These are the top 5 new features coming today in iOS 16
As you wait on your iOS update to download and install, here’s a preview of the best of what’s new.
iOS 16 launches today, September 12. If you’re reading this right when it hits your inbox, you may need to wait until later today (timezone dependent) before you’ll see it in Settings > General > Software Update on your iPhone. If it’s already there, go ahead and start that download-and-install process and hang with me here as we go through the top five new features in no particular order (but c’mon, the first one is going to be the one that everyone is talking about):
Lock Screen Customization
This is a fun way to express yourself with your iPhone like never before, and it’s something that I had a ton of fun playing with throughout the beta process this summer. From your Lock Screen, tap and hold on the display to bring up the new Lock Screen selection view. If you have several custom Lock Screens, this is where you’ll select them. Otherwise, tap on the plus sign at the bottom right to add a new one. You can see a lot of examples in the Apple publicity photo above. You can customize the font style and colors, and you can add widgets. My main Lock Screen has my calendar, the temperature, and my Apple Watch rings. For the photo, I chose a photo of my lovely wife. One of the options is to have your iPhone intelligently change the color of the background, so I chose a lovely blue since blue is my favorite color. But I didn’t stop there. I created several different Lock Screens that I can switch to at any time to provide some variety. I think people are going to have a blast playing with this feature.
Custom Lock Screens for different Focus modes
Focus modes have been in iOS now for while, but I confess that I never really started using them, apart from the Sleep focus, until iOS 16. One nice feature is that you can tie a custom Lock Screen to a specific focus mode. So I created a Lock Screen for my Sleep focus using Apple’s Astronomy wallpaper. That feels like a good one for night time. I also built one for my Work focus that has a work-specific Lock Screen as well as a custom Home Screen with work-specific apps. I have that one set to auto-enable when I arrive at my office, and auto-disable when I leave. It’s honestly a lot of fun, super useful, and is made all the more polished by iOS 16 letting you tie Lock Screens to Focus modes.
Quickly select and copy the subject of a photo
This is part of a software feature that Apple calls Intelligence and encompasses more than just this, but the ability to quickly select the subject of a photo and then copy it is a downright magical experience. To do this, simply do a long press on the subject of a photo. Your iPhone will give you haptic feedback, and that’s when you can release your tap. You’ll see two things happen. First, the subject of the photo is indicated by a white line that races around it so you know what you’ll be getting. You’ll also see the words Copy and Share above the subject. If you tap on Share and then select “Save Image,” You’ll have a new image that is only the subject of the original photo. You can then pull that image into another app to combine it with a document or another photo. It’s very, very cool. Apple says this works in “Photos, Screenshot, Quick Look, Safari, and more,” but I find myself using it mostly in Photos.
Messages
You can now edit a message after you send it, at least with the first fifteen minutes after it’s sent. This is great for correcting those annoying typos. You can also unsend an entire message, but only during the first two minutes after you send it. When you do, it does a really cool explosion animation. Lastly, you can mark a message as unread. This is not something I personally use, but many people like to mark a message as unread so that they can remember to return to it later.
Speech to text
In 2005 I was working for Apple at the Green Hills store in Nashville, Tennessee. One evening after the store closed, we had a vendor come and give a presentation to us. He was from one of the speech-to-text companies that was popular at the time. (I don’t recall which one.) He told us then that to get true Star Trek-style speech-to-text technology, it was going to take another 25 years. Well, here we are in 2022 and iOS 16 gets us as close to that as we’ve ever been. Now as you’re dictating text it automatically includes punctuation and you can switch back-and-forth quickly between dictation and manual typing. So if the dictation technology built-in to iOS doesn’t get something right, you can correct it quickly. In fact, I’m using this right now to dictate this section of the post. Pretty cool! (It’s not perfect though. I had to go back and make a few edits to this.)
There’s definitely more in iOS 16, but I wanted to highlight some of my favorite new features. What won’t be debuting today with the initial release of iOS 16 is the announced Shared Family Photos feature. That’s been delayed until later this Fall. I suspect that it’s going to be one of the most-appreciated new features when it ships. If you have a favorite new feature that I didn’t mention here, feel free to let me know in the comments!