Over at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference tonight, the next few months in the life of iOS and OSX phones, tablets and computers has been laid out for all to see. The big news is that the key features of iOS 9 are now out in the open, and that – unusually for Apple – all phones and iPads which were capable of running iOS 8 will be eligible for the free upgrade to iOS 9.
So what’s inside the update? As far as iPhone goes, the big changes are in the way Siri is now capable of predicting your activities, making it a little bit more like Google Now. The example given on stage by senior VP of software engineering Craig Federighi is that if you read a book at a particular time every day, Siri will now fire up the books app ready for your perusal. What’ll be interesting about this is how Apple plans to make Siri intelligent in this way without breaching its own promises about data collection and privacy.
There’s also a brand new News app, which acts like Flipboard in that it aggregates feeds from your favourite websites and redraws them in a magazine style layout with zoomable pictures. Newsstand as was will be switched off – we’re not sure yet how this will affect existing subscriptions to Newstand magazines.
Over on iPad, meanwhile, there’s a couple of big changes. The first is that you can now have floating video screens for picture-in-picture apps and split screen multitasking. Both these features have been available on several Android phones and tablets (notably the Samsung Galaxy Note series) for a while, but they’re welcome here nonetheless.
More originally, the keyboard is also getting an overhaul, and you can now turn it into a trackpad by dragging across it with two fingers.
While the headline features of iOS9 are mostly slick implementations of what’s already available elsewhere, it’s under the hood that it looks like Apple has done the most innovating. It’s introduced new games programming libraries for physics and AI and extended its graphics programming tech, Metal, to OSX as well as iOS. It’s also updating its programming language, Swift, to version 2 and pledged to open source it by the end of the year.
Other updates include support for Apple’s Homekit and Carkit, which will allow your phone to control compatible household appliances or in-car entertainment apps over the internet.
Elsewhere, the firm also announced an update to OSX – codenamed El Capitan – and an update to the Apple Watch operating system. In terms of the Watch, one of the nicest touches is that you’ll be able to use Homekit from your wrist – so that you can change the temperature on your home heating remotely, for example.
There were also a couple of big number updates: more than 100 billion apps have now been downloaded from the App Store netting developers a whopping $30bn over the last seven years.
