It’s been two weeks since the 2024 WWDC keynote and I’m sure you’ve read a lot online about the ugly tints on the home screen, but this is as ever when I post my Apple reviews online is a different look at everything, after using all the new different OSs for two weeks on my primary devices.
But before we get into that I want to talk about a tweet online I saw this week which talks about how the beta is really stable and doesn’t crash, doesn’t affect your battery life ect ect and whilst I do agree this beta is stable, it’s stable so far (And so far for a beta) Unlike that tweet I saw which is basically encouraging people to install the beta I still wouldn’t recommend it, the next beta update could ruin all of that. If you still do want to install the developer betas, then make sure you do the same thing I did and back up your phone using Finder on your mac first!
iOS 18
Okay iOS and as I’m sure you’ve all seen there’s more home screen customisations now, my personal favourite it is to have the app icons on “Automatic” meaning that when the sunsets and my iPhone goes into dark mode the app icons now also go in to dark mode. You can have these always in dark mode too if you prefer and you can also easily flick a switch and make the app icons bigger now which also removes the text.
The other option is the “Tinted” option which can let you tint all the app icons literally any colour you want using 2 sliders to make it look even better there’s also an eyedropper tool where you can select a section of your wallpaper and have it match the colour of the app icons. I’ve seen online a lot of people giving this option slack for the way it looks and at the moment I would say “give it time”. First Apple may improve the feature in upcoming beta updates and secondly give third party app developers time to update their app icons to work better with the tinting option and it should start to look better.
A highly requested new feature is that we can now lock any app’s so that they require FaceID to be opened. This feature also goes one step further then that however as we can also then have the app fully hidden from our home screens. Selecting this has the app moved in a “Hidden” folder in the App Library which then requires FaceID to be opened. It is worth noting moving apps to the hidden folder stops the app appearing in Search anywhere and push notifications will stop working for the app.
Another awesome customisation update is to our control centres which are now fully customisable. We now can make buttons the size we want, and you can add or remove whatever buttons you want easily via the new controls gallery which is inside the control centre itself. On the lock screen you can also now customise those torch and camera buttons to whatever buttons you would like.
Now when we’re younger we’re told that if you’ve got nothing nice to say, don’t say it. So on that note the Photo’s app got a big update. I don’t like it… It’s now all on one page, it’s so cluttered anything is harder to find. I’m hoping it gets a little better in the next couple of months and that’s the Photo’s app.
In messages there’s even more ways of writing what you want how you want for example you can make text bold or even move. I think the most important change to messages in iOS 18 however is the support for RCS (Rich Communication Services). This improves texting via SMS so it improves texting our friends who use Android phones meaning things like Read receipts, sending media and tap backs will now work! (As long as their Android phone also supports RCS but most Android phones do.) Finally in messages you can now schedule a message to send in the future which is neat.
Game mode has now come across from MacOS to iOS. Game mode. Automatically starts running when you open a game and should improve your experience whilst running a game. I can’t say I’ve noticed much changes myself but I know that it does pause Background activity whilst in game mode. I suppose the people who might see the benefit the most with this is those using older iPhones.
Across iOS, iPadOS & MacOS there’s now a new “Passwords” app meaning that the “Passwords” section of settings has been removed and can now be easily accessed anywhere from this app. It’s got a similar design to the Reminders app and can easily highlight your Wi-Fi passwords as well as any potential security issues like re-used passwords or passwords that have been detected in a data breach.
Finally, I want to talk about Apple Music as it’s my most used Apple Service. There’s been only really small changes to Apple Music and it’s design this year. The biggest change really is the “Play Next” & “Play Later” system which to keep it simple has been re-designed to be like the way Spotify handles music queues. I was happy to see though that the shuffle, Replay & Autoplay buttons have been re-designed and are bigger, so the days are gone where you accidently press the wrong one because the buttons, we’re too small.
There is genuinely a lot of new stuff inside iOS 18 and there’s a lot I haven’t covered from the new features in the Notes app to things like the all new reader in Safari which can even read a whole article for you in Siri’s voice. I also haven’t mentioned the latest in AI and not Artificial intelligence I’m talking about “Apple Intelligence”. That will be in a separate article at a later date so keep an eye out for that.
WatchOS 11
For years now the Apple Watch has been one of my most favourite gadgets that I own and WatchOS is the updates I look forward to the most and this year was no exception with some much-needed updates and changes.
Starting with the “Fitness” app
It is awesome to see that finally a feature that has been requested for a long time has been added and that we can now PAUSE our Activity rings. The default option is a day but you can pause your rings all the way to 90 days. (Strange that there’s a limitation or that it’s 90) but this is awesome because if you’ve been working out and working all week well the healthiest thing to do would be to have a day relaxing and not necessarily close all your rings also means you can pause them for awhile because your ill for example till you get better.
If you’d rather not pause your rings for a day to relax more but you’d still rather do a little less one day of the week well good news for you. You can now customise each of the goals for each day. So for example now you really can have the perfect lazy Sunday with a stand goal of just 5.
On your iPhone the “Fitness” app has got a new design which I can’t say I’m most comfortable with yet but you can customise it to show whatever information you’d like to see which is pretty neat I suppose.
Check In with Workouts
Check In was a feature which was launched last year with iOS 17 which is an easy to use feature that can automatically let your friends know you’ve gotten to your destination safe and now it’s been added to the workout app. Simply swipe left whilst your running for example, hit the check in button and send it to a chosen contact. Your contact will be notified and will be able to easily check your alright and when you finish your workout they get a notification to say your safe.
New App – Vitals
WatchOS 11 brings us a new app named “Vitals”. Using all the health data that the Apple Watch collects on you day to day the Vitals app makes your daily average for the past 7 days of your body’s vitals. These are your “Heart Rate”, “Respiratory Rate”, “Blood Oxygen”, “Body Temperature” & “Sleep Duration”. It will then let you know to review your vitals should any of them be different from what they usually are whilst it will also remind that things like Illness & Alcohol will affect this too.
A small app itself but any new app on the Apple Watch I think is always great to see especially when its health-related ones.
New Photos Watch Face
There’s an updated Photos watch face which looks defiantly better with a cool depth effect on the time like similar how it works on your iPhones lockscreen. I certainly like the look of it but if you look on Apple’s website, they’ve gone all out on this small feature which to me looks a bit like it might be a gap filler to make WatchOS 11 look bigger than it is.
You can watch a video version of this blog post below on YouTube where I look even deeper in to the aspects of iOS 18 & WatchOS 11. I even show you bits of what the latest and greatest in the platforms look like. If you haven't checked out my YouTube before, give it a look.
Thanks for reading,
Kyle Wilkinson
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