iOS 10: Top Features

iOS 10: What you should know

iOS 10

1.       General redesign and user experience:

Apple says it has "redesigned the experience of the lock screen". But before we get to that, there's a new feature that will mean you'll see more of the lock screen.

At the moment, particularly with the faster second-gen Touch ID fingerprint sensor in the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, there's a tendency to hit the Home button and blast straight to the Home screen, But Apple has unveiled Raise to Wake, which makes the iPhone light up, and go to the Home screen, when you just lift it up. One of several features where we'll see the influence of the Apple Watch on the iOS ecosystem, incidentally.

Onscreen notifications have become more interactive. There are now lots of 3D Touch shortcuts that let you respond to notifications in clever ways without leaving the lock screen, and plenty of dynamic features that can happen in the notification itself.

You can accept invitations, respond to messages, and stay in a messages thread, live, all on the lock screen. You can see live animated progress of your Uber driver after 3D Touching an Uber notification. And - exactly like on the Apple Watch - you can do 3D Touch press and then clear all notifications. That's a handy one, that.

Control Centre has been redesigned. We didn't see much of it in detail, but it looks like it's either customizable or varies in look depending on the context. At any rate it has multiple screens, so if you swipe from the right you get to a special music section. More generally, you can swipe from the right in the lock screen to bring up the camera. That'll be less fiddly than the small icon you had to swipe upwards in iOS 9. You can also swipe from the left to get a list of customizable widgets.

'Slide to Unlock' has been removed, and instead you'll see 'Press home to open'. Doing so will prompt you to enter your passcode or will unlock the phone if you use Touch ID.

2. Siri:

The biggest change to Siri (other than the fact that it's launching on Mac! See our macOS Sierra update for that) seems to be that Apple is opening it up to 3rd-party developers. This means that you'll be able to activate non-Apple apps and functions via voice control.

As an example, Craig Federighi explained that you can now ask Siri things like "Send a WeChat to X" (or, using natural language, "WeChat Nancy that I'll be five minutes late" and so on). There will be Siri support in Slack, WhatsApp, Uber, Lyft, Shutterfly, Pinterest, Map My Run, RunKeeper and lots more apps.

3. QuickType:

Apple is "bringing Siri intelligence to the keyboard". Which mainly manifests itself in the use of artificial intelligence and context cues to offer more suitable and relevant suggestions when typing. QuickType is pretty handy and a genuine time-saver at the moment, but remains unsophisticated. If it's half as good in iOS 9 as the demos suggested, it's about to get a lot better at predicting what you want to say.

What's more, QuickType is going to become more proactive at bringing in data from other apps and offering it as part of your responses. If someone asks where you are, it will offer your location as a suggested response; if someone asks for a person's email address and iOS thinks it knows who that is, it will suggest the relevant contact details.

There will be support for multilingual typing - in other words, not in just one language or another, but in a blend of the two. You won't have to switch keyboards to do this, Apple said, although they didn't offer details. Will you have to tell iOS that you want it to make suggestions in English and Spanish, say, but not French or Italian? Or will it learn your preferences on the fly? We really hope it's the latter.

4. Photos:

Like QuickType, Photos has been given an injection of artifical intelligence. Apple says it will use deep learning techniques to analyse faces, places and objects - the company boasted, if we didn't mishear, that 11 billion computations are made per photo - and use its findings to build smart albums for you.

Photos can draw together linked photos and videos by place, people and time, and automatically create highlight reels and trip mementoes; Apple calls this 'Memories'. It demonstrated a good-looking photo/video album created from a holiday, where individual videos had been cut to include the most relevant bits of footage. Federighi was then able to adjust some sliders and see it remade with a different mood and length. All very impressive on stage, but we'll obviously need to test this for ourselves.

5. Maps:

Maps gets a new design in iOS 10; like some of the other apps that have been revamped for this update, it looked broadly simpler and cleaner. Apple says the controls are easier to access.

Maps now does more in advance, with the proactive elements we've seen before in iOS coming to the fore. Slide upwards from the bottom of Maps and you get suggested destinations. If you normally go to work at this time, then your workplace will be on there. Another location may be drawn from a calendar appointment for this time.

You can sub-filter when searching for nearby businesses. Fitter for restaurants; then filter for seafood restaurants.

Like Google Maps, Apple Maps in iOS 10 takes traffic into account dynamically, and offers alternative routes on the fly if traffic makes them preferable. Unlike Google Maps (we think), its interface will zoom in and out cleverly, depending on the distance to the next turning and other factors.

And, like many of the other features here, Apple is opening Maps up to developers. (Openness is a theme tonight.) This means you'll be able to book a ride with Uber and pay for the ride using Apple Pay, all without leaving Maps.

6. Music:

As we expected, Apple Music has had a major visual redesign - and to be fair, it looks good. It also gets onscreen lyrics for some songs, although you may have to wait for the lyrics for your favorite song to be added.

Better still, whilst taking Live Photos, your music will continue playing - allowing you to have uninterrupted music sessions.

7. News: 

Quick one, this: Apple News has been redesigned - like the other apps here, it becomes cleaner and simpler. But more interestingly, Apple has added subscriptions in News. (More and more this is becoming the app that Apple wanted Newsstand to be.)

Now there is also a 'Breaking news' notifications from the app. You can toggle the feature from the app's settings and even custom-tune the publications you wish to see push notifications to your device.

You can access paid subscriptions, where you can read an unlimited amount of articles from various publications. There is also a widget for the News app, but given that it's still in beta expect it to be a little rough around the edges and only provide basic functionalities.

8. HomeKit & new Home app:

And now a bigger one. Apple is getting serious about smart homes and the internet of things, launching a dedicated app, Home, for controlling all the appliances that are compatible with HomeKit.

If you open up Home, you'll see all your HomeKit-compatible accessories, no matter which company makes them, and you can easily control them all from one hub. Many of these will have 3D Touch shortcuts: you can force-tap and slide on a dimmer app, for instance, to adjust light levels.

There are some really nice features in Home. One is called Scenes, which is effectively a pre-customised set of adjustments across a range of accessories that you can activate with a single tap or Siri command.

In the demonstration, the user is getting ready for bed and taps a button in Home labelled 'Goodnight'. This invokes an entire raft of smart-home instructions: it locks the door, adjusts the thermostat, draws the curtains and so on. Similarly, there could be a 'Good morning Siri' command that gets your home ready for the day.

Home will be built into iOS's Control Centre, and Home notifications will be interactive - Apple demonstrated a door notification that can be 3D Touched, bringing up a live feed of the door camera and the ability to unlock the door.

On 19 July, Apple organised the 'Accessories' option found within the Control Panel of the HomeKit app.

9. Phone:

The all-important but often neglected Phone app gets a single big enhancement: voicemail transcription. iOS will convert speech into text so you can glance through a voicemail without having to listen to it. Will be great if it's accurate enough (and remember that it doesn't need to be that accurate, since you're just trying to get the gist; if it's clearly important, you can just listen to the message).

One other update: Apple has pledged to work with third parties to provide more information about known voicemail spammers, so you can be warned when one is ringing.

10. Messages:

And to finish up, a huge (if often slightly silly) update for what Apple pointed out is the most frequently used app in iOS. There are lots of small updates here, many of them clearly aimed at a young audience.

You'll be able to use rich links in Messages. Share a link and, as it would in Slack or Twitter, artwork and a precis of the article may be pulled in, so your friends can get an idea of the gist without having to click.

Emoji will be three times the size, and emoji will be incorporated into predictive text: bad news for those who are sick of all the emoji in messages they get from iPhone-owning mates. In fact it goes even further: Messages can scan a message you're about to send and highlight all the words that could be replaced with emoji. Tap them one by one and they'll transform into the appropriate pictures.

You'll be able to add various bubble effects to your messages, too.

You can make a message (including pictures, if you wish) come up in 'invisible ink', which means it's blurred out until the recipient swipes across it with a finger. This is designed for situations when you want to surprise someone with a nice message and want to delay the moment of gratification for a little longer. We'd hope that iPhone owners won't use this for dumping their other halves.

Other effects include 'Slam', which makes the speech bubble briefly bulge outwards dramatically, and others that make the text initially smaller than normal.

Wait, there's more. You can send handwritten messages; you can use Digital Touch and send your heartbeat (another nod to watchOS). You can use full-screen visual effects on your messages, so that the entire screen lights up with a garish laser show if that's what you want. It's all a bit much for us oldies but, to quote Marty McFly, your kids are going to love it.