iOS 17 makes iPhone more personal and intuitive | Hacker News Reader

iOS 17 makes iPhone more personal and intuitive

apple.com

219 pointsmihau203 comments

Some of the smaller updates will be a nice QOL bump for me:

> For easier and more secure password and passkeys sharing, users can share passwords with a group of trusted contacts. Everyone in the group can add and edit passwords to keep them up to date. Since sharing is through iCloud Keychain, it’s end-to-end encrypted.

>Maps adds offline maps, so users can download a specific area and access turn-by-turn navigation, see their estimated time of arrival, find places in Maps, and more while offline. Maps also makes it easier than ever to discover thousands of trails in parks across the United States, and supports electric vehicle drivers with real-time charging availability information.

>AirTag can be shared with up to five other people, allowing friends and family to keep track of an item in Find My. Everyone in a group will be able to see an item’s location, play a sound, and use Precision Finding to help pinpoint the location of a shared AirTag when nearby. This also works with all other Find My network accessories.

Shared passwords/passkeys comes pretty close to eliminating my need for a 1Password subscription. But it kinda depends on what other login-associated details Apple lets you put together with the password.

ProBably TOTP and a comment entry field (that I use for recovery codes).

> For easier and more secure password and passkeys sharing […]

Note there is a IETF draft for credential transfers:

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-secure-credential-tra...

Apple and Alphabet/Google as authors.

The offline mapping is huge since I went to big bend national park in texas and rerouting in one of the massive areas without a network would get a precise location using GPS on a black map that couldn’t download. Also, I make sure to have a full tank of gas in the desert as the next gas station may be 90 miles away

Google Maps has had offline maps support on iOS/Android for at least a decade now.

Yeah but navigation requires internet.

I drove through Death Valley and thought I was super smart by pre-downloading the whole area…

that's not true. it can navigate without internet as long as you have downloaded the maps ahead of time. i have definitely used it in a few parks including Death valley NP and it worked fine. maybe your download got corrupted somehow or expired?

Not if the entire area is within the downloaded map. I've been using google maps this way for a while now since I live in a rural area without solid coverage.

Maybe because the drive was long (Vegas to Bakersfield) and covered multiple downloaded areas?

I had to break it up into two legs to do a similar route (first to Lake Isabella then to Bakersfield)

It does not. You can navigate perfectly fine fully offline. In your case either the maps weren't downloaded correctly, or the phone was reporting that it had internet connectivity so the app was trying to use it over the offline cache. Putting it in airplane mode may have fixed it.

I don’t even have a data plan on my phone so I can definitely say that navigation works just fine when offline!

HERE Maps by Nokia had offline maps, including search & navigation, over a decade ago. At the time Google had only offline maps with tiles and some POIs, no navigation or similar things.

i loved the HERE Maps when i had a Windows Phone. we navigated two countries in Europe without ever needing to turn on data roaming. this was back in 2013 i think? it was mind-blowingly good to navigate from one end of the country to the other end using just offline maps.

Here Maps is still available on iOS and Android with offline maps. Owned by an EU auto consortium and well maintained.

Well, not if you like your maps to have Japan in them, since it doesn't.

Blocked by Japanese government? https://old.reddit.com/r/windowsphone/comments/2s5p80/where_...

There might be such regulations, but they're much less strict than South Korea if so - I haven't heard about them.

The great difficulty of keeping a map up to date from outside the country would be enough.

Microsoft maps (prior to even Bing, I forget the official name) had downloaded maps back in 2007 on Windows Mobile 6.1.

Apple is a bit late to the game here, but obviously this isn't a make it or break it feature for the success of a mobile platform!

I tried that at the time, I did plan for this eventuality in Nov 2020, but I remember that this didn’t work for that area. I forget why, but I was also trying to route towards gas stations since we were taking the scenic route and the stations were much further apart than I had expected. I also had a ham radio, but no programmed frequencies. It was like time traveling to the 1990’s except I had XM radio

Paper maps have had this for centuries.

People are downvoting this, but it's true. Unfortunately they often were lacking major continents.

And now Apple Maps will have it, yay!

Other major mapping apps have had this feature for a decade

OnX is outstanding. You might enjoy it.

PSA: for environments like that you really should have a paper map and a compass for the same reason you should make sure your tank is full.

You don't have to be a wizard navigator or anything but those will operate when you have no signal and also show you a bigger picture of how to get where you want to go when you find you aren't where you want to be.

> AirTag can be shared with up to five other people

Finally! Every time either me or my wife goes out of town we have to remove the luggage airtags from one account and add them back in to the other one. When my kid leaves his jacket somewhere at school, only his phone can find it. Super annoying.

Netflix: We're coming for your shared accounts.

Apple: And here's how you can securely share those passwords.

How does netflix notice a shared account anyway?

Is it just two devices accessing the same profile?

how does it handle legitimate scenarios like the kid away at college or someone traveling?

Well, Netflix used to have a page[1] that specified how, but it's since been dumbed down. It used to say it uses a combination of IP addresses (and geoip), device IDs, and account activity from devices signed into your Netflix account.

1. https://help.netflix.com/en/node/123277

Credential sharing is a huge QoL improvement in an ordinary-folks kind of way, and very pleasing.

Now if only the Contacts team would do the same.

> users can share passwords with a group of trusted contacts

Such as the FBI and the Chinese Government!

It's end-to-end encrypted, and the encryption key is safely stored in the same data center for authorities to use.

No thanks, I'll stick to my self-hosted VaultWarden.

> NameDrop allows users to easily share contact information by simply bringing their iPhone devices together.

Bump lives!

Didn't Android have this in circa 2013?

Yes, but Apple's version has a fancy swooshing animation

2011, actually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_Beam

Bump predated that and was available on both iPhone and Android which is what the OP in this thread was almost certainly referring to since that's the app they named.

And easily one of the most enjoyable computing experiences out there. Very physical. And cooperative multi-player by nature. Many great things here.

I wish Web NFC had a publish mode where we could web hack something like this.

I still wish for this on almost a daily basis. Maybe Android still has it, but no one uses it anymore except me :(

It isn't enabled on android by default anymore.

Which means the "bump to see this video" turns into "hang on, go into settings and hunt for nearby share, probably hidden in the 'Other' menu..."

It seems to be disabled by default in the latest version of Android. A shame, because it had potential.

If Google Nearby Share wasn't so... Googled up, it would be a great replacement. Instead, we get a local sharing mechanism that's connected to your Google account for some god-forsaken reason.

What I really miss is the weird, short period where WiFi Direct file sharing Just Worked between different brands. WiFi Direct still exists on modern Android but there's no cross-device file sharing platform anymore. It was just Bluetooth file transfers but faster, which is all it really needed to be. I'm sure Google Nearby Share works in a similar way except for the weird Google stuff.

Looks like Android Beam has finally been ported to iOS after Android removed it because nobody ever used it.

Apples innovations are often in making things that other people have tried before and making them polished and usable.

So, despite it being failed in Android; it'll probably work well in Apples ecosystem. -- Apples true innovations (3D touch for example) have a much higher chance of not being used and going away.

That and the fact that there is one version of iOS, and Android has traditionally been very fragmented. Without widespread availability from "day one", these things just don't catch on.

See also: the resurgence of QR codes post iOS 11...

Isn't there now iPad OS?

Yes. Apple rarely makes the first $THING, but they often make the first $THING that doesn't suck.

Do you mean multitouch?

3D touch went away with the iPhone 11, and I'm still salty about it. The hold-spacebar-to-move-cursor thing is just ever so slightly less efficient than the previous force-touch-anywhere-on-keyboard-to-move-cursor. (But I get why they removed it -- that was pretty much the only good actual use of 3d touch. Elsewhere in the iOS UI, it just made things more complicated, and I was constantly accidentally force-touching things instead of long-pressing them, etc. Probably not worth the added hardware costs.)

> The hold-spacebar-to-move-cursor thing is just ever so slightly less efficient

The UX on that is terrible. If you’re reading this on an iPhone in safari, go to the URL bar and try to navigate to my user ID there. I’ll wait. Now try to do it on a site where the URL has a dozen parameters.

I hate that I have to use this -- but I do and it's a lifesaver in the right situation: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/url-quick-keyboard/id644777071...

Wow, problem solved!

No, he means 3D touch, hence the comment saying it would go away.

In addition Apple puts in a lot of effort towards educating users. And before they release a technology in the wild they make sure they build a lot of useful demonstrations for it.

So a user learns about the feature because Apple educated them well, and then immediately gets to practice it and commit it to their long term memory because they have some immediate actual uses for it.

The Android approach is to release a technology, do a bunch of non functional demos and/or PoCs demonstrating how it can be used, and by the time actual useful implementations of the technology have been created users have forgotten the technology ever existed.

No offense but the iPhone UX is notorious for having obscure features most users don’t know about and which are never exposed. Not that Android is better but as a distinction between the two that’s a poor one. They are both terrible when it comes to properly exposing features.

Reminds me of the very useful swipe-to-camera gesture that Android scrapped in favor of whatever they copied from Apple that year. Apple subsequently copied the swipe-to-camera feature, and Android never saw it again.

We have double-power-to-camera, which is arguably better than a swipe. Still, I'd like to see Android/Google have some confidence. Too often, we end up with half-assed "me-too"s from Google.

>… double-power-to-camera, which is arguably better than a swipe

Fully count me in as part of this camp. Wanting to quickly snap a photo and being able to launch the camera without looking at the screen is much more convenient.

Now that Apple supports it, it'll become useful and popular.

Dot cards dies! along with every NFC business card

I would love to see this feature implemented for Vision Pro

Kiss to prove you trust the other person['s personal higene]

Kiss to prove you trust the other person('s personal higene)

Maybe the patent expired and Apple didn't want to share the number of devices sold?

So like the palmpilot had in the 1990's.. Cool. But i'm so over people recycling old ideas and pretending they're new.

If they work better now (maybe limitations in the past like transfer speeds), what’s the problem?

No ones pretending they’re new.

Apple doesn’t do new hotness. It finds experimental tech and if it can make it great then it’ll grab it. It’s always at a minimum 5 years behind new developments. As you point out sometimes decades.

I consider that their greatest strength though. Taking something with potential and starting to realize that potential.

Technically no, the PalmPilot didn't use NFC and required fussy button presses and pointing so it's a much better implementation.

>AirTag can be shared with up to five other people

>Reminders features a grocery list that automatically groups added items into categories to make shopping easier.

That's cool

Finally! AirTags are great but linking them to a single user was a significant limitation.

I feel like way too many of my notifications are iOS letting me know I'm being tracked by AirTags belonging to people I know. It'll be so nice to clear those out.

If they could only apply this concept to an iPad…

I really want to see decent grocery shopping features in Reminders. I'm using Grocery right now, which uses Reminders but has continual problems talking between my Watch and My Phone and has way more features than I need...but it's still (in my experience) the best shopping list app out there.

Excited for the journal app! I was always uncomfortable trusting any of the existing apps and inevitably censor or give up writing my thoughts.

I’ve even tried building several (4(!)) journaling apps in the past and it’s still an unsolved problem for me. Right now i use a mix of obsidian and a self built journal app but that obviously has some drawbacks on its own.

Microjournaling, photo context and able to share (along with local e2e) are on top of my list. Looks like it solves many of it.

> I was always uncomfortable trusting any of the existing apps

I still cannot understand why people are so trusting of things they put on their phone. It is so much easier for anyone to get into your phone as opposed to your house or a safe in your house.

You all are giving so much up just for this convenience, which will one day become inconvenient.

Probably because I've had my house broken into, but I've never had my data stolen off of my phone. Even when I have lost my phone, no one has been able to take anything out.

> I've never had my data stolen off of my phone

How would you know? In fact, you do not know this for certain. It is just wishful thinking. Marketing.

You seem to be conflating exfiltrating data from cloud services that the phone syncs with (which many state actors probably do en masse), with exfiltrating data held only on the device itself (which is something that you'd only expect from people who actively care about your data, e.g. police looking for evidence after you've been arrested, criminal gangs who want your crypto-wallet keys, etc.)

Modern phones are pretty good at stopping the latter class of attack; this is self-evident from the fact that this type of attacker is looking for specific things in order to use them in a timely manner (use the evidence against you at trial; drain your crypto wallet to spend the funds themselves before you can move the funds elsewhere), and yet we rarely see people reporting that someone made use of their exfiltrated data in this way.

PCs are much more vulnerable to this type of attack. There are tons of computer viruses that steal your crypto wallet.

Apples to oranges imo. We’re talking about a journal (with photos and audio and whatnot) here.

Also, i think keeping it in a physical format is more vulnerable from others accidentally reading it than in a phone which is the most private to me as an individual.

Yeah no, I started self-hosting when I realized that I really didn’t want anyone reading my thoughts. I’ve been using a regular note-taking app: iA Writer on my phone and Sublime Text on my computer.

At one point in the past I even had a beautiful WordPress site first online and then locally, but gave up when I started writing more on my phone.

> Improvements to Autocorrect and Dictation Deliver More Intelligent Input

Yet I bet they still won't add any additional languages for the swipe gesture, or allow multiple language predictions...

autocorrect and the swipe keyboard on ios has gotten progressively worse with each release, to the degree that i've reverted to typing with my thumbs because it's faster. additional languages seems like a bridge too far right now

They claim this new version has a fancy transformer-based text production model. Assuming that same engine powers swipe prediction, we might finally see an improvement here. Here’s to hoping. Voice dictation has also gotten worse over the past couple of years, I’m very excited that they claim they’ve got a new transformer-based architecture that works a lot better now. These two features alone might dramatically improve my quality of life using iOS. Android from a decade ago was better at text entry than iOS is currently.

This is so weird to me. I use both every day and they seem totally fine. It even picked up my child’s unique nickname (even though spellcheck still flags it)

I would be happy if the stupid thing stopped capitalizing every occurrence of "and", and stopped replacing "is" with "I'd". Those two alone turn swype-typing from a convenience into a frustrating slog.

Don’t worry, the swipe keyboard on ios is so atrociously bad that you aren’t missing much.

Eh, I like it and use it all the time. Different strokes for different folks (pun intended).

The swipe keyboard on iPhone is bad, but it is usable. Android is definitely better.

Coming from Android, I find typing and editing generally painful on iPhone even after 6 months and fiddling with settings. However I have yet to swap back to Android to see the pain points there.

Hate that iPad doesn’t have swipe.

They mentioned using generative transoformer technology for the new autocorrect. I hope that means very soon we will be able to have much more natural conversations with Siri

I'll be happy if they can correctly capitalize/autocomplete my last name, which is on my address card (and that of many of my relatives in my address book). It is incomprehensible to me that it suggests three wrong things when I type my name, and does not ever offer to capitalize it.

Because it never learns, although it's claiming to? But don't worry, both Google and Samsung keyboards fail in the same way - after years of LeArnInG.

I have been patiently waiting for a feature for versions but now I don't think they are going to do it - ability to control the notification (alert/ringing) settings of both the SIMs separately.

I mean how dense or arrogant people at Apple have to be grok that by design if someone is using two different SIMs on a phone the use cases and needs might be different. Android has given this feature since a century by now. Or I think it's just their incompetence. Seeing how Apple is at software I won't put past them that they might have implemented this whole thing in such a way that just adding this feature might mean a major rewrite.

I mean for heaven's sake I might have a SIM that attracts a lot of spam call/etc and I might just want to keep it perpetually on silent or sometimes silent - yeah just silent not entirely disable it (but just that SIM, not my other important SIM).

By the way they have mentioned filtering on the Messages app based on SIM but even their they have not mentioned anything about notifications. Yup they mentioned it twice (at least to me it seems the same):

> Dual SIM message filtering > Filter conversations in Messages by individual SIM.

and then right next to it:

>SIM-based filtering >Messages now allows users with a dual SIM iPhone to filter messages based on their SIMs.

So maybe I will still not be using the dual SIM of the dual SIM phone.

How many years will it take it to get to Apple's head that these are two different SIMs!

I haven't installed the beta yet so don't know details, but I saw a mention on Reddit that you can now have two different ringtones at least.

Well that honestly is a relief. I will see if I can set a muted ringtone

Though I seriously doubt Apple will allow someone to set a custom ringtone. I haven’t checked it.

What would make the iPhone personal and intuitive for me is an easy way to load apps without going through the app store.

This is rumoured to be possible with iOS 17 [1]. They just didn't announce it explicitly.

[1] if you are in the EU :^)

I'd love to be able to update apps without going to the App Store. Just long-hold an app and have an update option, or at least a "see update in App Store" option. Most of the time I go to the App Store, I have to wait for it to load a bunch of ads, then click search, then type the app, then hit update.

I believe all iOS apps get updated automatically based on apples app rollout process.

But you can still go do it via the App Store using fewer steps. Just click on your profile pic (top right) and you should see all available app updates.

I have auto updates turned off. I realize I can go into the update area and pick apps to update, but if I'm looking to update a specific one, it's usually faster to search and update that way.

> Autofill verification codes received in Mail

> Download maps to use offline

> Turn your iPhone on its side while charging to make it even more useful when you set it down.

> Share AirTag or Find My network accessories with up to five other people.

I've seen a lot of people complaining about this release, but honestly, it seems like they took the time to address a lot of the little things that were wrong with previous (larger) releases. No complaints here, other than the fact that there's still no spotify-like control for apple music :/

Yet the biggest feature will (hopefully) be Digital Markets Act compliance.

I was half expecting them to announce that with a flourish like it was some big innovation they came up with on their own.

I expect no announcement at all. I think they will try to make this as quite as possible so that nobody is aware.

That was the main thing I was looking for as well. They could have either owned it or what seems more likely, they will flip a flag for EU users in a few months.

IIRC the deadline is in July, and they have to be DMA compliant for non-EU users' data too

I can’t see them ever announcing that in a keynote. I don’t think it’s a feature that most users are asking for or would make them want to switch to the platform.

I’m not denying it’s good for users, just that I don’t think it would be good for what is (highly) a marketing presentation for them at this point.

I would expect that to be talked about in the developer state of the union this afternoon, or perhaps not even at all at this point.

The only people who care about that are a handful of nerds who are deluded enough to believe that people want to sysadmin their phones, and surveillance capitalism and gambling companies such as Facebook and Riot who are desperate to bypass privacy and security controls.

I’m quite excited about the autocorrect improvements. However my expectations remain low.

It is incredible how poor the correction is on a regular basis. What’s most frustrating when you correct the correction and Apple will redo it yet again.

They really need a better way to gesture in-word that tells iOS “I know this word is going to be Miss-corrected, don’t even try”

My expectations are low too. I haven't had any major negative experiences with iOS autocorrect in years, so it's seems likely that that'll be a downgrade for me.

It still refuses to let me swear. Ever. No matter how often I correct it.

As an Australian I find that really ducking ridiculous and an afront to my national bloody identity.

They called this out specifically in the keynote as something they've fixed.

As someone else said, they mentioned that swearing is finally coming to autocorrect during the keynote. But if you want a fix faster than that (janky as this fix is), go to Settings > General > Keyboard > Text Replacement.

Write down each swear you want and then write the same word for what it should be replaced with. So write “fucking” and “fucking” in the two boxes, and then iOS will know that “fucking” is a word it should look out for and it’ll recognize it for both autocorrect and swipe typing.

Very stupid fix but a stupid fix is still a fix.

Thanks, that’s a good idea for an interim solution.

I hadn’t seen the full keynote until after my comment so hopefully the new autocorrect really is better in general.

Most of these features could be pushed as an app update, but here we are.

I believe the core apps have so much tech debt / tentacles throughout the OS that sadly they will never get to having say Messages update from the App Store. For example, the new Messages can pop up Photos overlay to generate a sticker. This would need to be an API to see if you have the latest Photos app with the sticker capability.

Maybe, but for Apple yearly releases are just free PR. It wouldn’t be terribly difficult to write “if photos.app doesn’t have getStickerablePhotos API, tell user to update”

Every time a UI update is pushed for the calling and messaging interface, there is a group of seniors that no longer know how to call or message family and friends.

Neither the phone nor the messaging interfaces have changed significantly. In fact the main day-to-day interactive elements are completely unchanged.

Can you download zoomed-out maps of the flight you're on? I always like to try to put the phone up against the window to see where you actually are (the maps on airplanes IFE are comically out of scale and hard to read with a 4inch poorly rotating airplane icon overlaid on them)

I don’t know about the receivers in phones but my understanding of gps is that it’s actually very slow to initialise if you don’t already have a rough idea of where you are. Roughly, I think you try to guess where you are and do some dsp work that will successfully separate signal from noise if you guessed correctly. You do this first for the ‘coarse navigation signal’ and again for the fine one. I think there are ways to improve it, eg testing multiple locations in parallel but I don’t know how much phones do those vs having good guesses (nearby cell towers, Wi-Fi, flights in your calendar can all be relevant signals to start with good guesses).

I generally don’t have any problem doing this on Google maps on my domestic Australian flights, in fact I almost always do it - great to see what’s underneath me and just how fucking much nothing there is. Although the Qantas map when I’m flying on a plane with IFE does a pretty good job as well

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only that has used iOS for 10 years now but don't actually use it. As in, less than 1% of it. I read about new features all the time but none sticks.

I wish we had more details on this (https://www.apple.com/ios/ios-17-preview/):

> The expanded Lockdown Mode increases security to help protect against sophisticated cyber attacks.

No support article updates or mentions in the Platforms State of the Union.

Found this in a press release (https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/06/apple-announces-power...):

> New protections encompass safer wireless connectivity defaults, media handling, media sharing defaults, sandboxing, and network security optimizations.

Hopefully a session will cover the details.

> AirTag can be shared with up to five other people, allowing friends and family to keep track of an item in Find My.

awesome

Finally! We bought an AirTag to put on the dog, and it was disappointing that only one of us could see it. Hopefully, they also solve the issue with it beeping randomly to alert of tracking so that it doesn't beep when it's with anyone in the family.

> easier sharing with AirDrop

it works now? also if they could fix mobile hotspot, that’d be great

Yeah, I have a 50% success rate with airdrop on anything large enough that I want to use airdrop because of it.

It barely works.

That's funny. I've never had it fail.

Usually it appears and I click it gets stuck waiting, it never appears on the other device to be accepted, or something like that.

Sometimes the other device never appears despite having proper settings configured. Usually I’m trying to move a large video file.

We just had this happen tonight. Even worse is it seems to silently get stuck. It’s hard to get it back to a blessed state.

Same, except the size of the file doesn’t matter. I just message myself on Telegram now.

It works 90% of the time for me if use it in "discoverable" mode and disable wifi first.

This is awesome! I'm excited to see the update! I wish there had been an update to the camera though. It's great I just use it a lot and would love to see how they improved pieces of it!

Usually they announce camera updates at the September event when they announce new iPhones and other products. Today was about software and operating systems and developer platforms. Some hardware, but the bulk of hardware announcements come in a few months.

WWDC is software, and sometimes new platforms (headset) or Macs.

New iPhone models and their changes, like the camera, will be held until the iPhone event that is traditionally in September.

That event often contains more iOS 17 features that they didn’t want to mention today for strategic reasons (might give away hardware changes).

This part of the presentation reallllly bothered me. What a bunch of time wasting nothings and filled with establishing your "brand" and ego.

Sorry, but I do not want to see someone's Self advertising everytime I get a phone call. You know this will be used to show you ads when companies call, right? You think this will not be monetized?

I mean its Apple, this is probably limited to your address book.

No, it's not. It will apply to strangers as well.

https://gizmodo.com/best-ios-17-features-iphone-apple-wwdc-2...

Although it’s the least used app for many of us, with iOS 17, the Phone app will be upgraded with a feature Apple is calling “Personalized Contact Posters” so instead of just your name and number showing up on the iPhone of someone you’re calling, they’ll see a customized image (or memoji) and **text of your choosing which could help persuade them into answering your call***. Apple also promises the Contact Posters will “also be available for third-party calling apps.”

Wait, so this is for strangers too? That seems rather ill-advised. I suppose it's a way to make people buy iPhones so they don't get ignored by other iPhone users because of the missing picture?

Now the scam callers will not only be able to spoof the FBI's phone number, but show a badge and a threatening full screen message too!

> Now the scam callers will not only be able to spoof the FBI's phone number, but show a badge and a threatening full screen message too!

Do they do that now with iPhones? It seems like the requirement to be using an Apple account would significantly hinder the scammers.

Somehow iMessage scams have been getting popular lately. Every once in a while I get a few phishing messages a day through iMessages. Then after a week it stops (they got caught, exploit closed, I don’t know).

More worrying that they could grab a photo off FB and spoof a family member. Lots of people would ignore the number if the face and name were familiar. How many people actually memorize phone numbers any more?

I suppose they can, but it wouldn't be a very convincing scam without a good voice replicator. Grabbing pictures is easy but isolating and replicating voices is still quite difficult, especially with the heavy accent many scammers seem to have.

The time of video call scams will come, but I don't think we're there just yet outside very targeted attacks on people in power or with huge amounts of wealth at their disposal.

Apple could really do so much more with the contact book

If it was permissioned it would have a lot more utility, for us

Like bring back google plus circles, for ios contacts

Yeah I was thinking this, too. Apple doesn’t do social networking in the modern sense, but they do have a connected and committed network. They could build some kind of publishing/feed app that leverages your contacts, group threads etc.

Actually, “group threads have a feed view / content publishing tools” is simple enough to work. Hm.

I would love to see this. There seems to be a really interesting opportunity for Apple to provide a privacy-respecting replacement for social media as we know it today. Somewhere between group texts/shared albums and private Instagram, with everything being end-to-end encrypted and meant to be shared in small groups.

“Text of your choice” only during the ringbell sound like a great Snapchat competitor.

It also looks like a new way for spam callers to display the image of a nice girl to persuade you to answer.

I can imagine a Zoom bombs variant of this.

i don't see where it says people outside your contacts will see it.

While I don't purport to know how it works, there's no indication this is any more automatic than the ALREADY EXISTING shared contact photos in Messages.

The keynote says you will set your own design which other people will see you when you call them. So it’s not based on the contact photo you have saved in your phone for someone, it’s based on the information they set to be shared with you. It was not explicitly mentioned whether or not this will apply to everyone or only people you have already had contact with. I can imagine it being like airdrop where it only shows you all of that if you’re in each other’s contact list rather than just for every single inbound phone call from some random person. The video demonstration also showed there were some settings that could be tweaked, so possibly you might be able to set an override for someone in your own contact list and display what you want rather than what they provide. But none of that was clarified in the video. So unless this gizmodo article has access to more details, they’re probably just describing their interpretation of it, and I will take those details with a grain of salt, until we have a developer beta for more detailed documentation to clarify.

That doesn’t suggest it will apply to strangers at all, as I see it. Can you explain why you reached that conclusion?

Imo that feature in fact makes me believe even more that it won’t be available on calls from people you don’t know — way too ready for spam and abuse.

So... don't use apps that do that? None of the first-party iOS apps will be showing you full-screen ads through that surface, obviously

Step 1: set your profile picture or whatever they call it as an ad. Use the free form text entry to customize the add for your target audience.

Step 2: start calling people. Doesn't matter if they answer, their dialer will show your ad.

The only workaround for this I can think of is to install an alternate dialer that doesn't implement this feature. I'm not sure it iOS has user replaceable dialers, though, that may just be an iOS thing.

Step 1: set your profile picture or whatever they call it as an ad. Use the free form text entry to customize the add for your target audience.

Step 2: start calling people. Doesn't matter if they answer, their dialer will show your ad.

The only workaround for this I can think of is to install an alternate dialer that doesn't implement this feature. I'm not sure if iOS has user replaceable dialers, though, that may just be an iOS thing.

I feel like accepting the spam call is far more painful than receiving it. This feels like it'd be an improvement, assuming the volume of spam doesn't increase with it substantially, since it's now much more obvious what's crap and what's not

I imagine this will be tied to an Apple ID and you’ll lose your account pretty quickly if you abuse it. Or the customisation will be limited in some way. There’s no way Apple will let someone call thousands of random numbers showing porn for example. I imagine someone has thought about this.

It'll depend on how well Apple handles abuse reports. If they become too aggressive, killing someone's Apple account (including their precious memories on iCloud) could be a real risk for mass fake reports. If they become too lenient, scammers will strike.

For just $15 per account [1] you can buy your way into someone else's iCloud, no manual phishing or credential stuffing needed. You'll need to ban quite a few per day to get rid of all of them, and even then innocent people may lose their accounts.

[1]: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3261128/criminals-pay-...

most spam callers use some VOIP hack to imitate other phone numbers, but this will surely require linking that phone number to an iCloud account. I don’t know how spammers would do it, but I’m guessing this will actually be used to hide their identities behind iPhone accounts.

it’d really be funny for spammers to suddenly start showing up as Karen from Des Moines instead.

Actually thinking this through, it could be used to Dox people too.

I don't know how spoof resistant the feature will be. Hopefully Apple has thought about this, they probably have at least considered it.

Whether or not this is doxing will depend on the way this feature works. If it works like WhatsApp (where anyone with your phone number can look up your profile picture and status and that's considered Works As Intended) then it won't be long until every phone number has been mapped. If it works push-only, with new image URLs being generated for each call, I'm not so sure if it can be abused.

I'm sure security researchers will have some very interesting blogs about this system in the months to come.

They already have a comparable feature for iMessages. So far, i haven’t heard of any abuses.

The difference here is that phone numbers can be spoofed much easier than iMessage accounts, so you can (maybe??) spoof this system.

How do the 1p apps block people's ads? Some sort of ML detection?

Probably more likely will be dick pics that just pop up on your screen

Just happy that friends are doing calls again!

They do have a “sensitive content” filter API so that’s likely not going to happen.

One feature I'm looking forward to, oddly enough, is Journal. Finally, an end-to-end encrypted fully featured journalling application interface that has your privacy in the forefront. Included with your OS.

Will we ever get a guest mode? Especially on my ipad, the kids love to use my apple pencil to draw, and I really don't want them to have access to everything else...

Is there a table somewhere that lists which new features will be available on which iPhones?

I wonder how they train that image filter at the bottom

thinking emoji

iPhone XS or later… I guess the iPhone 8 and the X are losing support now or did I interpret this wrong?

You are correct.

Sep 12, 2017 — Apple announces iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus, featuring a new glass and aluminum design, Retina HD displays, A11 Bionic chip and wireless ...

Sep 12, 2017 — “iPhone X is the future of the smartphone. It is packed with incredible new technologies, like the innovative TrueDepth camera system, beautiful ...

6 year old phone

6 years old and it still performs pretty well, I’m really sensitive to slow tech but I don’t have major complains with my iPhone X in 2023. This is the longest I’ve ever owned a phone definitely buying the 15.

Really? My X is still 100% fine for me. I used my friends new 14 the other day and didn’t notice any difference besides it being larger and thicker.

Is multiple users on an iPad a thing yet?

Nope. Seems like even the M2 chip and the RAM it has (on iPad Pro) isn't enough for Apple to consider adding multiuser support and quick multiuser switching. I keep waiting for this every iPadOS release, and it's disappointing not to see it.

Apple has really masterminded a new era in personal & interpersonal computing here. There's a couple tactics backing this overarching strategy, that all reinforce each other well. They have really pushed communications technology massively forward, which semi-coincidentally is one of their biggest & most effective moats. Another tactic that I thing is strongly helping them forward is in combining experiences & systems together.

The personalization starts super-visibly. Folks create their own contact "Posters" now, with the help of a nice flair-generator, that are highly visible across systems, such as the improved AirDrop, NameDrop. Personalization also is intrinsic too: Journal app could be incredibly interesting, as it seems to sort of assisted scrapbooker that pulls & clips your data & information as you open the journal, makes your journal more multimedia & characterful.

Personalization also is much more on display, now with StandBy, which cements your personality ambiently with an always-on display. Users can configure widgets & photos to provide a little information portal. The variety of widgets & configurability of the system seems like a class far beyond what Nest Hub and Pixel Tablet have, which feel like sterile consumer applications, rather than something of & for the user.

Groupware is where the real story is though. There's low hanging easy fruit, like Live Voicemail transcriptionsl; ingest only but a great adjustment to "workflow" we all deal with. AppleTV being able to work with the phone to do FaceTime gets them a much more respectable video position, oh and folks can now leave videomessages - so personal! AirPlay sharing does what Google Cast can do but none of their apps do do, letting people join & collaborate together while doing ubiquotous/pervasive computing... remember the Nexus Q? Apple shipped it. Youtube Music by compare still doesn't have a good shared/collaborative experience. Groupware keeps going and going today. CheckIn provides an incredibly useful way for trusted folks to be e-keepers for each other in the world. The "Bump" like contact sharing looks great & leverages that customization, and AirDrop being internet connected is a huge win. AirTags and browser passwords are both shareable with others. Notes is collaborative, and has FaceTime integration. Groupware radically evolved today on a lot of fronts.

By far the biggest changes in WWDC for me though were in iMessaging. Everything I've said so far is amazing & great adjustments, but iMessages is the crown jewel of Apple's world & it's never been on display like today. Apple is the social network overlord already, and they've really amped their game up incredibly. There's some really simple but powerful additions like being able to drop in locations, or again like with voicemail see live transcriptions of audio messages. CheckIn is integrated. These are more interesting & alive shared space Apple is creating, owning themselves, atop their already strong iMessage apps integrations. QoL is high, with less busy screen, shortcuts to get to where you were last in a convo. It's the emojis/Stickers though. Wow. Instead of being an append only stream, a chat is now a collaborative multiplayer experience, is a 1-dimensionally expanding whiteboard. And emoji/Stickers have a great creation tool! Taking existing photos & short clips & letting folks turn that into reusable stylized Stickers, that we can drop atop other folk's content creates a much richer hypermedia than what social networks have had so far. It's mind blowingly different to me.

That's it, then. Apple is never ever going to participate with the rest of the communications infrastructure of the rest of the planet. It's iMessages forever. They've stuck it to us, with Stickers. I'm not even joking. Text messaging is by far one of the most repeat & highest value things we have communication technology for, and Apple has seemingly found a way to mainstreamify a much more collaborative & interactive form of messaging.

My mostly-jest joke of today is that Vision Pro wouldn't have been launched except Apple needed to give people something else to talk about, other than how they are now far & away the most powerful social network on the planet. There's a ton of amazing personal & groupware things they've done, but the most important communication we have with each other is far more under lock by Apple than it was yesterday; the cry about Apple needing to support RCS & standards looks totally different today than it did yesterday. My hats off to Apple. The rest of the world has a lot more work to do to remain in good contact with one another than we did yesterday, and we didn't know it; thank you for moving the ball forward, amazing & as I said: awesome.

Please don't flag me this time for saying this, like my last go here. I think this is a well thought out idea & stance, & I'd gladly invite discussion & hate-mail, which I promise to be generous with here.

This is way too much text bro lol. I read it, but I think that's why you are being flagged. Too much summary

ctrl+f "sideloading" -> 0 results

With this in mind, does anyone care?

I'm sure dozens, maybe even hundreds, of people care

I'd say it's more, with the EU Digital Markets Act.

EU lawmakers, famously known for being the pinnacle of The Will of the People

Most people don’t care about sideloading.

I care about it, but I also understand that hell will freeze over before Apple stand up on the stage in front of their worldwide developer community and tell them that the Apple Store fees and the Apple Developer subscription cost aren't necessary after all. If they do allow side-loading for legal compliance, it's practically guaranteed that the option to switch it on will be slid into a minor-point release in a difficult-to-find menu with no fanfare whatsoever. It makes no sense for them to advertise the capability and I would be surprised if it even makes it into the release notes.

Not much of a surprise. Apple won't introduce installing downloaded apps unless they're forced, and the EU law that'll force them to enable external sources won't be enforced until next year.

Correct, almost nobody cares about sideloading.

Is this an advertisement?

Apple blew me away with what they are doing for personal communication. Everything else felt like a refinement or new product trial balloon. But what Apple is doing to make mini-creators out of people here is jaw dropping.

I'd go so far to half-jest VisionPro launch was pushed up to smokescreen how big the iMessage changes are, what ecosystem dominance Apple is getting with iOS/MacOS. Apple is never going to participate with anyone else ever, after this. Apple is off executing incredible big advancements.

Users create a little avatar that shows up across products, with some solid flare & artistic effect gratis. Great first impression building, lots of enduring personality.

But the day to day is wow. Being able to positionally drag drop emoji into group chat is huge flair from the start. Drop in locations easily, nice, useful. Creating custom emoji really really impressed me, really let's folks develop repetoir & humor in their interactions with each other over time. ActivityPub/Mastadon impl MissKey has a very barebones custom emoji that I like, but the authorship tools here look really really friendly & helpful to really DIY, to go beyond being a meme bank.

Other communications tech touches were everywhere. Live Voicemail live transcribing is dead simple & sensible, albeit receive only. Shared CarPlay Sessions is tech Google has in Cast/Android but which no one uses (including YouTube Music): hugely prosocial connected computing. Journaling is incredibly compelling as a synthesis tool, a way to pull together a variety of computing bits & encourage user content generation, to make a shared computing space around the user.

Apple also situated into the home far better than Google. Android's widgets have been stagnant for years & crude, and Apple has gone from having nothing to relentlessly driving forward with microexperiences atop shared computing spaces. These ideas, of shared computing spaces, and shared interpersonal spaces, are massively on display here in a way no one else is computing is showing off, and it's incredibly compelling to me. And scary, as it's so purely Apple's space; the world needs some principled loyal opposition to the Cupertino Way, that keeps the path of computing available for open innovation.

... and this all but completes transition from Jobs' Apple of "we know what's good for you" to non-Jobs' Apple of "the more the merrier, let's just stuff it with all we have".

The pattern is repeating except now there's no Steve to take the company back and smack some opinionated design sense into it.

I am beginning to dread every new iOS version as they seem to just make it worse and worse as times goes on. Examples:

1. Copy and Paste. When first introduced, it was great. You got a magnifying glass to be precise. It basically just worked. Yet somehow they kept changing it and every change makes it less usable. Currently, you can't really place the cursor at the end of a line (seriously, go into iMessage and try it). It's trying way too hard to snap to where it thinks you want the cursor. The only way to get this is to put it at the beginning of the next line and delete back. Pressing on a word brings up the "select" menu instead of just placing the cursor half the time.

2. Safari tab groups. I liked the old version where you toggled between tabs and private. But now you have to go through an extra step: selecting a tab group. Some people may want this. I'm not one of them. There is absolutely no way to opt out of this.

3. On an iPad hitting the top center of Safari brings up some split screen functionality that I have never used, don't care about and don't want. It's a natural place to press to go to the top of the page so this happens all the time.

Please just stop with this, Apple.

I don't have the same problems in #1 that you do (copy/paste + selection). Only mentioning this because you say to go try it, and I did just these things prior to reading your comment. Also, if you aren't aware of long pressing / holding the space bar to navigate, it's very useful.

I cant figure out how to paste something in many contexts without a long press, which will select text - so the paste will replace that text. So if i want to insert something, I will write a couple of chars of garbage, long-press-select, then paste-replace.

iOS strangely is full of these little hickups, it sometimes feels like back in Windows. (Also the auto correct is so annoyingly dumb and broken)

I do a light tap to bring up the copy/paste options. Long-press activates the navigation mode to drag the cursor.

You reminded me of another iOS UI/UX fail: the long press (and Force Touch).

Apple famously for many years avoided adding a second mouse button. Steve Jobs was against it. Why? Because it lacked discoverability and consistency. He ultimately lost this because the context menu on Windows became pretty consistent and universal.

But his ultimatel point applies to long presses (and similar): where is the discoverability? Most people don't realize this can do something different. If they do, there's no consistency to it.

Even in your example, why would I expect to move the cursor around by long pressing the space bar? They added a non-intuitive gesture to make up for the failure they created by messing with the original copy and paste that worked just fine.

Both apple and Google created a similar problem with the address bar on browsers. Notice how hard it is to delect part of a URL? Why would you want to do this? Example: removing the stupid text fragment on Google search results so you can copy and paste the URL.

Click (or press) once and you select the whole URL. Click (or press) again and it brings up a menu with options like cut, copy and translate. To get rid of the selection you have to click outside the selection area. Now you can click the text like the search term but it snaps to word endings. What if I want to just correct spelling without re-typing the whole word?

All I want is to finely select in the URL and they've added so many extra steps and barriers to make this as difficult as possible in the name of "usability".

I'm a fan of the space bar navigation. It's not a replacement, it's an additional way to move the cursor. Feel free to tap to the position you'd like, or long-press-and-drag the cursor directly.

Not just iOS. That's all mobile OS's, as they all keep trying to re-invent the wheel each year so they can have something big to unveil to shareholders and customers.

Cynically..

"That's why this year, we're again focusing on the core features. Phone, messages, voicemail. We literally have no ideas beyond what was already here when we arrived."

For point number one, you just tap in the empty space at the end of a line, so I'm not really sure what you mean. You can also hold your finger down and get the "magnifying glass" experience with the cursor just like you've always been able to.

If the URL (or search term) exceeds the address bar box size, this is either impossible or very difficult. You'll hit the clear button instead and delete the URL.

But even if this works (which it doesn't consistently), how is that intuitive?

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