lot of icons on the Control Center panel now. Everything is on one page, but we're still vague on personalization options. There's some cool new usability stuff. When you're in the notification center, you can now swipe back down from the top and actually see your lock screen. That shows the newest notifications, but you can scroll down again to see everything.
Apple
Lots of New Stuff for iPad
Drag-and-drop is coming to the iPad in iOS 11. Drag images, text, whatever. There's a new native app called Files, which is a smarter and cleaner way to browse all of your files—not only on the iPad, but in iCloud, Google Drive, OneDrive, and other cloud services. You get a super-sized dock in iOS 11, too. Fill it with as many apps as you want, then swipe it up from the bottom of any screen for faster app-switching. Speaking of app-switching, there's a new App Switcher that makes multi-tasking truly powerful. It especially shows off the power of Files and drag-and-drop, since you can move things across apps by dragging—just like you do on a Mac.
AppleMessages
Your messages will be heading to iCloud for better syncing. This also gives you the ability to simultaneously delete embarrassing messages across multiple devices, a genuine user service. It may also solve the plague of getting the same notifications across all your devices (fingers crossed).
Apple
New App Store
It now looks a lot more like Apple News. There’s a "Today" tab with stuff you might like, and a "Games" tab with other stuff you might like. In-app purchases are also pulled out in the App Store, so you can show off new features in the store itself. There are so many fewer things on the screen at a time—being featured by Apple is going to be an even bigger deal with this redesign. While it will make popular apps more popular, it could make everything else harder to find.
AppleApple Pay
The mobile payment platform continues to grow. Apple Pay will be available in 50 percent of retailers this year. But there's a big new feature that will drive more adoption outside the store: you can now use Apple Pay to send direct payments to friends. So think Venmo but, you know, in iMessage.
Apple
Music Everywhere
Speaker support is coming to HomeKit. You can use AirPlay to get multi-room audio through HomeKit. With that and with the new HomePod speaker, Apple stabs Sonos right directly in the back. Lots of speaker-makers are going to support AirPlay 2, which is the tech that’ll make enhanced multi-room work. You can throw music to Apple TV, too, and use Siri anywhere to control everything. Any app can plug in and get in on the fun.
Apple
