Last night, Apple announced iOS 15 at the conference presentation of the new iPhone 13† The House of Cupertino also announced the arrival of iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 in its final version on September 20, 2021.
iOS 15: all the news
iOS 15 introduces new FaceTime calling features, tools to reduce distractions, a new notification experience, additional privacy features, complete redesign for Safari, Weather, and Maps, and more.
Focus
Focus is a new feature that can filter notifications and apps based on what you want to focus on at any given time.
This “Focus” mode is accompanied by a new notification design, with slightly different bubbles. For example, the faces of contacts are displayed instead of the app icon, as on Android.
Safari
Safari has a completely new design. The controls are now easier to reach with one hand and put more emphasis on the content of a web page. There’s a new compact tab bar that floats across the bottom of the screen, allowing users to switch between tabs with ease. The new tab groups allow users to save tabs and easily access them anytime and on any device. Finally, there is a new customizable home page.
Cards
Maps application now offers a new 3D view in cities with significantly improved details such as buildings, zebra crossings, bike paths. There’s also a new city driving experience with additional road data and enhanced transportation features, such as blocked favorite lines, subway exit notifications, and augmented reality walking routes.
live text
Live Text is a new feature that recognizes text in a photo for users to search, detect and use. Spotlight’s internal search engine can now even search for photos by location, people, scenes, objects, and text. Spotlight also offers more comprehensive web image searches and results for actors, musicians, TV shows, and movies.
Privacy
iOS 15 also introduces new privacy measures such as processing Siri requests directly on the iPhone, which also has the added benefit of providing better response. There will also be a new screen to display how often applications are using the permissions they have been given.
Share play
SharePlay is a new feature announced at WWDC. It allows users to share experiences with each other during FaceTime calls, including content such as music on Apple Music, TV shows, or movies on Apple TV. The advantage is that media files are played synchronously for all participants and there are shared play buttons so that anyone in a SharePlay session can play, pause or skip the content and add it to a shared queue. †
SharePlay also allowed users to share their screens to view apps together during a FaceTime call. Unfortunately, Apple has decided to remove this feature from iOS 15 for the time being.
iPad OS 15
IPadOS 15 also comes with a list of new features. Apple has added widgets to the home page, like on iPhones, in addition to the “application library” on the iPad. But unlike the iPhone, where you have to swipe right multiple times to access it, Apple adds the “application library” to the bottom dock.
Also revamped the way multitasking works. With iPadOS 15, Apple added a “shelves” feature that displays open windows in an app. So in an email application, shelves can be open emails or draft messages.
Additionally, iPadOS 15 looks to macOS and its Finder to improve the Files app. The iPad file manager then takes advantage of some features directly from those of the Macs. For example, the Files app now supports devices formatted as NTFS.