There aren’t many adventurous things you can do in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. So, I decided to install the beta version of the iOS developer 14 hours after Apple announced it at its World Developers Conference (WWDC) on Monday.
I previously installed beta developer versions on Android and handled errors. However, given the poor quality of the release of the stable version of iOS 13, I was skeptical about the quality of this new beta developer. But after 24 hours of use, I realized that this is a stable beta version, and I don’t have to worry about any major bugs.
The main theme of iOS 14 is the customization of the home screen. Now you can more easily move icons, place widgets between them, and hide pages to make things easier. Right now there are only source widgets available on iPhone, but things will get more interesting when iOS 14 is available to everyone and third-party app makers have their widgets in the library.
Also, you can stack these widgets on top of each other, making it easier to have many widgets in one placeholder.
Apple has also introduced the App Library, something that resembles Android app drawers. App Library automatically organizes your apps into folders, and there is also an alphabetical view when you go into search mode.
I think I will use the App Library to check what apps I have and remove the ones I am not using. Other than that, I am satisfied with using Spotlight search for now.
Then there is picture-in-picture. So I can keep watching YouTube or Netflix videos in a small floating video when I have to quickly reply to a message or email.
That brings me to ‘Smarter Siri’, which now floats like a bubble at the bottom of the screen instead of taking up the entire screen. It’s a bummer that even after this redesign, you really can’t interact with things on the screen while Siri is on.
A significant benefit of this arrangement is that calls now don’t fill the entire screen either; instead, they appear as a floating banner at the top of the screen, so you can quickly accept or reject it and get on with your life.
When I started using this beta version of iOS 14, I noticed a lot of things that were not announced on stage. And boy are there some cool little features hidden in the nooks and crannies of this update.
First of all, there is a touch gesture feature hidden in the touch settings within Accessibility. This allows you to turn double taps and triple taps on the back of your iPhone into actions like taking a screenshot, going to the home screen, or scrolling down. You can also assign a Siri shortcut to one of these gestures.
Second, there is SMS filtering, which is very important to me because we receive so many spam messages from Indian companies. Now, I can filter them through known and unknown senders. In addition, I can also view all transactional and promotional messages in different categories. Android has had this feature through many third party applications. It was time for Apple to launch this.
I found a bunch of little gems in iOS 14, like the ability to recognize sounds (like a cat, a dog, and a doorbell), caption images, and emoji search. You can read about it here.
There is also some neat privacy in this mobile operating system. Every time an application uses its microphone or camera, you will see a small dot at the top of the icon in the network bar: yellow is for audio and green is for video.
You can also go to the control center and see what application your camera or microphone recently used.
The control center shows which application recently accessed your microphone or camera. H / t @SirajSoft pic.twitter.com/3Q1B51UNKE
– Ivan Mehta (@IndianIdle) June 23, 2020
Apps will now have to explicitly ask for your permission to track it, and you can view privacy reports for each website in Safari. A more important update is that both Safari and iOS have built-in password protection, so if any of your passwords is compromised, Apple may ask you to change it. You can read about all the privacy related updates here.
Password security recommendations. And alerts for when your password was part of a data breach pic.twitter.com/lNBEgduxab
– Ivan Mehta (@IndianIdle) June 23, 2020
There are tons of iOS 14 features, like improved iMessage, Maps, and Home. However, I have not used these features since they are not as relevant to India, or personally I have no use case to test them.
Overall, I’m happy that the home screen design finally allows users to personalize their iPhone screens to some degree. And most importantly, there is no shortage of small but useful features that come with iOS 14. I can’t wait for the full implementation.
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Posted on June 25, 2020 – 3:22 PM UTC
