Apple’s biggest event of the year, its annual Worldwide Developers Conference aka WWDC was an event with high expectations and it some where did met them. There were tons of announcements related to tvOS, watchOS, macOS and the biggest one, the iOS 12. This was probably the most celebrated announcement at WWDC 2018, but do not expect a complete overhaul of the OS. These are just few tweaks which we were looking for a couple of years now and they are pretty useful. So if you don’t have time to go through a detailed article, simply scroll down to the top 5 iOS 12 features.
#1. Grouped Notification
This is probably the most asked for feature in iOS, since Android has this for years. What it does is group all your notification from one app in a stack format, which looks pretty clean and organized on the notification screen. You can tap on it and expand to view individual notifications. You can further take actions by manoeuvring through them. When done you can simply tap the collapse button to stack them together once again.
#2. Animojis
An iPhone X exclusive feature, it is possibly the most talked about in the device. There are new characters – a koala, tiger, T-rex and ghost in addition to tongue detection. Your tongue is now a part of the animoji. Another cool addition is Memoji, which is an animoji of the user and looks exactly the way you look. You can create your own Memoji with tons of customization allowed. Animojis now work with FaceTime too and you can impose it on your own body.
#3. Screen Time
This feature helps you understand how addicted you are to your phone by telling you the way you use your phone and how much. This also helps you to decrease that addiction by putting time limits to use apps. The interesting part is, this app provides stats, such as – the most used app, how many times you pick up the phone during the day, which apps send you the most notifications during the day and a lot more. This is actually a lot of information which can be put to good use.
#4. Siri Shortcuts
Bigger improvements with Siri were expected, making it a better virtual assistant but what Apples has done here is not that bad. What Shortcuts does is, it triggers an app or command to a phrase of your choice. For example – we used the phrase Hello sunshine to check on weather updates. So every time Siri is asked, Hello sunshine, it tells you the weather in your city. It will be interesting to see how this expands to more apps and commands in the future.
#5. iOS Apps
There are no overwhelming visual changes but some stock apps have got a new face and there is a new app for iOS 12. The Books app is now Apple Books and it supports a new design which is, well, not that modern but still new. The News app has been redesigned with modern characteristics and the Stocks app too has got a new UI with built-in News. The newest entrant to iOS 12 is the Measure app which is an AR-based app which helps you point at objects and measure them in real time. You can measure the length or volume of an object. It works well with smaller objects.
