To abundant fanfare, iOS 10 has officially been released among the masses. And if receiving gifts is your thing; the long awaited operating system update brings forward a multitude of enhancements that you can enjoy, all day, every day (well, as long as your battery is holding a charge. *Ba dum tiss*). Also read here about 8 hidden iOS 10 features you didn’t know about.
iOS 10 truly is the gift that keeps on giving, so with that in mind, check out the new features and enhancements you’ll be able to enjoy by updating your iPhone or iPad to iOS 10.
- Completely revamped Messages experience, including message and bubble effects, stickers, apps, and more.
- A new native application dedicated to smart home automation.
- Beautifully redesigned and improved apps including Maps, Music, and News.
- Siri enhancements and new functionality within Photos, Home, Maps, Phone, and Messages.
- Security and privacy updates to help secure your identity from statistical information transmission.
- 3D Touch implementation in more places allowing for faster and more useful shortcuts.
- Redesigned Control Center with easier access to Music and Home automation controls.
- Voicemail transcription.
- Apple Pay in Safari.
- New emoji!
Even though ‘iOS update season’ is a joyful occasion for most, the update hasn’t came without controversy, however, as some unfortunate souls have encountered “soft-bricking” of their devices while upgrading to iOS 10. Keep in mind though, that these issues are few and far between, only affecting a small amount of users. If that doesn’t calm your nerves, note that these users were able to restart the update and install successfully using their home computer or laptop in conjunction with iTunes without issue.
Downloading iOS 10 is simple and easy to do. Just connect your iPhone to power and Wi-Fi. Open the Settings app, tap General, and then finally tap Software Update. Follow the prompts, and after your iPhone or iPad restarts you’ll finally be able to enjoy iOS 10 in all its glory.
Apple published detailed release notes for iOS 10.0.1:Messages
- Expressive Messaging
- Bubble effects let you send messages loudly, gently, slam or with invisible ink
- Full-screen effects to celebrate special moments
- Tapback for quick replies to messages, links, and photos
- Handwritten messages animate like ink on paper
- Digital Touch lets you send sketches, taps, and heartbeats
- Tap to replace can emojify your text with just a tap
- Rich links show a preview of web pages you share
- iMessage apps
- New App Store for iMessage
- Use the power of apps in Messages to share and collaborate with friends
- Download stickers to send and place on text bubbles and photos
Siri
- Siri now works with the following types of apps
- Messaging apps to send, search and read back text messages
- VoIP apps to place phone calls
- Photos apps to search for images and photos
- Ride service apps to book rides
- Payment apps to make personal payments
- Fitness apps to start, stop, and pause workouts
- CarPlay automaker apps to adjust climate, radio, seat, and personal settings
Maps
- All new look
- Proactive suggestions for places you’re likely to go next, based on your routine or appointments in Calendar
- Improved search with new callout design, clustered results and category filters
- Home, work, favorite locations, and locations from upcoming Calendar events are displayed on the map
- Displays where your car is parked via CarPlay or Bluetooth
- Weather for the currently viewed area
- Extensions
- Make a reservation within Maps using extensions from participating reservations apps
- Book a ride to a destination within Maps using extensions from participating ride service apps
- Turn-by-turn navigation improvements
- Search along route for gas stations, food, and coffee shops
- Automatic view adjustment of the road ahead
- Use pan and zoom during navigation
- Option to avoid tolls and highways
Photos
- Advanced face recognition designed with deep learning to automatically group similar faces together
- Object and scene recognition to intelligently search for photos by what’s in them using advanced computer vision that scans your library locally on device
- Places album to see all your photos, videos and Live Photos on a map
- Memories
- Intelligently highlights forgotten events, trips, and people, and presents them in a beautiful collection
- Memory movies automatically edited with theme music, titles, and cinematic transitions
- Related memories make it easy to rediscover even more photos in your collection, based on location, time, people, scenes and objects
- Easily share with family and friends
- Brilliance control applies region-specific adjustments to brightness, highlights and contrast
Home
- New Home app to securely manage and control HomeKit enabled accessories
- Scenes to control groups of accessories with just a tap
- Rich Notifications with quick actions to control accessories
- Optionally share home access with family and friends
- Remote access and automation of accessories with Apple TV or iPad
Apple Music
- An all-new design for Apple Music brings greater clarity and simplicity to every aspect of the experience
- Navigate your Library with an improved menu and see all of the Downloaded Music that you can play on your device while offline
- See recommendations in For You that highlight mixes, playlists, albums, and Connect posts—selected for you based on the music and artists you love
- Visit Browse to more easily see exclusive releases, find curated playlists, and discover the most important new releases—picked by our editors each week
- Listen to Radio more easily—clearly see what’s live on Beats 1, hear your favorite shows on-demand, or choose a curated station for any genre of music
- Play music with an improved Now Playing experience—swipe up to view available lyrics and quickly see or edit songs that are coming up next
Apple News
- An all-new design in For You adds bold typography, vibrant color, and distinct sections that make it easier to find stories on specific topics
- See the most important stories of the day within Top Stories—updated by our editors throughout the day
- Find the most popular stories right now within Trending Stories—selected based on what others are reading
- See all of your stories grouped into easy-to-understand sections on the topics you follow or read
- Discover the best and most interesting stories of the week within Featured Stories—selected by our editors
- Share stories more easily—just tap the icon on any story to send it to a friend right from For You
- Receive breaking news notifications from some of your most trusted sources
- Subscribe to your favorite magazines and newspapers directly in News
- New personalized Today View widget lets you keep up with the latest stories throughout the day
Experience
- Raise to Wake automatically wakes the screen as you raise your iPhone
- Rich notifications that support real time information, audio, photos and videos
- Today view is redesigned and supports all new widgets for apps like Weather, Up Next, Maps, Stocks and more
- Control Center is redesigned with easier to access controls including dedicated cards for music playback and Home
- Expanded use of 3D Touch
- Lock screen notifications to support an expanded view and access to quick actions
- New quick actions for built in apps like Weather, Stocks, Reminders, Health, Home, FaceTime, iCloud Drive and Settings
- Home Screen widgets
- Control Center for access to quick actions for Flashlight, Timer, Calculator and Camera
- Clear all in Notification Center
QuickType
- New emoji, including gender diverse options to existing characters, single parent family variations, rainbow flag and beautiful redesigns of popular emoji
- Contextual predictions for current location, recent addresses, contact information and calendar availability using deep neural network technology
- Emoji predictions
- Calendar events are intelligently populated using deep learning technology with information from your conversations in Mail and Messages
- Multi-lingual typing now lets you type in two languages at once without having to switch keyboards
- Rest & Type on iPad intelligently adapts to your unique typing patterns
- Predictive typing now uses deep neural network technology for greater prediction accuracy
Phone
- Voicemail transcription (beta)
- Spam call alerts with spam call identification apps
- Support for third party VoIP apps receiving calls on the Lock screen, including support for Call Waiting, Mute and Do Not Disturb
Other improvements
- Apple Pay in Safari
- View two pages at once using Split View in Safari on iPad
- Notes collaboration lets you invite people to work on your notes together
- Markup support in Messages, Photos and PDFs stored in Notes
- Bedtime Alarm in the Clock app lets you set a regular sleep schedule and receive bedtime reminders
- Health adds support for health records and organ donation (US Only)
- Stabilization support for Live Photos for improved camera capture
- Live Filters support when capturing Live Photos
- iCloud Drive now supports Desktop and Documents folders from macOS
- Live search results in Spotlight for Chinese and Japanese
- Siri support for Spanish (Chile), Chinese (Cantonese – China), English (Ireland), English (South Africa)
- Ling Wai and Kaiti Black document fonts for Chinese
- Yu Kyokasho and Toppan Bunkyu fonts for Japanese
- New definition dictionaries in Traditional Chinese and Danish and bilingual dictionaries in Dutch and Italian
- New keyboard for Spanish (Latin America)
Accessibility
- Magnifier now uses the camera on your iPhone or iPad like a digital magnifying glass for real-life objects
- New range of display color filters to support different forms of color blindness or other vision challenges
- VoiceOver adds a Pronunciation Editor to customize the way words are pronounced, additional voices, and support for multiple audio sources
- Additional text highlighting options in Speak Screen and Speak Selection, as well as the ability to speak keyboard letters and predictive typing suggestions to support multi-modal learning
- Switch control now lets you control iOS, macOS and tvOS all from the same iPhone or iPad, so you don’t need to configure switches for the secondary device
- Software TTY allows you to place and receive TTY calls without the need for traditional hardware teletypewriter accessories
What’s your favorite feature in iOS 10? Let us know in the comments below!