iOS 9.2 Officially Released

After months of beta testing, iOS 9.2 was released this morning with a host of improvements and bug fixes. Although the update doesn’t introduce any major new features, minor tweaks in several of the OS’s apps are sure to please iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch users.

The Apple Music, News, and iBooks apps see the most improvements in iOS 9.2. The new update allows users to create a new playlist while adding a song to a playlist in Apple Music, and playlists are now sorted with the most recently changed playlist at the top. Albums or songs from the iCloud Music Library can be quickly and easily downloaded, and the Classical Music catalog has been vastly improved upon.

The News app introduces a new “Top Stories” section, with stories curated by Apple editors and updated several times per day. The iBooks app now supports the 3D Touch feature, allowing users to “peek and pop pages from the table of contents, your notes and bookmarks, or from search results inside a book.”

Noticeably absent from the official 9.2 release, however, is support for AT&T NumberSync service. The service, which saw support in iOS 9.2 beta versions, allows users to use their mobile number on multiple devices – users can make and receive calls and text messages from their iPad when their phone is not present, etc.

According to 9to5Mac, NumberSync isn’t set to launch until early 2016, and support for the feature will likely be present in the next iOS update.

Several other features and bug fixes worth noting appear in the update, as well. Safari View Controller, the feature that allows Safari pop-up windows to be used in third-party apps such as Facebook, has been improved with several minor tweaks, and iPhones now support Apple’s USB Camera Adapter which allows users to import photos from digital cameras. Siri now supports Arabic, and a nasty bug that shut randomly shut off users’ alarms has been fixed.

iOS 9.2 is now available to users with an iPhone 4s or later, and can be downloaded by navigating to Settings > General > Software Update. The release notes detail further improvements and bug fixes.