On the 7th of June Apple hosted a special keynote as part of their WWDC21 event where they announced iOS 15. They released the developer beta that very same day and I have been running it ever since, during this time I’ve been getting myself familiar with the new features and with the public beta likely to be out soon I thought now would be a great time to document my thoughts.
Safari
I’ll start with what in my opinion is one of the most notable new changes and that is the re-designed Safari. After using it for over three weeks my opinion on the new design is still very mixed and will take a long time for users to get used to when iOS 15 releases in September time.
The address bar now floats at the bottom of the screen with only two buttons on it (Those being the share button and the Tab button) When you start browsing the site the address bar hides until you start swiping up significantly. Whilst I do like this design as you get your phone screen showing the whole page now sometimes the bar doesn’t appear straight away and the refresh button has disappeared, to refresh you now have too go to the top of the page and swipe down. In my opinion this feels like an extra step now. You can swipe left or right between tabs now which is definitely more convenient.
A few more extra new safari changes and features is the ability to have separate tab groups, search tabs and Safari extensions now being enabled on Safari for iOS.
FaceTime
FaceTime was probably the most spoken iOS thing at this event and in the developer beta 2 the extra features got enabled. Personally I haven’t used FaceTime much but I imagine that all the additional changes are to compete with services like Zoom and Microsoft Teams which have really accelerated in user growth since the pandemic began last year.
Some of the coolest new features coming is the ability to share your screen to other users as well as listen to Apple Music together and queue up songs together. You will also be able to watch programs together with certain services, obviously Apple TV+ being one of those but things like Disney+ will be compatible so this is quite cool and would be nice for younger couples.
Maps
Apple Maps has had a couple of cool design tweaks, first of the maps look much better and the street names are all in capitals now. You can change the design of the map depending on what your doing, personally I keep it on driving mode all the time. When you are driving it’s labelled on the map which exit off a roundabout you should take, it’s niche things like this that have been changed on maps but in my opinion make a good difference.
Messages
Apple made quite a big deal with Messages improvements but in my opinion they aren’t anything very special. To me it just seems that it makes it easy to see what things your friends have shared with you across the Apple Ecosystem. The new gallery view to share photos does look better but in my opinion Apple could do better and it would be cool to see iMessage come to things like Windows and Android phones but I can’t see it happening. (Although if it came to iCloud.com that would be better and more likely I think.)
Focus
This was a well spoken about feature which in my opinion is just a glorified Do not disturb. For me the Personal and work mode didn’t exactly work, this might change in a future beta. The only proper mode I’ve used of it is the Fitness mode which comes on automatically when I start a workout on my watch and then when I’ve finished my workout and pings up all the notifications I missed during my workout.
Some little bits
CarPlay - A couple of design tweaks, first of they changed the position of the album artwork again on the now playing screen which is something I feel like they did every beta in iOS 14. The maps updates have also been added to CarPlay and there is a couple more settings.
Notifications – They do look different and might take a little getting used too but I do think they look better.
Camera – It’s very easy now to copy text from photos and works surprisingly really well you can do it direct from the camera app or even from an old photo in the photos app.
Health – Health now shows your trends, for example if your resting heart rate would dip for a week you would get a notification pop up telling you that your resting heart rate is trending lower then usual, it doesn’t just do this for your resting heart rate though it does it for pretty much all of the available data which I think is pretty cool.
Thanks for reading
Kyle Wilkinson
This review was written on the 28th of June 2021. Based on an iPhone 12 Pro running iOS 15 Developer Beta 2 some features may not be able on all devices and some features may change on the official release. The screenshots used are from the same beta.
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