I only wish there was a way to jump immediately to the featured photo in my Photo Library, because more than once I’ve found myself unable to place exactly where a picture is from. Most of us have thousands upon thousands of photos in our libraries that we don’t go back to look at this puts them front in center. One thing I love about this is, like the Featured Photos that Apple previously introduced into Photos, it helps surface pictures that you may have forgotten about. I flirted with one of the Weather faces, but ultimately found it not personal enough, and ultimately settled on a rotating set of landscape pictures from my photo library that change every time I wake the phone. I’ve created a handful of different lock screens over the past several months, but have mostly not found myself switching too much between them. By default, your lock screen wallpaper is also applied to your Home screens, although you can still change it to be different if you want, and there’s a great “legibility” option that blurs the image to give you a splash of color while making it way easier to read text. Your photos can be tweaked too: you can make them black & white or apply a color tint for a distinct look. What I like about this premise is that it puts your personalization front and center: your wallpaper is the star of the show, whether it’s a specific photo, one of the built-in options like Astronomy or Emoji, or a rotating set of photos that you or the system have chosen. To enter the new customization mode, you press and hold on the lock screen-again like the Apple Watch-and it kicks you into a screen where you can swipe between different lock screens you’ve created or create a brand new one. You can have multiple lock screens (much like Apple Watch faces), each configured with a particular wallpaper image, a handful of widgets (think watchface complications), and a few choices of style. The template for this system is very clearly pulled from the Apple Watch. Apple’s built an entirely new system for customizing your lock screen to your tastes and it’s both more than I expected and less than I’d hoped (in my wildest dreams, anyways). Everything about iOS 16’s lock screen picker is very reminiscent of how watchOS deals with watch faces. But over the last fifteen years that’s been the only software option to make your phone stand apart. Since the very earliest days of the device, it’s allowed for a degree of personalization in the form of allowing you to choose a wallpaper, which at least lets you separate your iPhone from everybody else’s. The lock screen is the front door of your iPhone. A handful are now scheduled to arrive later, whether because they require buy-in from third parties-for example, the new Live Activities API, which also powers the iPhone 14 Pro’s Dynamic Island feature, or support for the Matter smart home standard-or because they’re likely easier to launch when all of Apple’s platform updates go live, like the new iCloud Shared Library.īut even if not all of the features are ready at launch, there are still plenty of good reasons to take the leap to iOS 16. Of course, one thing has become de rigueur in the Apple roll-out: not all the new features that are part of iOS 16 will be available at launch. Such is the benefit of a unified platform architecture. It’s also worth noting that, of course, most of the new features in iOS 16 also apply to iPadOS 16, and many also to macOS Ventura. None of which is to say there isn’t still room for improvement-as there always is-but simply that there are a lot of great reasons to upgrade. IOS remains Apple’s flagship platform, even if it doesn’t yet have the immense longevity of macOS, and in this year’s update, there’s pretty much something for every kind of user, from shutterbugs to security fiends to those who just want to customize the look and feel of their smartphone life. Some of those are the kind of slow-burn features that may end up having an enormous effect on the way we use our technology, but will take a while to come into their own. IOS 16 was first announced at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June, where Apple showed off a release with a handful of marquee features, including the biggest redesign to the iPhone’s lock screen in years, and a ton of smaller-but in many ways no less significant-enhancements. But then comes along a release like iOS 16 where the company proves that not only can it continue to add compelling new features but also rethink certain fundamental parts of its smartphone experience. Fifteen years after the launch of the iPhone, you might be thinking that Apple gazes upon its domain and weeps for the lack of worlds left to conquer.
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