A Week With iOS 10: The iPhone's Biggest Software Upgrade in Three Years

What matters more is what it opens up for third-party apps

At Apple's keynote in the early hours of last Tuesday, nearly half the time went to iOS 10 — explaining it and demonstrating it.

Users won't get the iOS 10 update until this fall, but the developer beta is already out. We installed it on an iPhone 5s and an iPhone 6s Plus and used it for close to a week.

It is not stable yet: lag, crashes, and bad overheating all happen. If you really want to try it and you have a developer account, you can click here to download and install. Back up first.

This build will differ from the final release. And since no third-party app supports iOS 10's new features yet, we paid most attention to the system itself and to Apple's own apps.

At first it will feel strange

You will need time to adjust, because the lock screen has changed — the motion your fingers repeat hundreds of times a day, the one your muscles already know, is not the same.

First, you no longer have to press the Home button or the power button. Lift the iPhone and the lock screen appears by itself. In our testing it worked on the 6s but not on the 5s.

The lock screen matters more now. It is split into three screens — Today, Notifications, and Camera — with Notifications showing by default; swipe left or right to switch.

The new design makes sure you see your notifications whenever you pick up the phone. On the 6s before this, fingerprint unlock was so fast that pressing Home dropped you straight onto a home screen full of app icons.

The part that takes getting used to: Apple's famous "slide to unlock" is gone. In its place is "Press home to unlock" — Apple now assumes the iPhone in your hand has fingerprint unlock.

With the iPhone SE, every iPhone at every price has Touch ID.

Still, for longtime users used to a swipe on the home screen, the first days on iOS 10 feel odd.

The biggest change to how iOS looks since iOS 7

Once you unlock the phone, the new look is plain to see. The clearest case is Widgets — the things that used to be crammed in with the notification bar, which you had to swipe down from the top to reach.

Apple gave Widgets a bigger presence on the lock screen, and they are easier to find inside the system too. They now sit with Spotlight search.

Swipe right on the home screen and all your Widgets are there. Their design has changed as well.

Besides looking more like cards, Widgets are now all the same height by default. Before iOS 10, the developer set the size. Now every widget starts the same height, and you tap "Show More" to give it more room; how much it grows depends on the kind of widget. iOS 10 remembers your choice, even after you restart the iPhone.

That leaves the pull-down menu holding nothing but app notifications. But if you pull down while inside an app, swiping left still gets you the Today view.

Control Center has changed too, into two cards

The other place with big changes is Control Center. The design is new, and the buttons in the top row are now in color, so you can pick out the one you want faster in that cluster of buttons.

More important, swipe right and you get the Music controls. On iOS 9 these were folded into the same panel. As their own card they are far more useful, with room for more song information and more buttons.

If you have wireless speakers at home and like playing music from your iPhone, you will like the new button at the bottom for picking where the music plays. Switching sources is easy now.

3D Touch is more useful

Control Center supports 3D Touch as well — the interaction Apple introduced last year, where how hard you press the screen can open an app's shortcut menu.

The bottom four icons in Control Center now respond to it. Press hard on the flashlight, for instance, and you can set its brightness; iOS 10 remembers what you picked. Set it low and it opens low every time until you change it again.

When Apple launched 3D Touch last year, the pitch was pressing an app icon to jump to a specific feature — press the Camera icon and you land straight in time-lapse, selfie, and so on.

But 3D Touch needs developers to support it. Plenty of apps still don't, and pressing hard only makes the screen buzz once.

In iOS 10 Apple made a small fix: whether or not the developer supports 3D Touch, pressing an icon hard now brings up at least a Share option, which sends the app's download link to a friend. Before this, digging up a download link was a chore.

Cards run through all of iOS 10

Widgets became cards, Control Center became two cards, and every notification went from a "banner" to a white, rounded-rectangle card.

A notification dropping in from the top of the screen now feels more like a window: you can answer a message or an email inside the card. On iOS 9, replying felt like walking into a different screen.

Cards show up in more of Apple's own apps, too — Maps above all, where they are the app's biggest change.

Start navigating and a card you can drag rises from the bottom with details on the different routes; search for a restaurant and a card gives you the name, phone number, and address instead of sending you to a separate page.

Going to cards is an important change for iOS. At the very least it makes the whole system look of a piece.

Artificial intelligence matters more, and Siri will be the center of it

Artificial intelligence is the newest fight among tech companies, and Apple is joining it. Siri goes back here to what it was meant to be: an AI assistant, not a thing that tells jokes and searches the web.

Apple makes Siri's new weight obvious. Its entry in Settings has moved up to where you see it at once, instead of sitting behind "General."

Going by the WWDC demo, Siri can call on third-party apps — hailing a car, ordering food, buying tickets — but we could not try any of that in the developer build.

Photos shows the AI work too; it has picked up some of what Google Photos does.

Albums now include "People," the faces the system finds on its own. Name someone who turns up often and you have, in effect, a photo library devoted to that person.

In our use it caught human faces accurately most of the time, though now and then it also pulled out a cartoon face from an emoji.

The other "smart" piece of Photos is the new Memories, a re-sorted photo stream that gathers pictures around a theme and makes collections and videos out of them — nearly the same thing as Google Photos.

The video can be edited, rather like a slide deck: title, music, number of photos.

On the whole the AI parts are unfinished in the developer build, so we still don't know what they can really do. The new Photos also does less than Google Photos, which recognizes not just faces but objects, scenery, animals, and which generates collages and filters as well as videos.

iOS 10 wants you to sleep better

iOS 9 added a blue-light filter, Night Shift, said to lessen what screen light does to your sleep. You may have missed two other color modes: one inverts colors, the other turns the whole interface black and white.

iOS 10 takes these further. Accessibility has a new Display Accommodations section, and beyond those three modes the color filters include six color tints, so your screen can show all sorts of colorful effects.

And if Night Shift looks too yellow to you, turn on the new Reduce White Point, which takes white light out of the screen and makes it gentler.

To help you sleep, the Clock app has gone so far as to add Bedtime, where you set a wake-up time, how long you mean to sleep, and how the alarm sounds.

It then follows that schedule all the way through, pushing reminders to go to bed and to get up, and it draws you a sleep history chart.

We tried it, and it beats setting your own alarm to ring every five minutes. But this is a developer beta with plenty of bugs, so don't lean on the feature. This morning we could not shut off the alarm on our 6s Plus by any means; restarting the iPhone was the only way out.

Music has changed a great deal

The alarm clock is not the only case. Many of Apple's own apps got large updates — Music, for one, looks and works nothing like it did.

The first thing you notice is the bigger type: section titles, entry points. The mix of large and small text is easy to mistake for Windows Phone.

Whether the design looks good may be a matter of taste. One thing is not: it works poorly on a small screen. On the iPhone 5s we tested with, the title and the image swallow nearly the whole screen, and how little you can see at once is pitiful. On a big screen it is nowhere near as tight.

Under the surface, Music's logic has been rebuilt as well. The five entries along the bottom are now Library, For You, Browse, Radio, and Search; Connect, which was for following artists, is gone.

Sections that used to be scattered around — New Music, Charts, Editors' Picks — are now in one place.

The playback bar echoes the cards above: a rounded rectangle you can drag. It supports lyrics, too, although the developer build has not delivered that yet.

Using Music has changed enormously. It is simpler, it makes sense, and it pushes the parts that have to do with music itself. It finally looks like what a music service should look like.

Messages is all flash

The other app Apple dwelled on at WWDC was Messages. It is a full social app now, not a tool for sending texts.

The whole conversation has turned unusually rich and colorful.

Messages has gained a lot of features, but most are showy and overblown. The effects look fine, and after using them we found you probably won't reach for most of them often.

What is worth waiting for is the app store inside Messages. It is open to third-party developers as well, so more services, stickers, and animated images can arrive later.

Other apps that changed

Music and Messages changed the most, but every other Apple app got an update, large or small.

Contacts, for one, has been redesigned with bigger type and more room for profile photos. It is a bit clearer than iOS 9.

Or Notes, which, like Evernote, now lets you add contacts and share a note. Even Notes has opened up.

Apple's own apps can be deleted now. Apart from Find My iPhone, Safari, App Store, Photos, Camera, Clock, Health, Wallet, Settings, and Phone, all of them clear off the screen like any third-party app.

In fact those apps are only hidden, not deleted in any real sense. To get one back you go to the App Store and "download" it again.

As for App Store search ads, we have seen them so far only while signed in to a US-region account. Search for Uber and the top result is another ride-hailing app.

A few more updates

Beyond the big changes above, the interface has these smaller ones.

Open a folder and the background goes to a Gaussian glass blur.

The button in the top-left corner that takes you back to the last app is much quieter: the word "Back" is gone, only the app name shows, and the arrow is smaller. It is far softer to look at than the iOS 9 version.

Last, the keyboard click sounds deeper. The reason is plain: type in public and the keyboard noise tends to bother people around you, and until now the only fixes were turning the volume down by hand or switching to silent — a nuisance either way.

It still gives you enough sound to go by, and it is less likely to disturb anyone. A good change.

The verdict? You will like iOS 10, and this is only the start

iOS 10 is the largest system upgrade Apple has pushed since 2013. It reworks how the system looks and changes some lock-screen habits that were designed years ago for different hardware.

Apple clearly wants using an iPhone to be more than pressing Home, picking an app, going in, then pressing Home again and going into another. iOS 10 strengthens the lock screen, the Widgets on the search page, and notifications, and it opens more ways into apps.

The week we spent with it is only the start. In iOS 10 Apple has also opened up Siri, Maps, Phone, iMessage, and other parts of the system, making more entry points for third-party apps.

When iOS 10 ships in September, third-party apps tuned for it will follow. Then we will see how much these openings actually help.

Even so, the biggest change since iOS 7 amounts to making the iPhone somewhat nicer to use — nothing like how fast the system moved in the iPhone's first five years. Smartphones are already well worked out. Year by year, Google and Apple borrow from each other and push new technologies like AI into their systems bit by bit. Until smartphone hardware or AI produces a real breakthrough, don't expect any invention beyond imagining.

Cover image from VCG.