Apple iOS 13: The major new features coming to the iPhone

As anticipated, Apple announced iOS 13 onstage at WWDC 2019, showcasing the first look at the company's latest software for the iPhone. As per Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi, iOS 13 is the "next big release for iOS," and the operating system will see a lot of advancements.

Mainly among those are dark mode, improvements to performance, and many more changes.

IMPROVED PERFORMANCE

As with last year's iOS 12 update, this year Apple is putting a big emphasis on performance improvement, especially for older devices. The company might have learnt from its past issues where new versions of iOS resulted in slowed-down phones, though we'll have to wait until iOS 13 actually makes an entry into the world before we decide if Apple's succeeded the second time.

Apple promises that Face ID will unlock 30 per cent faster and apps will launch twice as fast in iOS 13.

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REMINDERS

This was the most neglected area for an update, Apple is redoing the Reminders app entirely in iOS 13 with a whole new visual look, adding new filtering options like "Today," "Scheduled," "Flagged," and "All" for sorting tasks. Apple's also pushing big AI integration here — you can type and Reminders will automatically choose when you'd like to be reminded, and tag contacts.

We will also get rid of paper-like texture weird look that had been a mainstay of the old skeuomorphic iOS design from the time of original version of iOS.

UPDATES TO APPLE MAIL, NOTES, AND SAFARI

Apple's also modifying a few of its core applications on iOS 13. Apple Mail is all set to get new desktop formatting. Safari is getting per-website preferences, and Notes is getting a new gallery view for looking at all your notes at glance.

APPLE MAPS

With iOS 13 Apple is completely recreating Apple Maps. Apple says that it's rebuilt the app from the ground up, with more comprehensive map data and a new mode that's... basically just Google Street View. The new map will be available in select cities and states to start and will be available in the US by 2019 end and globally by 2020.

PRIVACY

As estimated, privacy is a big part of the announcement for Apple: now, you can choose to provide your location data to an application "only once", preventing you from being able to constantly ping your location when you are using it.

Apple is also launching a new feature of "Sign in with Apple" which will be available for developers to log in to applications and services. Users can log in to Face ID and create a new account for a service "without revealing any personal information".

Apple accounts will also be able to automatically create new private email addresses per application that they will forward to your actual email, which will prevent applications from accessing your email or sending you unwanted emails.

IMESSAGE PROFILE PICTURES

iOS is getting profile images similar to WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger that allow users to share their name and photos with other users for messages. In other words, Apple will make your phone look like your product demos where all contacts have their own names and photos.

And, of course, you can also use your Memoji as a profile picture. To that end, Apple is also adding many more options to customize Memoji, as well as the ability to use your Memoji as iMessage stickers, much like Bitmoji does. These packages of stickers can also be used as personalized emoji in applications such as Mail and even in third-party applications such as WeChat.

NEW PHOTO AND VIDEO EDITING TOOLS

Apple is adding a new editing interface for iOS for photos and, for the first time, videos. You can edit the brightness, reflections, shadows, contrast, saturation, white balance, sharpness, definition, vignette and noise reduction in your content. And for videos, in particular, you can finally rotate them directly on the device.

The Photos application is also getting a new user interface, which will use machine learning to eliminate duplicates and strange clutter as screenshots for easy navigation.

FIND MY

The old Find My Friends and Find My iPhone applications are merging into a single application, simply called "Find My". The new app puts all of Apple's tracking in one place, allowing you to track missing devices and friends and family members at the same time. The new application can even locate devices that are offline by sending a secure Bluetooth beacon to other Apple devices, transmitting it to Apple and then, ultimately, to you. (Everything is encrypted end-to-end and should not affect data usage, battery life or privacy).

EXTERNAL STORAGE

The most awaited, now iOS will be able to pull files from SD cards and USB flash drives to import into the Files app.