Explore and Learn iOS 14 Features

       We know that iOS 14.0 beta 5 released on Aug 18th, 2020. The following are the expected new features of iOS 14. Try to learn more about the features and the areas that we need to think from a developer or tester perspective. Now, we will discuss the iOS 14 new features below,

• A new home screen with the App Library: Apple is finally changing the iOS home screen! With iOS 14, you’ll be able to actually remove apps from your home screens, and even eliminate entire screens. It is a great way to clean up your iPhone’s home screen without losing access to all your stuff, and it is the most significant change to the iPhone’s home screen in years.

• New Widgets on the Today view and home screen: With iOS 14, Apple will completely overhaul the widgets experience. The new widgets can have more information and a bunch of new sizes, but most importantly, they can be dragged right off the Today view and onto your home screen. A single “Smart Stack” widget lets you swipe through your commonly used widgets, and can even be set to automatically show you the widget you’re most likely to need throughout the day.

• A whole new Siri interface: Siri’s full-screen takeover will finally become a thing of the past. When you trigger Siri in iOS 14, it will simply show the Siri “blob” at the bottom of your display, and a lot of the results will show as a rich notification at the top of your screen.

• Picture-in-picture: Once only available on iPad, picture-in-picture mode is finally coming to iPhone with iOS 14. When watching a video or talking on a FaceTime call, you can swipe back to the home screen and the video will continue to play in a little box, allowing you to keep using your iPhone for other things.

• App Clips lets you use mini-apps on the spot: Apple is introducing a whole new class of application called App Clips. These are little micro parts-of-apps that allow you to use specific Apps without having to download, install, and sign in to a big app to do one simple thing. A developer creates an App Clip when they make their app, making sure the experience is under 10MB in size so it downloads and opens quickly. Developers are encouraged to use Sign In with Apple and Apple Pay so you don’t need to log in or create accounts. App Clips will show in the App Library, and show an app icon surrounded by a dotted line. You can re-access the App Clip this way, or easily download the full app.

• Major Messages improvements: Messages is arguably the most important mobile app in Apple’s arsenal. Apple is adding some big features to Messages across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. You can now pin up to nine conversations, keeping them at the top of your Messages stack. That is a relief to anyone who has a lot of different conversations going, or just gets a lot of two-factor authentication codes over SMS.

• Memoji updates: There are seven new hairstyles, 16 new pieces of headwear, three new memoji stickers, face coverings and an expanded range of ages. Memoji have been refined with new facial and muscle structure to make them more expressive, too.

• Maps improvements: The Maps app will help you find places to visit in major cities with a new Guides feature. Apple is working with major third-party travel companies to provide guides to landmarks, sightseeing, restaurants, hotels, shopping, and other activities.

• Camera improvements: The Quick Take video mode enjoyed by the iPhone 11 (press and hold the shutter button in Photo mode to take a video) will come to iPhone XR and iPhone XS. And all iPhones will get the ability to change video resolution and frame rate in the Camera app, rather than digging into the Settings app. In addition to the single-shot exposure lock, there is now an exposure compensation slider that lasts for an entire session whether taking photos or videos.

• Default email and browser apps: With iOS 14, you’ll be able to designate third-party apps to be your default email or browser. You can currently run other browsers and email apps on iPhone, but when you open a link or email address, it will still open Safari or Mail. With iOS 14, when you click on a link or email address, it will open the app of your choosing instead.

• FaceTime improvements: Do you remember how iOS 13 had a neat feature where it would tweak your eyes to make it look like you were looking at the camera, instead of down at your display? That “eye contact” feature never ended up shipping, but it’s back in iOS 14.

• Keyboard tweaks: The dictation feature is now better and works entirely on your device, but that is not the big-ticket item. The big-ticket item is that the emoji picker now has a search bar, just like it does on the Mac.

• Privacy enhancements: You can give apps your approximate location instead of your exact location (perfect for a weather or sports app), for example. When an app asks to access your photos, you can select specific photos to give it access to, instead of your whole library. While an app is accessing your camera, a little green dot will show in the status bar. There’s an amber dot for when your microphone is accessed. Because some apps ask for permission to access your camera or microphone for legit reasons, but then watch or listen to you when you’re not expecting it.

• The Translate app: Apple’s got a new first-party app called Translate, and it’s basically the Apple version of the popular Google Translate app. Just pick two languages, hit the microphone button, and the app will listen to your voice and provide text and voice translations. You can even download many languages to your device and it’ll work entirely offline.

• Apple Arcade: Apple is updating the Arcade tab in iOS 14 to show you the games your Game Center friends are playing, quickly access games you played recently (even if it was on a different device), and make it easier to find and sort through all the Arcade games.

• ARKit 4: Apple keeps expanding its augmented reality tools for developers, even if it isn’t making a lot of impressive features for users yet. ARKit 4 tools let developers place Location Anchors so an AR object can occupy a specific place in the real world. Like a virtual sculpture in a public square. There is a new Depth API that lets developers build 3D mesh environments and per-pixel depth information on the latest iPad Pro with its LiDAR scanner. Presumably these features will be important on future iPhone Pro models, too.

• Safari improvements: Safari is faster than ever in iOS 14, and more secure, too. You can access privacy reports for websites, and Apple will monitor saved passwords to see if any have been involved in recent data breaches.

• CarPlay: Apple’s car interface has a host of small but welcome improvements. There are new categories of apps allowed, including EV charging, parking, and food ordering apps.

• Car Keys:  Apple’s one of the first to bring a standardized version of digital car keys to your iPhone.

Thanks for spending your time here to read this article and know about the new features of iOS 14.

Reference: MACWORLD

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