"Where’s the new stuff? Where’s my progress?" That’s how the tech enthusiast dives into a new version of Apple software. iOS 13 has some of it, some new toys. But several of the most interesting parts will be slower to develop.
We installed the iOS 13 beta to get a feel for what’s new. Two features stick out as ways to get an instant sugar hit of change. These are Dark Mode and Look Around in Maps.
Dark Mode
Dark Mode seems simple at first. What was white becomes black, so text turns into pin-pricks of light instead of 3-pixel-wide absences of it.
Such a mode has been implemented in several Android interfaces over the years, but Apple is neck-and-neck with Google, which will add system-wide support for Dark Mode in Android Q.
Dark Mode has technical benefits but creates UX problems. The tech boost relates to how the display tech works in Apple’s top-end phones. The iPhone Xs and co have OLED screens, where each pixel is its own light source. More black means fewer lit pixels, and lower power consumption. I have not noticed a marked difference in battery life using Dark Mode. But it could prove a significant boost for heavy screen-on applications such as in-car GPS navigation.
But there’s a problem. Maps is where Dark Mode looks and feels its strangest. Streets become grey threads in a sea of black, and the change is disconcerting. Use Google Maps to navigate and you may recognise this view, as it switches to something similar when you go through a dark tunnel.
Zoom in and the colour scheme inverts again: black roads, grey terrain. But you’re left wondering, is this actually better?
Getting dark right
At least Apple recognises Dark Mode isn’t a simple switch to flip. You’ll see black versions of all of Apple’s built-in apps, from the Clock to the iTunes Store, but developers will have to make optimisations to their own apps. Apple has not forcibly goth'd up the third-party apps we tested.
Dark Mode works particularly well in content-rich apps like iTunes, as it helps album and film covers stand out. We’re all used to this visual language. Netflix and BBC iPlayer already effectively use a “dark mode”, presumably because of the boost to perceived colour contrast. Icons pop more.
There’s also a question of taste to tackle. The blue fonts used in the App Store stand out much more in Dark Mode, and make the app look less clean and carefully designed than in the standard view. Store fronts like this don’t necessarily need to be subtle, but Apple won’t want to lose the veneer of software sophistication it has applied more successfully than Google over the years.
Of course, some apps already have a dark mode. Amazon’s Kindle app has had it since 2017, although the current iOS 13 beta seems to break the app pretty comprehensively. Don’t download software betas unless you’re willing to put up with a few bugs.
Mapping Ashford
The new Look Around feature in Maps is worth experiencing, though. This elicited more than a few “oohs” at iOS 13’s unveiling, not least because most consider Apple Maps a bad alternative to Google Maps.
Look Around is Google Street View on mind-altering substances. It lets you seamlessly travel between locations in a first-person view, complete with 3D mapping of objects such as houses, trees and cars.
This isn’t magic. Even without the advanced camera cars Apple uses, parallax calculations between successive images can be used to figure out depth. However, the effect is engrossing.
Right now only San Francisco, Cupertino and Las Vegas offer Look Around. But Apple’s camera cars have been spotted in Blackpool and Kent, suggesting good chunks of the UK may already be captured. Americans may not be famous for their non-US geography, but Apple is unlikely to kick off UK Look Around with Ashford.
Look Around is, for now at least, iOS 13 candy. It’s not used in iPhone in-car nav, you can’t get first-person previews of journeys and there’s no Peloton exercise application for all this data. You simply tap into the distance to move, like a particularly realistic-looking RPG. But it is impressive.
There are other Apple Maps tweaks. iOS 13 lets you share ETAs for journeys, and features like public transport routes are brought closer to the level of those in Google Maps. Using Apple Maps may, finally, not be a bad choice.
Photos
Photos gets an iOS 13 revamp, too. Navigation of large photo libraries, which most iPhone owners have, is much improved. There are tabs for “days”, “months” and “years”. They cut down the amount of flicking needed to find photos of that holiday from two years ago. And a “play movie” button creates a fully soundtracked video of photos from albums auto-created based on EXIF/meta data.
Other parts of iOS 13 are simply cleaned up and quietly improved. The volume control graphic is subtler and smaller. The keyboard finally supports gesture typing, called Quickpath, although those desperate for the feature will likely already have switched to a third-party keyboard such as Swiftkey. Similarly, iOS 13 has improved the Reminders app, but there are many such apps available on the App Store.
Siri also sounds a little more natural, thanks to a new text-to-speech engine. Its intonation is more nuanced. At one point, one phrase seemed to be read out in an older Siri voice, as if suddenly possessed by a demon from its past. Bizarre, but perhaps this only occurred because the iPhone was downloading the Siri British voice files at the time.
The voice assistant is supposedly smarter, too, but so far the difference is not glaring.
Incoming improvements
It’s a little too early too judge some of iOS 13’s potentially more impactful features. ARKit 3 will let augmented reality objects interact more realistically with the real world. They will be able to sit behind real objects, and visibly so. But there are currently no third-party apps available to make use of these new abilities.
Sign in with Apple is not available yet, either. Again, this will feature in third-party apps, alongside the familiar “sign in with Google” and “sign in with Facebook”. It’s a privacy-retaining alternative to those relative privacy vacuums.
Apple will, most likely, release the new version of iOS in September, alongside a bunch of iPhones. As it always does. The changes to iPadOS are arguably more dramatic, but even if you have no interest in Dark Mode, Apple has made some useful changes in iOS 13.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
