iOS 10 and a Siri That Plugs Into WeChat and Alipay: Everything You Need to Know About Apple's Keynote Early This Morning

Apple upgraded its entire lineup of operating systems. But will that help it sell more hardware?

Early this morning, more than 5,000 people came to the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in downtown San Francisco for Apple's annual WWDC developer conference.

In a two-hour opening keynote, Apple announced upgrades to four platforms: iOS 10, macOS Sierra (the new name for OS X), watchOS 3.0 and tvOS.

At the venue, a QDaily reporter noticed that the audience cheered loudest whenever Apple said it was opening up a core feature — above all when it said Siri would open up to third-party apps. Siri, Maps and iMessage can now all serve as doorways into other companies' apps: say one sentence and a WeChat message goes out; pull up Dianping inside Maps and book a table.

By opening up the system, Apple has made countless new things possible in the daily use of the iPhone and the Mac. That openness ran through the whole of this WWDC.

The iPhone's Biggest Software Upgrade in Years, Built on Openness and AI

iOS 10 took up more of this WWDC than anything else. Apple demoed ten significant updates in one go, covering Siri, Photos, iMessage, Music, even phone calls. This may be the biggest change to the iPhone's operating system since iOS 7 in 2013.

The changes start with the lock screen. Since the iPhone 6s, fingerprint unlock has been so fast that pressing the Home button leaves you no time to read the notifications on the lock screen.

Now, when you pick up an iPhone, it shows the lock screen by itself so you can see what came in. The notifications are richer than before, too. Call a car with Uber or Lyft, for instance, and you can watch it move across a map in real time without leaving that screen.

As for nuisance calls, Apple has teamed up with Tencent to flag likely junk calls from unknown numbers with a line of text.

More of what changed in iOS 10 comes from openness and artificial intelligence.

Apple opened up three important features this time:

• Siri can send messages, order food, hail a ride and transfer money straight through third-party apps such as WeChat and WhatsApp;
• Maps now carries the restaurant-booking features of Dianping and Yelp;
• iMessage can take in stickers, animated effects and camera features built by outside developers.

Across the whole event, nothing drew a stronger reaction from the audience than the news that Siri would open up to third-party apps — except the closing video paying tribute to developers.

On artificial intelligence, several of iOS's own apps now compete head-on with Google.

Take QuickType's smart replies: it learns your language habits and suggests the reply you were probably about to type. That is almost exactly what Allo, which Google announced last month, does.

Or take Photos, which can now recognize what is in an image — faces, objects, scenery — and use that to sort and file every picture you have.

On stage Apple demoed a new photo feature called Memories, a photo feed much like Google Photos that groups pictures into categories such as family and people, plus a "photo map" showing where each picture was taken.

It also puts together video albums with background music, and those videos can be edited — you can swap the music, for one thing. All of this works on the Mac as well.

It is essentially Google Photos for iOS.

Apple Watch Gets Faster, and Apple Is Still Working Out How You Should Control a Watch

With watchOS 3.0, the Apple Watch will first of all get faster: the apps you open often stay resident in the watch's memory, and messages arriving in your phone's apps are pushed to the watch in real time. By Apple's count, apps will open seven times faster on the Apple Watch.

Apple has more ideas about how you control the watch, too. This time it did not mention Force Touch — pressing hard on the screen — once. It reworked the interface instead, so that a single tap gets you to the features you use most.

The alarm clock, for instance, no longer makes you dial a time. It shows the alarm times you use most often, and one tap sets one.

watchOS 3.0 also adds iPhone-style multitasking: press the side button and it lays out the apps you have been using, so you can jump into any of them with one tap.

The new ways of interacting include handwriting. In the on-stage demo, sliding a finger across the screen was enough to write a word, and the new system already takes Chinese input.

Apple has added features to the Apple Watch as well as reworking how it is used:

Another one-tap feature is SOS. Hold the side button down and the Apple Watch dials your region's emergency number through your iPhone while showing the information first responders need.

Fitness tracking has been strengthened, with the emphasis on the social side of activity data. You can now compete with friends over who has lately run farther or faster.

Finally, as usual, watchOS 3.0 adds a few watch faces, and lets you swipe left and right to switch between them quickly.

The new built-in apps also include a wheelchair mode and Breathe, which walks you through deep-breathing exercises.

In short, watchOS wants to make the watch feel faster by simplifying how you work it. Some of the new interactions, handwriting among them, may do the job.

watchOS 3.0 arrives in the fall; the developer version went out today.

The Mac Gets Siri, and Apple Pay Can Now Buy Things on the Web

Siri is no longer just the assistant that sets alarms and runs simple searches.

At this WWDC, Apple's compulsion about naming flared up again: it changed OS X's name back, to macOS. That brings macOS, iOS, watchOS and tvOS into one naming scheme.

Siri will be built into that operating system. Alongside the keyboard and mouse, we will be able to control the computer with our voices; Siri sits in the Mac's dock and opens like any other app.

But what can a voice assistant on a Mac actually do? Apple's demo had Siri finding files on the computer and searching the web, all by voice.

Apple Pay, Apple's payment tool, has come to the Mac too. A payment app that used to work only on a phone now works on web pages, and it looks very convenient:

Instead of typing a card number and password into one page after another, you send the request to your Apple Watch or use the fingerprint reader on your phone, and the payment is done.

Finally, for anyone using an iPhone, an iPad and a Mac at once, the three work together noticeably more closely:

• Unlock a Mac with one tap using the watch or the iPhone;
• The clipboard syncs across iPhone, iPad and Mac, so text or even an image copied on the iPhone pastes straight onto the Mac;
• If you have several Macs, their desktops can sync, and an iPhone can even open a file saved on a Mac's desktop.

Apple Music Gets a Whole New Look

Apple launched its Apple Music streaming service at WWDC 2015. A year on, WWDC 2016 brings Apple Music's first big update: a new interface, and lyrics.

The clearest change in the interface is the use of bold type; Connect, which used to let you follow what musicians were up to, has been tucked into a second-level menu.

Music has also finally gained a few things a music app ought to have all along, such as showing lyrics.

iMessage Is Turning Into a Full Communication App

iMessage, which used to be about nothing but text messages, is becoming a full social app, and the chat feed itself is getting much richer.

Honestly, it has gotten a little showy.

First, every link now shows a thumbnail and a title, much as in Skype. Video links play inside the chat window on their own.

Emoji got a large update. They are three times their old size, and — more interesting — the input field not only predicts emoji but picks out words that can be turned into them.

Type a sentence with "Happy" and "Love" in it, for example, and the system finds and highlights both words; one tap turns them into emoji.

A pile of visual effects has landed in iMessage's message window as well. In the demo, speech bubbles animated according to what the text said — "exploding," for instance. The whole screen can throw up effects such as fireworks depending on what you are talking about. Very showy…

Handwriting, and the animated Digital Touch messages from the Apple Watch, can appear in conversations too. You just draw or write on the screen.

iMessage has also opened its interfaces to developers, which means all of the above can multiply without limit. Developers can build stickers or animated images, and can plug in their own apps.

Apple demoed ordering food through iMessage on stage: once someone sends you a restaurant link, you can order and pay inside iMessage itself.

All this shows that Apple finally has a complete social app — one whose direct competitors will be Facebook, Line, WeChat…

Until now, wary about user privacy, Apple had not tried much in the direction of social.

This time Apple stressed privacy again, its position being: iMessage has plenty of personalized features, but we will not take your private data. In practice that means iMessage adds end-to-end encryption and builds no data profile of its users. AI features such as predictive text and automatic emoji suggestions do not send anything to the cloud either; they are handled on the iPhone.

And Some Things That Have Little to Do With China

Apple also updated tvOS, though that means little to users in China.

Its new features resemble what today's smart TVs already do:

You can use the phone app as a remote, and ask Siri by voice for the show you want, with YouTube included in the search;

And if you move between different online video services, Apple supports Single Sign-On, so one login shows you everything.

Also of little relevance to China: Apple News, a service that cannot get into the Chinese market at all.

The System Is More Open Now. So What?

As the operating systems get better — as iOS and macOS evolve in particular — Apple's hardware becomes nicer to use.

That is good news for users, of course.

Even before these updates, though, the iPhone and the Mac were already good enough to sell for more than Android phones and Windows PCs.

But the iPhone and the Mac can no longer sell more each year than the year before: most of the people who will ever buy an iPhone have bought one, and most of them wait nearly three years before replacing it.

The iOS 10 released today runs on every iPhone from the iPhone 5 on. MacBooks going back to 2010 can also move to the new macOS Sierra.

After the upgrade those machines will work better, but that does nothing to help Apple sell more of them. And as a public company — the largest public company in the world — Apple has to chase a higher sales figure every year.

Today we saw upgrades to the iMessage communication service and to Apple Music, which already has more than 15 million paying subscribers. Could the money they bring in fill the hole left by falling iPhone sales?

Or can Apple find a breakthrough in the hardware market it knows best — say, in the Apple Watch, which got its software upgrade this time? Lately its watch ads are all over San Francisco, from the airport into the middle of the city.

Then there is the Apple car project, further off but almost certainly under way. Apple has poached Tesla employees at every level and leased several million square meters of office space in Silicon Valley.

After the iPhone, what will actually solve Apple's growth problem? And what will Apple have to change about itself along the way?

Apple is far from the only company with a growth problem, and smartphones are far from the only industry with one. For a company that has pushed the whole technology industry forward more than once, the challenge it faces today is not an easy one. And where its search leads will tell the rest of the industry something.

Next, we will look across three articles at how Apple is hunting for its future growth in different fields.