All You Need To Know About The Announcements At Apple’s WWDC 2021

The biggest developer conference of the year, exclusively hosted by Apple, brought forth a lot of new announcements on Monday, where the tech giant revealed the first looks of the iOS 15, the new macOS Monterey, announced big improvements to FaceTime, and a whole lot more.

The iOS 15 Preview

One of the biggest highlights of the event was Apple’s sneak preview of the upcoming iOS 15. As it stands, the new software will give notifications a new look, with contact photos on text notifications, bigger app icons, and new filter modes called Focus. There’s also an option to batch certain notifications and receive them as a digest at certain times of day as a summary.

Source: Macworld UK (Apple)

Upping its privacy game, iOS 15 will bring all Siri request processing on-device by default. Users will also get an App Privacy Report with a seven-day summary of how often apps accessed location information and your phone’s microphone or camera. Mail will also block tracking pixels commonly used in marketing emails to determine whether an email was opened and read.

Other updates include the ability to search text in photos courtesy of a new feature called LiveText, including the ability to search photos in Spotlight, AirPods audio updates, and the ability to locate AirPods Pro and AirPods Max using Find My.

FaceTime Improvements

Under iOS15, FaceTime will also be getting new updates. The in-built calling app will now get spatial audio and a new “SharePlay” feature that lets you share media with people on FaceTime virtually. The SharePlay feature will let you watch or listen to content with others virtually. Apple is also introducing a SharePlay API so that other developers can build apps that support the feature.

Siri, Minus The Internet

Apple will finally enable Siri to function without the internet, with the ability to process voice requests on the device, meaning audio won’t be sent over the web, and Siri can accept many requests while offline. Apart from this, Apple also announced that it will let third-party accessory makers add Siri to their devices.