iOS 12, an anti-addiction system, and a Siri that reminds you to put on sunscreen: 10 software updates worth watching from Apple's keynote

All software — not a single piece of hardware

If you take the features shown at the annual WWDC developer conference as Apple's rehearsal for how people will live with their devices over the coming year, then this year's two-hour keynote was clearly written by two screenwriters. They disagreed with each other, and neither checked with the other beforehand.

Apple spent part of the morning reflecting on how internet services take your time and your privacy without restraint — the new fashion in Silicon Valley. The anti-addiction design in iOS 12 will track where your hours go each day, remind you that the world is bigger than a 5.8-inch screen, and, when necessary, stop you from scrolling social media or watching video for too long.

The new privacy policy blocks ad platforms from collecting user information, clawing back a little privacy from internet companies.

But Apple also painted a future in which human and machine merge: once you hand your whole schedule and all your habits to the iPhone, Siri will tell you what to do and when. She'll remind you to put on sunscreen, remind you to call on your grandmother's birthday. The new Siri can reach directly into specific apps to book tickets or order food for you.

In another maximalist demo, this one in the Apple Watch segment, a woman pedaled hard on a stationary bike on stage, her wrist and her mouth never stopping: she followed a yoga tutorial on the watch screen while cycling, traded voice messages with her son, and competed remotely with a friend in the health app over who had logged more exercise.

But the loudest applause and laughter from the 6,000-strong audience came for Memoji. Who can resist turning their own face into an animated emoji and recording it? Especially after seeing a pile of animated avatars sticking their tongues out mid-sentence in FaceTime's new 32-person video calls. A full ten minutes went to this.

If you look only at what got updated, the keynote looks much simpler. No new hardware appeared in two hours, and there wasn't even a major change to any operating system's interface. This year Apple slowed down, mostly repairing the countless problems left over from two years of iterating too fast.

iOS 12, for instance, opened with performance: various operations sped up by 40 to 100 percent. And the update runs all the way back to the 2013 iPhone 5s, to show that Apple hasn't abandoned its older users — Apple's direct answer to Batterygate.

Sometimes no change is the best change. Through the upheavals of the past two years, both iOS and macOS became very unstable. It's time to fix them.

As for the new features, you can think of them as more choices: hand your whole life to the iPhone and Siri, or cut the time you spend staring at a screen. That will be a hard choice.

One thing seems certain: this was a middle-class keynote. Fitness and health, physical and mental, came up again and again — yoga alone appeared twice. A managed calendar is the price of using everything the new iPhone can do. The Stocks app is the showcase for cross-platform development and for folding in Apple News.

The coming week will be a good one for the 6,000 iOS developers in attendance, who packed the San Jose McEnery Convention Center this morning and cheered with their arms up, in their WWDC commemorative jackets.

Those scenes made it into the opening video of the keynote as well. Three huge connected strip screens scrolled through hundreds of square iOS app icons, from Skype to Google Drive to Douyin and Kuaishou.

The shape of the phone hasn't changed much, and the operating system itself is unlikely to yield many more breakthroughs. In an ecosystem that moved from revolution to refinement years ago, it is the individual apps, one by one, that now decide what each day feels like.

Here is what was announced.

iOS 12 fixes old problems; the upgrade is mostly about performance

iOS took up nearly half the keynote.

iOS has reached its 12th version, and it fixes problems that were already there, starting with support for old devices.

iOS 12 works on every iPhone and iPad from 2013's iPhone 5s onward. Until now, the newest version of iOS had never supported a product range spanning five years.

As usual there were numbers to prove the new system works: after iOS 11 launched last year, half of all users updated within 7 weeks, and it is now installed on 81 percent of devices — against 6 percent for the newest version of Android.

And on the iPhone 6, iOS 11 made apps launch 40 percent faster, keyboard input 50 percent faster, and the camera 70 percent faster.

This has everything to do with the criticism Apple has faced. Last December, iOS was found to contain a hidden feature that throttled iPhones with aging batteries. Apple confirmed it, and the user backlash that followed hasn't fully died down even now. Apple cut the official price of a battery replacement and widened the repair program back to the start of 2017.

Now Apple wants to prove that the new system won't drag down old devices.

iOS 12 also updates several of the built-in apps.

Stocks was a focus: the whole interface was redesigned to fold in business news, and the iPad version was reworked too, with a sidebar showing every stock you follow.

iBooks got a substantial interface change and a new name, "Apple Books," plus a "Reading Now" feature that shows where you last stopped.

Apple News added a "Browse" tab, and the iPad version got a sidebar for navigation.

The new Voice Memos app came to iPad, with iCloud saving.

CarPlay was updated too, supporting third-party navigation apps for the first time — from now on you can use Google Maps or Amap in CarPlay.

One of the few new artificial-intelligence features in iOS 12 is the new Photos app.

It now looks much more like Google Photos: you can search photos by what appears in them, and stack several search terms together — the ocean plus the name of a vacation spot, say.

The For You tab automatically builds smart albums out of your photos and video clips, which you can also share with friends.

Google Photos has had all of this for a while. Now it is in Photos on iOS 12.

The AR everyone keeps talking about finally gets a useful pre-installed app

Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering, announced another centerpiece of iOS 12: the second generation of ARKit.

ARKit 2.0 improves face tracking and spatial recognition, renders faster, and ties AR models more tightly to physical space.

Apple worked with Pixar on a new AR file format, USDZ, which loads finished 3D models quickly across different apps; Adobe, Autodesk, Sketchfab, PTC, and Quixel will all support it from the start.

Usefulness was Apple's theme at this year's WWDC. It demoed a measuring app called Measure. Apps like it already existed, but an official one is better placed to lead people into using AR.

Measure can take lengths, angles, and other readings, and it can scan a whole flat surface to get its area without manual positioning. Apple also showed illustrations in an article turning into AR images, and made-to-order products displayed in AR.

ARKit 2.0 also adds a two-person mode, so two people on different devices can interact inside the same AR scene. Apple demoed it with a Lego playset, though it didn't look like much fun.

Or, as one developer sneered on Twitter: "There's a screen right in front of you — what do you need imagination for?"

The uses are still thin, but the ARKit 2.0 upgrade shows Apple takes it seriously; building Measure into the phone puts AR on the same footing as services like Maps and News.

Following Silicon Valley's new trend, Apple adds an anti-addiction system to iOS

As talk of phone addiction grows louder, and after Google put anti-addiction tools into Android P, Apple has added three of its own to iOS 12.

First, Do Not Disturb was upgraded. Push notifications now arrive all at once when you switch Do Not Disturb off, instead of flooding the screen the moment you wake the phone, as they do today.

You can also silence a specific app. Press and hold its icon and a new mute mode appears, letting you set how long that app's notifications and messages stay quiet.

That helps keep notifications from pulling your attention away. Notification management is the second part of the iOS 12 anti-addiction upgrade.

In iOS 12 you can press and hold a notification on the lock screen to manage it, either turning that app's notifications off entirely or sending them quietly to Notification Center, with nothing on the lock screen, no banner, and no badge on the app.

iOS 12 also groups notifications: everything from the same app now appears together.

The phone-usage report already found on Android P has arrived on iOS 12 too.

The feature that hands you the most direct control is Screen Time, which shows how you used your phone over the past week and helps you rein the total in.

As on Android P, you get a weekly activity report. Screen Time shows several very detailed charts: how much time you spent on the phone, exactly how long you spent in each app, and which apps sent you the most notifications.

Once you know which apps are eating your time, you can set a limit for each one.

As the limit approaches, a notification warns you that time is nearly up; when it runs out, the app displays "Time's Up."

Just as you can hit snooze for five more minutes after the morning alarm, Screen Time shows a button that gives you a bit longer in the app.

It isn't only for adults. If you have children, iOS 12 also brings an Allowances app that lets parents control which apps their kids can use.

Digital addiction has been a hotly debated topic in Silicon Valley, and across the tech industry, for several years now. This February, former employees of Google, Facebook, Mozilla and other giants formed the nonprofit Center for Humane Technology, and with the digital-rights group Common Sense launched the "Truth About Tech" campaign, whose goal is to "reverse the digital attention crisis and realign technology with humanity's best interests."

The Center for Humane Technology argues that our society is being hijacked by technology. It blames the tech companies' "attention economy," and says their race for user attention has eroded public mental health, damaging personal relationships and children along the way.

Mobile devices have made the problem worse. Sitting in front of a computer for a dozen hours used to be called "internet addiction"; phones scatter that usage across the whole day, so you spend hours on them daily without ever quite noticing.

Anti-addiction features were already built into the Google I/O conference that just wrapped up: Android P added Digital Wellbeing, the same class of tool as iOS 12's Screen Time. Its pieces include a Dashboard showing total phone time and the number of notifications received, an App Timer for capping time in each app, and Wind Down, which forces the screen into Do Not Disturb.

Apple, too, has long been accused of making no real changes around addiction. This January, Apple investors Jana Partners and the California State Teachers' Retirement System wrote to Apple with their concerns about digital addiction. The California State Teachers' Retirement System is a pension fund holding more than $1.5 billion in Apple stock.

In the letter, the investors said that smartphone use by children and teenagers could have "unintended negative consequences," and called on Apple to study the question and to build settings that let parents limit how long their children use a phone and what they see on it.

With iOS 12, Apple has clearly answered — trying, like Android P, to treat phone addiction through notification management and a more data-driven picture of how the phone gets used. Under Silicon Valley's growing scrutiny, both major operating systems are now trying to help people put their phones down.

But in the segment that followed, demonstrating watchOS 5, Apple had a member of the Apple Watch team, Jules, ride a stationary bike on stage for a while to show off multitasking and GymKit, which connects to gym equipment.

In a scene as eerie as an episode of Black Mirror, Jules kept switching between apps on her watch while pedaling and got a pile of things done: ordering food through Yelp, inviting friends over, browsing the web for a bit, and telling her husband to log the children's sleep.

Talking about curing people of internet addiction and, in the same breath, having someone do more online tasks from a watch while exercising sounds more than a little absurd.

At the press event after the keynote, Apple told QDaily this is not a contradiction: everyone has their own habits around phone use. The point of the screen-time tools, Apple said, is that they give you a data report rather than push you to use any given app more or less. The report looks different for everyone, and what you do with it is a personal choice.

In other words, control over addiction still rests with the user. When the "time's almost up" alert appears, you can swipe it away and keep going. Whether iOS 12 can really help people avoid addiction may take a while to find out.

Siri will control more of your life — but not through talking

The Siri that comes with the new iOS has gone in the opposite direction.

Siri used to be a voice assistant built around "talking" to people, like Amazon's Alexa or the Google Assistant. At this year's WWDC, it was presented entirely around a new feature called Shortcuts. Siri has become a productivity tool that voice commands drive.

With the new Siri, you can hang a Bluetooth tracker on your keys, set "call this tracker" as an action, and name it by saying "lost my keys" to Siri. When the keys go missing, say "I lost my keys," and Siri calls the tracker.

An "action" can be made of many steps. You could set "text my family that I'm home," "turn on the lights," and "play music on the speaker" as one workflow, then name it by recording yourself saying "I'm home." When you need it, say "I'm home" to Siri and all three run automatically.

The new Siri is essentially Apple folding Workflow — the app it bought last March — into its own voice assistant, turning it into a spoken IFTTT. Workflow's idea was to call specific functions from other apps inside a single app: set up the sequence once, and it finishes the task for you and saves you time. iOS 12 adds voice on top.

Which is to say that Siri, as a "smart voice assistant," hasn't advanced much. Over the past year Microsoft has let Xiaoice place phone calls to people and taught Cortana to understand more commands; Google demoed the Assistant calling a hair salon to book an appointment at I/O. Siri, in all its years, has made very little progress on the "smart" part. This iOS 12 update does include "speech recognition," which belongs to the natural-language understanding branch of artificial intelligence, but Apple showed none of the intelligent interaction everyone is excited about right now.

Federighi said, "We want Siri to do more." Apple's answer is a Siri that looks less intelligent, and a digital life scripted in advance by voice commands.

Animoji has evolved into Memoji

Last fall, alongside the iPhone X, Apple introduced Animoji, animated emoji built on 3D face recognition. iOS 12 takes the feature further: better performance, plus animated faces called Memoji.

Animoji gained several new characters — a ghost, a T. rex, a koala. They have something in common: you can see the tongue. In the demo Apple made a point of saying that after the iOS 12 upgrade, the iPhone X can recognize tongue movements and mirror them on the Animoji, so sticking your tongue out shows up too, which makes them livelier.

And if you'd rather have an Animoji that looks more like a person, iOS 12 adds Memoji. As the name says, Memoji means "my animated emoji": you customize your own Animoji-style character by picking the face shape, hair, skin tone, features and accessories you want.

After Apple launched animated emoji, Samsung had a go at innovating on the idea — the Galaxy S9's "AR Emoji" generates an animated avatar that resembles you from a selfie. Apple's updated Animoji looks like it took that innovation back.

Besides sharing them directly, you can use the new Animoji in selfies: swap your own face for the character you built, and iOS 12 composites it onto your body. It looks rather cute.

FaceTime supports group calls, and the new interface is fairly inventive

FaceTime has barely changed since it launched with the iPhone 4. iOS 12 adds something entirely new — group video calling, with up to 32 people invited into one call — along with a set of features that make this group chat feel different.

The call can be started inside FaceTime, or you can create a link and share it over iMessage for people to tap and join.

During the call, each person's window floats on screen; iOS works out who is speaking, enlarges that person's video, and floats it in the middle, with everyone else's smaller windows arranged around it. Double-tap someone's window to enlarge it yourself.

The updated Animoji works in group calls too, so you can swap your face for the character you made. In the keynote demo, Tim Cook joined a group video chat, but what appeared on screen wasn't the man himself — it was an Animoji that looked quite a lot like him.

Apple Watch gets smarter

In the newly announced watchOS 5, Apple Watch finally gets some useful things that should have been handled long ago.

The most useful: it now detects automatically when a workout starts and ends, so you no longer have to tap your wrist a dozen times before setting off on a run. Nor will you forget to end a session and end up with a run of absurd length on the record.

This is obviously something a fitness device should already do, and something Apple should have fixed sooner.

Siri got another usability fix: you no longer have to say "Hey Siri" before speaking to the watch's built-in assistant. Just raise your wrist and give the command.

Also on voice, watchOS 5 gives Apple Watch wearers a walkie-talkie of sorts: press the button on the side of the watch and talk, and the other person hears you. The feature is called Walkie-Talkie.

watchOS 5 adds workout modes as well: during yoga, the watch shows heart rate; on a hike, that turns into elevation and speed; an outdoor run shows pace, cadence and calories burned.

watchOS 5 also supports WebKit, so you can listen to podcasts and read web pages on the watch.

The new watchOS 5 looks above all like a repair job on the pile of problems in the watch's workout experience. Sales suggest that Apple Watch's bet on health and fitness as its headline features has been accepted by the market: Apple Watch sales rose 60 percent in 2017.

But Apple Watch has essentially given up on third-party apps

Apple, which was still urging developers to build watch apps last year, said nothing about them at this year's WWDC.

It is more as if Apple has worked out that apps on a tiny screen are doomed, and picked a more practical line this year: strengthen notifications on the Apple Watch. Most of the time, after all, using the watch means glancing at a notification.

Notifications on the watch will do more, with new interactive controls. Photos from the live demo show buttons and interface icons added to them.

Apple Watch is becoming an Apple device that stands on its own, with more and more new abilities. Yet at this year's WWDC Apple mentioned no update at all for third-party watch apps — as if telling developers to handle notifications well and leave it there.

There are no exact figures, but the mainstream apps are retreating from Apple Watch: since 2017, Google Maps, Amazon, eBay, Slack, Twitter and Instagram have all dropped their Apple Watch apps. Who wants to look at photos on a screen that small?

In the end, if you buy an Apple Watch, what you use most, besides checking notifications, will probably still be the handful of fitness features Apple pushes hardest: measuring your heart rate, and counting calories and minutes while you exercise.

You could say that after a year of tinkering, Apple has given up on getting developers to tinker with third-party watch apps.

macOS is the only system with an interface change

The new macOS is no longer named after a mountain but after California's famous Mojave Desert. Federighi made a point of saying the Mojave is beautiful both by day and by night, which led into the most visible new feature: Dark Mode.

As leaked before the keynote, Dark Mode is an interface designed for the evening. Every element in it is mainly black — menu bar, window backgrounds, buttons and the rest. In the demo you could see that the default Mojave desktop wallpaper changes when Dark Mode is on, shifting to the desert at night.

The new macOS desktop also brings a big change: Stacks. macOS's Dock has long had a "stack" that fans out the files in a folder when you click it. The new feature moves that behavior onto the desktop: a spot that used to hold one icon can now hold a pile of files, which you can click to expand or scroll through in place.

The Finder changed visually too, with a new gallery preview. It looks exactly like the photo-gallery preview on Windows: the preview fills most of the window, the file sequence runs along the bottom, and details sit on the right.

The new macOS showed off a series of other additions: taking a photo on the iPhone from the Mac and uploading it directly, an entirely new screenshot tool almost identical to the one on iOS, and Voice Memos and Home apps.

Apple pulled the privacy part out for special attention during the demo.

The permission controls that already existed have been strengthened. You used to be able to control an app's access to things like location; the new macOS adds more entries — camera, microphone, mail database, browsing history and so on. If you don't want an app reading your browsing history, you can switch that off in System Preferences.

Apple also stressed a new anti-cookie-tracking feature. In the new macOS, every Mac gets a generic "system configuration profile" that obscures the trail a user leaves on the internet. With it, internet advertisers can no longer follow a particular user's browsing habits. To advertisers, Apple says, Mac users will all look the same, and featureless.

That is good for user privacy — Microsoft and Google have both advertised anti-tracking features for their browsers. But for Apple, whose ecosystem doesn't live off advertising revenue built from user data, doing it at the system level costs nothing commercially.

No hardware — and a few things went missing

There was no new hardware in the whole keynote, not even a simple performance bump, and some already-announced products that people are still waiting for didn't appear either.

Last September Apple announced AirPower, a charging mat that powers the iPhone, Apple Watch and AirPods at the same time, without your having to find an exact spot for each.

AirPower is due out this year; the delay is reportedly down to heat problems, along with support for AirPods 2.

The wireless charging case for AirPods was also announced last September, and it didn't launch today either.

Nor was the Touch Bar mentioned, just as at the last conference. This new way of interacting, launched with the 2016 MacBook Pro, seems to have been treated as an afterthought ever since. Little software has been optimized for it, and it went unmentioned at the developer conference — which amounts to abandonment.

Photos by QDaily