Guide to iPhone iOS 12- What changes you can expect?

Recently at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference revealed some of the changes that you can expect in iOS 12 iPhone and iPad. This iOS upgrade will be relatively not give emphasis to elaborate new features but instead would focus on stability. Since iOS 11 has had its share of bugs and other issues, an emphasis on reliability would be a positive.

iOS 11.4 latest update saw the addition of Messages in iCloud feature which now lets you store your messages, photos and other attachments in the cloud to free up space on your devices. An iOS 12 upgrade will not only affect future iPhones and iPads but also freshen up the phone or tablet that you already own.

So here are some of the changes that you can expect in the new update

There would be more robust parental controls

Apple’s parental controls on the iPhone can be found under Restrictions inside the device settings, where you can put in a rope on the kind of content or media your kid might see or use. But what’s missing are granular time-limit app-by-app controls a caregiver can use to restrict when, and for how long, your child is involved in such activities. In other words, it lacks a key tool to combat smartphone addiction. But now this feature will be upgraded with more parental controls.

See the best of the iPhone X

Owners of the iPhone X, the only iPhone to without the home button, have had to learn new navigational gestures. Maybe in future all iPhones, will similarly do away with the home button and instead have the user rely on Face ID facial recognition. Apple will adopt some of the existing navigational behavior on the X as part of iOS 12, while doing away with others.

Swiping up from the bottom of the screen to get to the home screen is a simple gesture that works well, a keeper. Also  you can switch apps by swiping at the bottom of the display. Also to dismiss a running app you must first summon the app switcher or multitasking screen by swiping up and pausing for a second or so.  For any app to get dismissed you must press down for a moment on an app until a circled red dash appears on the upper left corner. Only then can you you swipe up to dismiss that app.

Siri would be a smarter gal

Does Apple’s assistant lacks the brainpower of Amazon’s rival Alexa and the Google Assistant. It’s time for Siri to not only bone up on its smarts but to become more conversational and make nice with many more third-party apps and services.

With a new feature called ‘Shortcuts’. This will let you pin actions to certain words and Siri will complete your command. For instance, if you use a Tile to keep an eye on your keys, saying ‘Where’s my Tile’ will instantly bring up your keys location.
There’s also improvement to Siri Suggestions. These show up in the left homescreen page and it searches through places on your device like Calendar and Mail to bring up suggestions. To go along with these benefits there’s a dedicated Shortcuts app. Along with letting you build your own shortcuts, this will be packed full of pre-made shortcuts that you can enable.

Your Screen Time

In iOS 12 there’s a new ‘Weekly Summary’ feature that’ll tell you how much you use your phone per week. It’ll tell you how often you pick up your phone, which apps send you the most notifications and so on. Also you will be able to set individual timers for apps. Like if you use Instagram a lot iOS 12 will tell you how long you’ve spent in the app and give you options to reduce your usage.

Address Wi-Fi confusion

You can tap an icon in the Control Center on the iPhone to turn Wi-Fi on or off. At least that’s what you think you’re doing when you tap that icon. Instead, it merely disables your connection from the Wi-Fi network you’ve been on. A moment later you might connect to another nearby Wi-Fi network, whether you want to or not.  To truly disable Wi-Fi, you must visit settings on the phone and tap a switch there, an extra step that’s irritating. But with iOS 12 new features this might be solved.

Improve 3D Touch

There are lot of people who use the pressure-sensitive 3D Touch feature on their iPhones, or at least use it very often. The feature has been around since 2015, when Apple released the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. Now the onus is on Apple to make 3D Touch more appealing and customizable.

What 3D Touch lets you do is apply a little bit of force on an icon so that a contextual “quick action” shortcut menu pops up the ability, say, to take a selfie or record video when you press down on the Camera icon, or call a favorite person when you press the Phone icon. But too often those shortcuts just aren’t very useful. To  give the user some say on what shortcuts controls do or don’t appear inside apps when you apply pressure   Or even let users who don’t want to bother with 3D Touch turn it off. The pressure-sensitive requirements are, well, a bit too sensitive. You’ve long been able to gently press down on the iPhone’s home screen to make all the icons wiggle. When they do, you can move icons around on the screen, and by tapping an “X” delete those you don’t want. But if you press down too hard on screen with 3D Touch, you don’t get the wiggly icons, but rather those quick action shortcuts.  Now the new upgrade might solve your issues with 3D Touch.

Group FaceTime calls

You can make use FaceTime all the time to make and receive video calls. As long as you have a decent connection, FaceTime works great. It’s time for FaceTime to do more. For starters, let Apple open things up so you can hold video calls with multiple people on FaceTime. On Skype, for example, you can organize a video call for up to 10 people. You can chat with up to 32 people and it’s integrated into iMessage. This means you can quickly turn a group text chat into a video one.

Design and display changes

The grid of icons on the Home screen is functional but frankly getting tired, you would certainly like to see some way to liven things up. Maybe the icons reveal more information at a glance  a snowflake on the weather app to indicate, say, that a storm is coming. Also if you’re wary about such changes, why not have a “classic” screen option that more or less keeps the status quo design.

Speaking of the screen, the  future iPhones  might have an “always-on” display option like you seen on other devices. Such a screen would also surface glanceable information like the time, weather, maybe some notifications from the people with whom you most need to stay in touch.

Still another display option would let you choose a dark-screen motif, an interface loosely along the lines of the “Invert Colors” feature that is currently buried inside the Accessibility settings of the iPhone. Such a mode might appeal to folks with a near bezel-free iPhone like the iPhone X.

Visual search

Google rolled out new tools for an artificial-intelligence driven visual search feature called Google Lens, which lets you point the camera on an Android phone at objects and signs to do such things as copy and paste real-world text, provides style and shopping details on clothing, reveal details about a painting, and so on.

The tech is cool but still in its nascent stages, and it will soon come to Apple, through iOS 12 and the cameras on the iPhones. Apple also has ambitions with augmented reality, which was a big part of iOS 11.  In iOS 12, Apple is introducing a new app called ‘Measure’. This will let people measure items, a suitcase was used an an example, using the ARKit engine and save the dimensions.

Shut down of lightening port

Apple will soon close an iPhone security gap allowing access to personal data on locked iPhones, an entry point that law enforcement agencies have used to gather evidence. iOS12 iPhone software update will shut down the Lightning port on devices after the phone has been locked for one hour. After that, the port can only be used to charge the device using a power adapter.

Apple is  constantly strengthening the security protections in every Apple product to help customers defend against hackers, identity thieves and intrusions into their personal data. Apple promised to have improved security measures in its iOS 12 software, due this fall, aimed to protect your private data from apps on the device.

Apple has announced iOS 12, you can have its experience on hand from this month onwards.