Home Improvements

Corey Wang, one of Apple’s Producers of Human Interface designs, announced some exciting changes coming to the Home app in iOS 16.

Redesigned from the ground up, the new Home app will provide a single view of all of your favorite accessories and rooms making it easier to see the status of your entire home in a single view.

New categories at the top will help you filter your view to things like lights, climate sensors, thermostats, and air conditioners, locks and doors, water sensors, and more. Tapping on these categories will immediately reduce the list to only the relevant accessories, still organized by room, and showing more detailed status information.

A new multi-camera view will also allow you to see four HomeKit security cameras at once, with the ability to scroll right to see others. Individual tiles have also been redesigned so that different accessories are more recognizable with unique shapes and colors, rather than trying to fit everything into the same square tile design.

Supported Devices

For the first time in years, iOS 16 is drawing a line in the sand when it comes to older iPhone models — it will only be available on the 2017 iPhone 8 and later devices.

This drops not only the 2015 iPhone 6s off the list, which we all knew was likely to happen this year, but also the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus.

Not surprisingly, iOS 15 will also be the end of the line for the iPod touch. Apple discontinued the last iPod touch less than a month ago, undoubtedly in anticipation of this very event. Even though the last iPod touch was released in 2019, it still featured the same A10 chip as the iPhone 7, which didn’t make the cut this year either.

Release Date

As usual, Apple is making the first developer beta available to members of the Apple Developer Program today. However, unless you’re a paid member of that program, you’ll have to wait until the first public beta arrives before you’ll be able to try it out for yourself. That will probably arrive sometime in early July.

It’s generally a good idea to wait for the public beta anyway. Apple expects developer betas to be installed on devices dedicated for developing apps, and not those intended for daily use. The first couple of betas could have some serious bugs that you probably won’t want to deal with. By the time the first public beta lands, it means Apple is comfortable enough with the quality of the software that it’s willing to let members of the public take it for a spin.

However, even then you should expect that some things won’t work properly. If you don’t want to deal with being a guinea pig for iOS 16, it’s best to just hold off until the final public release arrives in September.