iOS 13 brings a lot of changes along with Dark Mode, which we were longing for. At WWDC 2019, a lot of new features and performance improvements were introduced. The highlights features include new and simpler ways to browse, new AR techniques added to Maps, Sign in to Apps & Websites with Apple ID and more. Apple has released a developer beta version of iOS 13 and therefore we tested the new features introduced.
Let’s know what the features are and how to use them.
Dark Mode
One of the most awaited features, Dark Mode has finally made an entry with iOS 13. It gives a Dark color scheme which is great for low-light environments. All the native apps including Notes, Mail and Messages comes with inbuilt support for the mode.
You can quickly enable or disable Dark Mode from Settings. All you need to do is tap Display & Brightness-> Dark Mode and make working on iPhone easy for your eyes. Moreover, you can schedule the Dark Mode at a particular time, also at sunrise or sunset.
Your favorite third-party apps can be on Dark Mode too, developers can use API to implement the same.
Photos Gets A New Look
Photos app is revamped and becomes manageable than ever. Browsing and sharing photos have become easier. It gives you an option to view everything in All Photos and can get them segregated in Days, Months, and Years. The previews under Days, Months, and Years tab are larger which makes images distinguishable.
Months also highlights your images by events. Photos tab also shows the location’s name, and other details to provide context for important events. Years highlights photos taken on or around a date in past years.
Remembering birthdays has become simpler with birthday mode. Assign birthdays to People in your People album and Photos tab will highlight photos of them on their birthday.
Just like Instagram search page, under Photos tab, muted videos and Live Photos will start playing as you scroll.
Your Photos app detects and hides similar and duplicate photos, screenshots, documents, and more, to remove the clutter while you scroll through your Photos Library.
You get Screen Recordings Album to keep all your Screen Recordings in one place. Also, search has improved, which makes finding photos in thousands of your photos.
Video & Photo Editing
When you edit an image, each adjustment displays its intensity, therefore you can view all the effects increased or decreased. You can tap the effect icon to see the difference in the appearance of a photo, before and after applying the effect. With Enhance, you can control the intensity of your automatic adjustments such as Brilliance, Shadows, Highlights, Exposure, Brightness, Saturation, Contrast, Vibrance, and Black Point. With Noise reduction, you can reduce or remove noise from photos.
Now adjust Portrait Lighting effect, move the light closer to the subject, smooth skin, brighten facial features, and sharpen eyes. With High-key Mono, you get a beautiful look with a monochromatic subject on white background.
Editing videos has become easier, every adjustment, editing and filters that you can do to Photos can be done to video as well. So, you can increase or decrease exposure, apply filters or rotate your videos. It supports all video formats captured on iPhone, including video 4K at 60 fps and slo-mo in 1080p at 240 fps. You remove an effect such as a filter or undo a trim to get the original video.
Privacy & Security
With new updates, you set app permissions for an app to ask every time they fetch your location data. Also, whenever an app will use your location, you will get a notification so that you can choose whether you want to update permission or not. Without your permission, apps can’t access your location using Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, this is possible due to changes in API and new controls. You can also decide whether you want to share location while sharing images on the social media platform.
Sign In With Apple ID
Every time you visit a website which requires a login asks you to give away your email address or Facebook ID, Apple has managed to find a way to help you escape that. To login to such websites, you can use Apple ID. Just tap Use Apple ID button to sign in or use Touch ID or Face ID.
Apple also promises that it will never track you when you use to sign in with Apple. You can protect your Apple ID with 2FA. Also, information shared with apps or websites is just a name or email address. You can choose to share or hide your email address with an app. You can also choose to let Apple create a random email address that forwards messages to your real email address.
Maps
With this upgrade, you will get realistic details for beaches, roads, buildings, parks and more. New enhanced features allow you to get to a place with an immersive 3D experience which provides a 360-degree view of a place.
With Collections feature, you can save your favorite locations and share the location with friends and family. You can also share ETA (Estimated Time Of Arrival) with them to keep them informed. With Junction View, the app makes sure you never take a wrong turn.
With all of this, it also gets improved Siri guidance, so you get clear instructions to avoid mistakes. It also provides information related to gate locations, flight terminals, departure times and more.
Siri
Siri comes with improved speech recognition engine which enhances audio to text transcription. Siri sounds more natural than before and provides customized suggestions in Safari, Apple Podcasts and Maps. Siri can also detect reminders in messages and third-party apps. It can play music, audiobooks, podcasts and radio with third-party apps.
Shortcuts
Shortcuts is now an inbuilt app and it is home for all shortcuts. Shortcuts have become powerful which makes interacting apps in traditional way easy.
Memoji and Messages
When you start a conversation with a person, your name and photo are automatically sent to the recipient. You can always choose whether you want with either everyone, contacts, or no one. You can also select images, Animoji or Memoji for that. It generates sticker packs on the basis on your Memoji and Animoji Character, which enables you to express different emotions in Messages.
Search in Messages has been enhanced. Just type a word and get information including photos, locations, recent messages and more. You can search in a single message or all messages. Three new Animoji cow, mouse and octopus are added.
Contacts
New relationship label in Contacts help users to manage contact list and you can also create Memoji for your contacts and yourself in Contacts.
Keyboard
A QuickType keyboard with QuickPath can let you type single-handedly without removing your finger while typing. You can either swipe or tap to type. You get an alternate word in the prediction bar, which lets you select different option. It also has the ability to detect a language which user is speaking.
Reminders
Reminders have become more robust. You can smartly create, manage and keep a track on your reminders. It also has a new quick toolbar above the keyboard, it is easy to add date, time, location and attachments to a reminder. Siri can type long sentences. It can automatically comprehend and suggest relevant ideas.
Managing reminders is easy. Swipe or Drag and drop a smaller task under a larger reminder. Also, group multiple lists together. Smart lists will help you organize and display upcoming reminders.
Tag your contacts in reminders and next time you are in conversation with the person via Messages, a reminder will come up.
You can use different colors to flag your emails. Colored flags are also synced via iCloud to Mail on your Apple devices. You can block a specific sender to stop them from messaging. Whenever they will send you messages, it will end up in the trash. Reply menu gets new items added such as notify me of replies, move to junk, mark as unread, flag options, move to a different mailbox and Mute thread. You get format desktop class text formatting which includes new font, size, color selections, strikethrough and more. All system fonts are supported.
Notes
You can view your notes in visual thumbnails, which makes it easy to locate the note that you are searching for. You can share your notes, attachments or subfolders with others to collaborate. It gives the option to search for specific text in the items. You can move checked items to the bottom and drag & drop and swipe to indent items. To reuse the checklist, click to uncheck all the items and start again. Notes allows you to create folders and subfolder for easy notes management. You can limit the access to view only of shared notes.
Health App
Health App gets new feature Cycle Tracking, which helps you to log your period, flow level and other information related to your cycle. It can also predict your period, fertile window for the next three cycles. You will get notifications related to both as the time approaches. It also logs the history of the cycle length, flow, fertile window and more. Activity Trends can keep track of your fitness data. It logs and compares your 3 months data with the last 365 days.
It has also included New profile page which allows you to track personal health i.e. medical ID, health records account, connected apps and devices. Another good feature added is a Noise app, which detects the environmental audio levels in decibels, defining them into two – Ok and Loud.
Safari
With iOS 13, Safari gets an updated start page which comes with frequently visited, favorites and recently visited websites so that you can get to a website quickly. It has a brand-new Download Manager included, wherein you can check the status of the file which is downloading, drag and drop them into an email or file. It is possible to download files in the background. You can also select to resize your images before you upload them. It has also View menu to provide access to text size controls, Reader view and more. You can save a set of open tabs as Bookmarks to open them later with ease. Share a webpage as a link, PDF or in Reader View.
Safari alerts you when you set a weak password for an account. Your Safari history and opened tabs synced with iCloud are secured with end?to?end encryption.
Files
Files have Column View which shows you all the details for every file, thanks to the rich set of metadata. It has smarter search suggestions which make searching for It has a downloads folder which contains all web downloads and attachments from Mail and
Safari. You can access files on a USB drive, hard drive or SD card.
Files app allows you to share files and folders with family, friends and colleagues in iCloud Drive. You can also allow them to add their files to it. It allows you to connect to a file server at work or a home PC via SMB from Files. With Document Scanner, keep a digital copy of physical documents and store them where you want.
Music
Now on Apple Music app, you will get lyrics of your favorite music. You can scroll and tap any line to jump to your favorite lines. You can also see the playing next and playlist, station or album with one tap.
Text Editing
Text Editing becomes simpler with iOS 13.
- You get the scroll bar to navigate long documents, conversations and web pages.
- Moving cursor has become precise and smarter, all you need to do is pick it up and drag it anywhere.
- Text selection is easier than before, just tap and swipe to get the work done.
- Gesture to copy, cut, paste, undo or redo. To copy pinch up with three fingers, to cut pinch up with three fingers twice and pinch down with three fingers to paste. Three-finger swipes to the left to undo and redo with swipe three fingers to the right.
Find My
Find My Friend and Find my iPhone has become one and is now called as Find My. It will help you in locating your device and your friends using the single app.
It can even find devices which are offline. When you report your iPhone missing, then another device of an Apple user which is in vicinity detects your device’s Bluetooth signal and shows its location to you. It is safe and anonymous.
AirPods
Siri will read incoming notifications from your messaging apps. With Shared listening, you can pair two sets of AirPods to one iPhone so that you can enjoy a movie or series with your friend.
Wi-Fi
iOS13 supports WPA3, the latest standard from Wi-Fi Alliance for secure browsing experience. If you don’t have an internet connection, then it automatically connects you to an iPhone personal hotspot in the vicinity. Moreover, it stays connected even when the device sleeps, so that you don’t miss out on any notifications. It also notifies you about the popular Wi-Fi networks available.
Performance
Performance of your iPhone will increase with iOS 13. The app will launch 2x faster and you can unlock your iPhone faster with Face ID. Apps that you download will be 50% smaller. Also, the app updates will be 60% smaller than before.
Other Improvements & Additions:
Fonts: You can install custom fonts, manage fonts from Settings. You can easily download fonts from the App Store.
Control Centre: You can choose Bluetooth accessories and Wi-Fi networks to connect right from the Control Centre. Long Press on Wi-Fi button and it will display the available connections, choose the preferred one. If you want to connect your Bluetooth accessories to your iPhone, long press on Bluetooth on Control Centre and connect to the desired one.
Revamped Volume Control: Whenever you decrease or increase volume on iPhone, you will get volume control in the top left corner of your iPhone.
Peek: Press and hold to get a message or web link to a quick look at your emails, web links.
Quick Actions: Want to perform actions related to an app, press and hold an app icon to get the options.
Silence unknown callers: iPhone users will have a way to deal with spam and unwanted callers. With this setting, iOS uses Siri intelligence to only let calls from your contacts, emails and messages to come through and rest are sent to Voicemail.
App Store: With iOS 13, You can download apps and games of 150MB and more using cellular data.
Calendar: Calendar lets you add attachments to events
Settings: Apps have been optimized to use fewer network data.
Voice Memos: Pinch to Zoom on the waveform to edit your recording with accuracy.
So, these are the changes which will be introduced with iOS 13. Excited to get iOS 13 on your iPhone, well you can get a developer’s beta now or wait for the public beta which will be released in July sometime.
iOS 12 was launched on September 17. We can expect the official public release in fall, 2019.
What do you think about the changes? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.