Biting apples

WWDC19 notes - iOS

Jun 27, 2019

Continuing the WWDC19 series began with Catalyst and watchOS, this is piece number 2 about major Apple's platforms.

Continuous evolution

After having lived on the Mac for a year and being much hyped, iOS Dark Mode is coming to iPhones and iPads. It is a move that makes total sense, both from a design point of view and from an energetic one once your iOS devices all have OLED displays.
Siri is improving too, this time around by leveraging on Neural TTS (Text to Speech) technologies to make her voice sound more natural. While the demo in english was promising, I am looking forward to hear what other languages will sound like - especially mine.

Years of pictures of picturing vehicles, interviews and hopes are finally seeing the light with iOS 13 improved Maps. Of the few things showed on stage, Look Around was the most impressive. Look Around is Apple's take on Google Street View, and while the latter is kind of fish eyed and not so easy to use, Apple's implementation surprised me for its 3D feel and smoothness while flying down the road. One big arrow on Google's bow is that Street View has come to be worldwide and very accurate; Apple new Maps should roll out on the entire USA by end of 2019, rest of the world to be seen. Siri guidance is improving too, let's hope this improved feature too gets extended quickly outside the US.

Reminders is getting a big update. First, gone are textures that brought the mind to before iOS 7. Gone also is the card metafore and navigation. Reminders can now interpret natural language input, a feature that I think leverages on Siri technology on natural language. Lastly, you can now scan and attach a document to a reminder.

Messages is seeing some update too, albeit not the ones I was hoping the most for.
In iOS 13 you can now share your name and profile pictures even with people you don't have in your contact list; of course there is also a list of Memoji improvements that I think will help boosting sales to teens and China alike. Search has been improved too, and this is a big finally since nowadays search in Messages is ridiculously ineffective and inaccurate.
What I was hoping to see in Messages is better control of groups: Whatsapp is leading here, with the ability of seeing who the message was delivered to and who has read it. iMessage still has a pretty basic set of functionality for groups managing and messaging, let's hope the beta period or iOS 14 will bring some welcomed news.

Photos is getting a big update too, with a new viewing interface and underlying technologies. Apple's VP of software has confirmed Photos is one of the most used iOS apps and thus it makes total sense it got some attention and even a dedicated WWDC segment.
Ryan Christoffel at macstories.net explains this new view well:

Each time-based view inside the tab has its own special features: the Days view beautifully lays out photos and videos in an immersive browsing experience where videos and Live Photos autoplay as you scroll by them; the Months view displays Memories-like collections of photos you can easily navigate; the Years layout is dynamic based on the day you view it, so if you open it on your child’s birthday, each card representing a different year will automatically surface photos from the same day in previous years, offering a delightful way to view past photos from your current calendar day.

What powers all these new features is a robust Machine Learning implementation. Thanks to ML Photos can now identify similar shots taken in sequence and show you only the best one. Even more impressing, it can group pictures by topic and automatically suggest that theme on relevan days by showing you all the pictures taken throughout the years that are meaningful to you. All this computations are done locally on each device thanks to the power Apple's own A-series processors can deliver, especially since the newest ones have architectures dedicated to Machine Learning.

Last, Find my Friends and Find my iPhone have been merged in one sigle aptly named app: Find My. Aside for this homescreen economy, there is one really interesting additive piece of technology here that caught my attention.
With the next releases, Apple devices will be sending out bits of data to nearby Apple devices, even when they are offline or locked, signaling their position. This feature, similar to what Tile app has been doing for some years now, can though leverage on a much, much vaster audience of devices - counting currently in the millions worldwide.

Misc:

  • shortcuts is getting an update. I have never used it, but I'm glad it is improving overtime because you never know when it will be helpful for you;
  • There's a new thumbnail view in Notes;
  • Share sheet has become smarter with intelligent predictions;
  • A Low Data mode similar to what Low energy mode does to data consumption. It would be nice to see it ported to macOS too;
  • Apps will launch twice as fast thanks to some improvements in how the fairplay cryptography works at app startup.

Conclusions

Even though my heart beats somewhere else, iOS is the Apple OS I spend the most time on due to my various interactions with my iPhone throughout the day.
I use Maps nearly every time I get in the car via CarPlay, so improvements to both Maps and CarPlay are more than welcome. Apple is pursuing its strategy here, and being one who heavily invested into Apple's ecosystem, all I can but not appreciate this commitment.
Improvements to Photos are extremely welcome too, since they will help me manage a growing pictures library with the power of Machine Learning.

If I had to find a single favourite common theme on iOS 13, that would exactly be Machine Learning: ML is powering new Photos, Siri, Reminders, Maps, Share Sheets and more. All of these are welcome advancements as they help reducing repetitive tasks on a computing device and unlock features that can surprise and delight, like the new Photos does.
This brings back to my memory a Tim Cook quote from some years ago I find enlightening o Apple's strategy here:

"I'm not worried about artificial intelligence giving computers the ability to think like humans, I'm more concerned about people thinking like computers"



* * *

If you like articles like this, please consider supporting this website through personal donations or sponsorships