Apple has announced its next version of iOS which is iOS 14 in the WWDC 2020 keynote. The new iOS 14 comes with many exciting features including new home screen design, widgets, picture in picture mode.
App Library
The new iOS 14 adds App Library at the end of the home screen page. Apple Library automatically organizes all of a user’s apps into one simple, easy-to-navigate view, and intelligently shows applications based on usage patterns. Moreover, it shows up apps that you’ve recently installed so you can get to them faster. Users can choose how many Home Screen pages to display and easily hide pages for quick access to the App Library.
Widgets
Widgets are getting many updates with iOS 14. Now widgets can be pinned in different sizes on any home screen page, providing useful information at a glance. Widgets are accessible via the Today View, but can also be dragged out of Today View and onto the home screen. You access these widgets through the “Widget Gallery,” with multiple different sizing options.
Apple has also introduced ‘Smart Stack’. With Smart Stack, you can swipe along to view different widgets if you want. It also uses machine learning to surface the right widget based on time, location, and activity. Widgets can be customized for work, travel, sports, entertainment, and other areas of interest.
Compact Call Screens and Picture in Picture
Apple has redesigned the call screen. In iOS 14 when you receive an incoming phone or FaceTime call on your iPhone or iPad, it is now presented with a compact banner rather than taking up the entire screen. This feature is available in Androids for years and it finally made it to the iOS. The iOS 14 now also supports picture in picture. Finally, Apple joins the Android club in this feature.
Other iOS 14 Feature Outlined by Apple
Translate is designed to be the best and easiest app for translating conversations, offering a quick and natural translation of voice and text among 11 different languages. On-device mode allows users to experience the features of the app offline for private voice and text translation.
Siri expands its knowledge, helps find answers from across the internet, and can now send audio messages. Keyboard dictation runs on devices when dictating messages, notes, email, and more.
The Home app makes smart home control even easier with new automation suggestions and expanded controls in Control Center for quicker access to accessories and scenes. Adaptive Lighting for compatible HomeKit-enabled lights automatically adjusts the color temperature throughout the day, and with on-device Face Recognition, compatible video doorbells and cameras can identify friends and family. The Home app and HomeKit are built to be private and secure, so all information about a user’s home accessories is end-to-end encrypted.
AirPods gain the ability to seamlessly switch between Apple devices with automatic device switching. Spatial audio with dynamic head tracking brings a theater-like experience to AirPods Pro. By applying directional audio filters, and subtly adjusting the frequencies each ear receives, sounds can be placed virtually anywhere in a space to provide an immersive listening experience.
Digital car keys give users a secure way to use iPhone or Apple Watch to unlock and start their car. Digital car keys can be easily shared using Messages or disabled through iCloud if a device is lost, and are available starting this year through NFC. Apple also unveiled the next generation of digital car keys based on Ultra-Wideband technology for spatial awareness delivered through the U1 chip, which will allow users to unlock future car models without removing their iPhone from their pocket or bag and will become available next year.
Find My will add support for finding third-party products and accessories with the new Find My network accessory program. This will allow customers to use the Find My app to locate other important items in their lives, in addition to their Apple devices. User privacy remains central to the Find My network with end-to-end encryption built-in. A draft specification is available for accessory makers and product manufacturers starting today.
Safari offers a Privacy Report so users can easily see which cross-site trackers have been blocked, secure password monitoring to help users detect saved passwords that may have been involved in a data breach, and built-in translation for entire webpages.
Health has all-new experiences to manage sleep, better understand audio levels that may affect hearing health, and a new Health Checklist — a centralized place to manage health and safety features — includes Emergency SOS, Medical ID, ECG, Fall Detection, and more. Health also adds support for new data types for mobility, Health Records, symptoms, and ECG.
The Weather app and widget keep users up to date on severe weather events and a new next-hour precipitation chart shows minute-by-minute precipitation when rain is in the forecast.
Accessibility features include Headphone Accommodations, which amplifies soft sounds and tunes audio to help music, movies, phone calls, and podcasts sound crisper and clearer, and sign language detection in Group FaceTime, which makes the person signing more prominent in a video call. VoiceOver, the industry’s leading screen reader for the blind community, now automatically recognizes what is displayed visually onscreen so more apps and web experiences are accessible to more people.
