Two days with the first iOS 12 beta: 23 changes worth noting

Maybe because nothing big changed, this beta has far fewer bugs than the last two years' did.

On Monday, at its annual developer conference, Apple laid out what is coming in iOS 12 — an update weighted toward performance and everyday experience. The throttling scandal, bugs that never got fixed, features that shipped late: for the past few years iOS has moved a little too fast, and too many of the problems landed on people actually using their phones.

Look at the interface and iOS 12 will not strike you as new.

We spent two days with the first developer beta of iOS 12 on an iPhone X. This is the early build Apple hands to app developers so they can learn the system and adapt their apps. The public release only arrives with the new iPhone three months from now.

But you would not mistake it for iOS 11.

After two days, the most immediate impression is that ordinary actions are faster — opening apps, switching between screens.

The first big change Apple announced at the keynote was to how the processor works. To save power, a phone's processor normally runs at a low frequency and jumps to a higher one when there is heavy work to do. iOS used to raise it "gently," with performance climbing step by step. iOS 12 pushes it up all at once, which in theory means you feel the speed in more everyday actions.

For now it is unclear how much of the gain comes from the new processor behavior, and how much from optimized code inside the system and reworked transition animations.

There are still plenty of small bugs, and some features drain the battery hard, but as a developer build iOS 12 is much further along than its predecessors were — smooth and stable.

If you want to try it, you first need a developer account; back up your phone and you can download and install. There is risk, of course. This is the first build: some apps crash, and the phone runs hot.

These devices are supported:

The main screens of iOS 12 look no different from iOS 11, but iOS 12 in fact fine-tunes more than a hundred features, some of them never mentioned at Monday's keynote. From two days of use, we picked out these 23.

Small changes to how you interact

To suit the iPhone X, which has no Home button, last year's iOS 11 overhauled parts of the interaction and the interface: how you switch apps, the oversized titles that sank down the top of the screen, and a Control Center that looked nothing like the old one.

iOS 12 adjusts what iOS 11 built.

1. Grouped notifications

This is probably the change you will feel most day to day. Notifications used to be ordered strictly by when they arrived; now notifications from the same app stack as cards, and the whole screen looks clean. Tap a stack and the cards fan out to show everything; tap again to open the app, or reply straight from the notification.

Swipe left on a stack and there is a new Manage button. Its two options are Deliver Quietly / Prominently, and turning that app's notifications off entirely. Delivering quietly means the notification shows up only in Notification Center, with the small badge on the app icon — no sound, nothing on the lock screen.

Below that is a Settings button that takes you straight into the app's notification settings, which have changed a little themselves.

Android has grouped notifications this way for a while. Now iOS does too.

The point is to simplify what you see, cut the number of times you pick up the phone, and keep you focused. If you follow one app's notifications closely, its group reaches further back in time. My go-to news app now lets me read a whole day of alerts in one place, instead of scrolling past every other app's notifications to the bottom of the list.

2. Multitasking returns to iOS 10's swipe-up-to-close

On the iPhone X under iOS 11, you called up multitasking by swiping up from the bottom and holding, then had to tap the red minus in the top-left corner to close an app — not convenient. iOS 12 lets you swipe up to kill an app, the way iOS 10 did. Apple changed it back.

iOS handles background apps differently from a PC or a Mac; most of the time you do not need to close anything to save power. The iOS 11 change was clearly meant to discourage people from killing processes. But many people disliked it, a few apps really did misbehave, and the press-and-hold method Apple chose took some learning.

3. Control Center gets another button

The new button opens the QR code camera, which is just the built-in Camera app. iOS 11 already did this: point the stock camera at a QR code and it reads it, with a banner at the top of the screen inviting you to see what it found. In China, though, everyone still scans codes with WeChat.

4. Do Not Disturb really leaves you alone

This one changed a lot. With Do Not Disturb on, the lock screen shows nothing at all — silence. Notifications pile up quietly in the background; unlock the phone, open Notification Center, and there they are.

Do Not Disturb also gains a Bedtime Mode. Turn it on and the lock screen shows a new widget with only the weather in the middle of the screen, and no notifications.

It takes some of the edge off the information anxiety of the compulsive among us.

Face ID quietly improved

5. Face ID lets you enroll a second face. The keynote did not mention this one. Anyone who has used an iPhone X knows Face ID makes you type your passcode far more often than you would like — the unlock is fast, but too many situations defeat it. iOS 12 adds a second enrollment in Settings.

The idea is to teach the iPhone "the other you," and so raise the odds of a match. You could enroll once before putting on makeup and once after. We tried enrolling a face lying on one side — the pillow pushes your face out of shape, and recognition used to fail there. Afterwards Face ID did feel a little more accurate.

Note that this does not let two people unlock one phone. If the second face belongs to someone else, the iPhone still only unlocks for the first user enrolled; the second enrollment exists purely to sharpen recognition.

Masks remain unsolved. Try to enroll a masked face and Face ID tells you to clear the obstruction.

6. Face ID gets a second try at unlocking.

When the first scan fails, the iPhone X immediately asks for your passcode so you can get on with it. iOS 12 changes that: swipe up again and Face ID takes a second look.

The tools for using your phone less are remarkably thorough

7. Screen Time leaves the final call to you.

Screen Time is not an app. You find it in Settings, and it holds a great many controls.

At the top is a summary: how long you have been on the phone today, which categories of apps you used, and your longest unbroken stretch. Some of it is genuinely surprising — 40 minutes staring at the screen without a break today, and I do not remember any of it.

Tap into the summary for more: how many times and how often you woke the screen, which apps sent you notifications and how many each, and a ranking of your most-used apps by time.

Back on the first screen, four main functions sit under the summary. Always Allowed is the app whitelist. Security and privacy lets you set a passcode for Screen Time. Downtime works like Do Not Disturb: pick a window, and every app except the whitelisted ones is locked down.

App Limits control specific apps. The list of categories covers games, social networking, entertainment, productivity, reading, health and other, and each category gets its own daily cap.

What happens when you hit a limit? Say I cap social networking: five minutes before the cap, a banner warns me. The moment it runs out the app locks — a tiny hourglass appears beside the icon, and the icon dims.

You can still open it; you just meet a "Time limit" screen first. Choose to ignore it and you can have 15 more minutes, or let yourself off for the rest of the day. If you set a passcode, that is one more step.

Which is to say: the enforcement everyone talks about still ends with your own choice. Over two days my phone time did not fall noticeably. I like checking how long I have been on the phone, but I have not yet worked out how to pace the apps themselves.

Animoji, upgraded, and the effects around it

8. Animoji adds four animals.

A dinosaur, a tiger, a koala and a ghost.

9. Animoji can see your tongue.

Only in and out, though — it cannot follow anything more complicated, like wagging it side to side. There are still bugs here, and it does not run smoothly.

Each Animoji's tongue got a small flourish: the robot's tongue is machinery, the alien's is green, the unicorn's sparkles.

10. Memoji, for building your own face.

As demonstrated at the keynote, the personalization runs deep — hair, eyebrows, eyes, nose, face shape, even freckles. Memoji has no gender, interestingly; you never have to pick male or female first.

Picking through the options does eat time. You may want a Screen Time limit for it.

11. Animoji recordings now run 30 seconds.

12. Memoji works in Messages and FaceTime.

You can shoot a selfie as your own Memoji, and add effects such as an oil-painting filter. The camera inside Messages is far more fun than the stock one.

A few new apps

13. Measure, an AR ruler.

Apple has built a number of apps third-party developers already make. Measure is a simple AR ruler: aim at a point on a real object, drag out from it, and you get the distance. We tried it on an iPhone 8 Plus and an iPhone X; both ran it smoothly, though the back of the phone warmed up before long.

Accuracy depends on the surroundings. The object should stand out from the background; when the colors are close, the measuring point drifts.

14. Stocks gets an upgrade.

Swipe up and a card appears with financial news from Yahoo. Tapping an individual stock brings up a card too.

15. Voice Memos changed as well.

The interface picks up the same card design, and simple trimming has been added.

16. Books looks more like a reader.

But the Books store is still gone from mainland China, and has not come back.

17. Photos moves closer to Google Photos.

It sorts pictures by what is in them — dogs, cats, places, people — so they are easier to find. This version is not as fine-grained as Google Photos yet, and it still has small bugs.

Siri got slightly smarter

18. Siri understands more questions.

"What is my Amazon password?", for one. That comes down to the data Apple holds; most companies could build a better assistant and still not have it.

Of course, if you do not use Safari's built-in iCloud password storage, this is no use to you.

19. Shortcuts makes phrases easy, but the standalone app is not here.

Instead of "set a 10-minute timer," Shortcuts lets you shrink the Siri command to "10 minutes."

In practice this saved me little time with Siri. The Shortcuts shown at the keynote — where one command runs a chain of actions across different apps — look more useful. But the standalone Shortcuts app is not in this first beta.

And some smaller things

20. Colors change.

App folders and lock-screen apps such as Apple Music now sit on darker backgrounds.

21. Battery settings add charts.

You can see which apps used your battery over the past day or two, and when the drain was heaviest.

The iPhone X's gestures move to the iPad

The keynote skipped this part too. With no Home button, some iPhone X actions became gestures, and iOS 12 brings a few of them to the iPad.

22. Control Center moved to the top-left corner; swipe down to open it.

23. Swipe up from the bottom to leave an app, swipe up and hold to call the multitasking view — exactly as on the iPhone X.

The iPad hardly needs its Home button now. Every year's iOS lays the ground for that year's hardware, so a next-generation iPad Pro with Face ID would be no great surprise.

Cover image shot at WWDC