Yet another report has come out from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman detailing Apple’s future product plans. Citing “those in the know,” the article broadly describes some of the key future features in iOS 15 for iPhones and iPadOS 15 for iPads.
Apple will likely unveil iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 at its annual developer conference, WWDC, which kicks off on June 7 this year in an online format. Typically, Apple then releases these updates in September or thereabouts, closely timed with the annual release of new flagship iPhones. Something close to that same timeline is likely again this year.
Bloomberg sources say that upcoming OS updates will allow users to set up different notification rules based on their status – “status” in this case means a number of predefined buckets such as working, sleeping or driving, as well as custom statuses that users can define themselves .
A new menu will be available on the lock screen or Control Center, or optionally on both. This menu allows users to set up automatic message replies based on the current state and configure whether notifications make a sound in that state, among other things.
Apple also plans to make a major overhaul of iMessage to make it “more of a social network” to compete with Facebook’s WhatsApp, though the sources clarify that the change could come later than the initial release of iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 The report doesn’t go into details about what iMessage changes would entail.
There will also be additional privacy features, including a screen that shows users “which apps are silently collecting data”. And there will be an updated lock screen, though details on that are scarce.
These changes will reach both the iPhone and iPad, the report says, but it also says that Apple will give the iPad “the most significant update to the device’s home screen since the product launched in 2010.”
However, the iPad home screen updates sound like they’ll mostly be about bringing over the home screen changes that iPhones already got in iOS 14 to iPads in iPadOS 15. Apple will introduce the ability to move anywhere on the home screen from adding widgets to the iPad just like on iPhones running iOS 14, and the report specifies that users can “replace the entire app grid with widgets only” if they choose.
The report focuses entirely on iOS and iPadOS, but it does offer a caveat that this year’s macOS update will be “smaller.” macOS is expected to receive its annual update around the same time as iOS and iPadOS, along with watchOS and tvOS.