iOS 11 is almost here: 30 changes worth knowing about

Apple has pushed out the iOS 11 GM build, which is all but the final release. Barring surprises, this is exactly what you'll get when iOS 11 arrives a week from now.

The finished version of iOS 11 ships on September 19, alongside the new iPhone.

Apple released the new operating system to developers at its developer conference in June. Back then it felt more like a demo — incomplete and bare.

Over the three months since, iOS 11 has gone through 10 rounds of updates: bugs fixed, features added and removed, power efficiency improved.

Early this morning, midway through the launch event, Apple pushed the GM build to everyone enrolled in the developer program and the public beta. This is the last test build before the finished release, and barring surprises it will be identical to it. If you want to jump in early, go ahead and update: the odds of running into trouble in daily use are far lower with GM than with the earlier betas. Back up your data first anyway.

We spent a little time with this latest build. Next to iOS 10, the new system doesn't look dramatically different — there's none of the visual shock Apple delivered a few years ago when it went from skeuomorphic to flat design.

But it is a practical upgrade. iOS 11 packs in more than a hundred small functional changes.

We tried the GM build on an iPad Pro released three months ago and on an iPhone. The iPad Pro is sold as a productivity tool, and iOS 11 includes plenty of work built for the iPad alone that the iPhone never sees.

Can it handle a day's work at the system level? The now largely finished iOS 11 gives us something to go on.

The Dock, now everywhere, is the foundation of multitasking on the iPad

iOS 11 makes the iPad Pro feel like a Mac, and the Dock at the bottom is how. It can appear anywhere: whatever app you're in, swipe up from the bottom and there it is.

Since the iPad Pro came out, iOS 11 has also reworked the Dock itself.

1. The Dock shows up to 18 app icons

The Dock holds a maximum of 15 apps, which you drag in and out straight from the home screen. The more apps you add, the smaller the whole Dock gets. Three "recently used" apps sit at the far right, so 18 icons can show at once.

2. With folders, you can put an unlimited number of apps here

The cap has a way around it. Unlike the earliest builds, Apple now lets you put folders in the Dock, and folders hold apps. In theory, then, the Dock can carry an unlimited number of them.

3. Splitting the screen from the Dock comes with small animations

The Dock can appear over any app — just swipe up from the bottom of the screen. Long-press an icon and you can drag that app on top of the one you're using. Two apps then share the screen; drag the edge of one again and the layout settles into a 1:1 or 1:2 split.

There are nice details here. Drag the border, for instance, and the larger app pulls inward at its edge — a signal that it's about to shrink and that another app is moving in next door.

Control Center looks completely different

Control Center is where iOS 11 has changed most visually. The cards of iOS 10 are gone, replaced by modules, and you can now choose which functions go in them.

On the iPad, you summon Control Center by swiping up from the bottom. If the Dock isn't on screen yet, the first swipe brings up the Dock and the second brings up Control Center.

You'll notice the multitasking switcher has merged into it. Apps you've just used line up down the left side. Control Center has become the main way to switch apps.

4. Closing apps is easier

In the first developer build of iOS 11, closing an app in the multitasking view meant a long press and then a tap on the X. In the GM build it's simpler: swipe the app upward and it's gone.

You can also swipe two apps away at once — three or four, if you have the fingers for it.

5. You can customize which modules go in Control Center

You add the modules on the left yourself, from Settings. Third-party apps still aren't allowed: all 17 available apps and functions come with the system, among them the timer, the camera and the alarm clock.

We tried it, and yes, you can cram all 17 into Control Center at once.

6. And all these icons animate

Screen recording, for example: tap it and you get a countdown from 3 to 1 before recording starts. Tap the battery icon and it turns yellow, switching on Low Power Mode.

More often, a long press opens a second-level page — screen brightness, say, where you can watch the level change as you drag.

7. The Music module looks completely different

Apple Music is a special case in Control Center. Long-press it and the box shows the name of the track playing plus pause and skip buttons — and, in the top right corner, a small signal icon that switches between the Bluetooth devices you're using, such as AirPods or a speaker.

On iOS 10, switching Bluetooth devices meant going into Settings, finding "Bluetooth" and working down the list.

8. Airplane Mode can now leave Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on

iOS 10 could do this too, but it's more convenient now. You used to tap Airplane Mode, watch every radio shut off, then switch Bluetooth and Wi-Fi back on by hand. iOS 11 remembers what you chose the first time and keeps Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connected from the moment Airplane Mode goes on.

Some changes in how you use the system

In places you don't look at often, iOS 11 makes small changes that could still break habits you've spent years building.

9. Spotlight results come back in a different order

Type a keyword into Spotlight now and what follows first is a drop-down that mixes suggested keywords, contacts, message content and more. Apps related to the keyword show up below that.

On iOS 10, the order was the other way around.

Spotlight now also stays pinned to the far left of the home screen, the page where your widgets live.

10. The lock screen has changed a lot

At a glance, the iOS 11 lock screen doesn't look much different from the iOS 10 you're using. But one big thing has gone: Notification Center is no longer here.

Swiping down on the lock screen used to bring up Notification Center with your notifications stacked one after another. Now you see notifications the instant the lock screen lights up, and swiping down brings up nothing.

iOS 11 has also tidied up the way you go from the lock screen into an app: swipe a notification banner right for an "Open" option, left to clear it. On iOS 10 you couldn't swipe banners right at all.

Everything else is unchanged: swipe right for widgets, left for the camera.

11. Apple Music's lock screen has changed too

Apple Music takes up less of the lock screen now. It has become a card showing the track name and the playback buttons. Music used to fill the whole screen, and some third-party apps even scrolled lyrics across it. It looks fresher this way.

12. A small change to app switching

On the home screen you'd normally press the Home button twice to bring up the multitasking switcher. Even with every app cleared away, you could still summon it: the home screen itself appeared as an "app," shrunk down.

Now, with nothing left to clear, pressing Home twice brings up no switcher at all.

13. Dragging several icons into a folder at once

Another gain in efficiency. To move several apps into a folder on iOS 11, long-press one icon, tap the others to pick them up, and drag them all into the folder together. The iPhone supports this too.

14. AirPods you can customize

One long-standing complaint about the wireless AirPods is that a double tap could only summon Siri. iOS 11 fixes that at the system level by letting you customize how the AirPods respond; the setting is in Settings.

You can now give the left and right earbud different jobs, so a tap can pause, skip to the next track or go back to the previous one. No more pulling out your phone to control the music.

Work-related features have been sharpened

The new generation of iPad is sold on productivity, and iOS 11 adds more features you might actually use on the job.

15. The Files app is finished

When it first appeared at WWDC, Files was barely more than a demo. Several updates later it supports most of the major cloud storage services: Apple's own iCloud, plus Tencent Weiyun, Baidu Netdisk, Dropbox and others.

The point is to make the iPad work more like a computer. You can open and search for a file directly, and keeping things organized is easier.

16. Screenshots can be edited and marked up

Photos, screenshots and notes can all be annotated by hand, cropped and shared with this tool.

And once you've marked up a screenshot and shared it, the system assumes you no longer need the original and deletes it for you — which saves precious space for photos.

17. Notes can scan documents

Notes has been extended too. It now works like a scanning app: point the camera at a document and it turns it into a cleaned-up image.

18. iCloud Keychain works inside apps

Versions before iOS 11 already had Password AutoFill, which filled in saved passwords in Safari. It runs on iCloud Keychain, and autofill now works in third-party apps as well — which makes iCloud Keychain something closer to a password manager like 1Password.

19. Sharing Wi-Fi passwords

Another sizable change. Join an iPad or iPhone to a Wi-Fi network, and when another Apple device comes close, your device pops up a card asking whether you want to share the password. Tap "Send Password" on the iPad and the password goes straight to the other device, which never has to type it.

Handy when relatives or friends come over: no more spelling out the password character by character. Both devices have to be running iOS 11, of course.

Small design changes

The overall design of iOS 11 hasn't moved much — there's no sweeping "revolution" here of the kind that took iOS from skeuomorphic to flat. But Apple has changed plenty of details this time.

20. New app icons

Maps, App Store, Reminders, Camera, Contacts and other built-in apps all have new icons. Maps has picked up a curved road standing for Apple Park; Camera has lost the two horizontal lines above and below. Small changes, but you spot them at once.

21. The AirPods pairing pop-up is now animated

This pop-up used to show a still image; now you get a 3D view of the AirPods turning steadily. Pair a set of Beats headphones instead and you get an animation for that product too.

22. Smart Invert

iOS 11 doesn't have the "night mode" a lot of people wanted, but color inversion gains a new option, "Smart Invert," under Accessibility.

What makes it smart is that it leaves alone what shouldn't change color. In Apple Music, for example, only the interface inverts; album artwork keeps its true colors.

On the iPhone, you also get these

23. Checking your carrier plan

If you want to know how much data you have left this month, or how many minutes of calls, you no longer need your carrier's app — iOS 11 can tell you directly.

Look under "Usage" inside "Cellular," which shows the plan you've signed up for and how much of each part you've used.

24. Answering calls automatically

Accessibility has also gained "Auto Answer Calls." Set a wait time and the phone picks up by itself after ringing for that many seconds. You don't have to touch it.

25. Pressing the lock button five times triggers SOS

This one is new to iOS 11 on the iPhone. The gesture brings up the emergency screen and locks down Touch ID immediately. The thinking behind it: in some situations, someone may force you to unlock your phone with your finger.

26. The camera can scan QR codes

Apple built this for the Chinese market. The native Camera app can now scan QR codes.

We tried it. The code has to fill a good part of the viewfinder before the system picks it up, and it tells you with a pop-up that you then have to tap before the code actually opens.

If the code isn't big enough in frame, the camera won't even show the alert, let alone scan it by itself — so there's no need to worry about setting it off by accident.

27. GIFs move now

On versions before iOS 11, the animated GIF stickers sitting in your photo library didn't actually animate.

28. The new App Store is up and running

The App Store has been rebuilt from the ground up, and is now organized into cards much like Apple Music. A new "Today" tab shows apps picked by hand.

In June, the redesigned App Store developers saw wasn't really running yet: the "app of the day" would go a long time between updates. After the public beta arrived, Apple's app editors sped up, and there is now something new almost every day.

29. You can turn off auto-playing video in the App Store

On an app's page, video that plays by itself brings in more downloads. But not everyone has data to spare, so iOS 11 adds a switch to turn autoplay off, in Settings.

30. And finally, new wallpapers

Every version of iOS brings new wallpapers. With the GM build, these are now settled: Apple has added more than 20, six of them brightly colored flowers — possibly to show off the iPhone X's new Super Retina display.

The interesting part is that some of the new wallpapers pay deliberate tribute to old iPhones. There's the classic image of Earth used on the first iPhone, and five rainbow-striped wallpapers in the colors of Apple's logo from the 1970s through the 1990s.

One disappointment: the official Live wallpapers are gone. Live Photos you shoot yourself can still be set as wallpaper.

Cover image from Pixabay