Besides Making Old iPhones Faster, What Else Did iOS 12 Change?

Most of the changes aren't where you can see them.

"After testing the final release of iOS 12, I suspect a lot of people won't need to buy a new phone at all this year."

That line comes from The Wall Street Journal's review of the iOS 12 release, and it does sound like an exaggeration. But it captures what makes this update different: Apple has turned its attention to device performance and everyday feel, and to making older hardware pleasant to use again. Fair enough — after several years of fast iOS releases, with throttlegate, an endless supply of bugs, and older models getting slower and slower, users had grown thoroughly fed up with iOS.

In our hands-on with the first iOS 12 beta, we could already feel that ordinary actions had sped up: apps opened faster, screens switched faster.

Once the final version shipped, we tested it again on two devices — an iPhone 6 Plus from 2014, and last year's flagship, the iPhone X.

Old iPhones Are Noticeably Faster, and So Is the iPhone X

The iOS 12 release supports exactly as many devices as iOS 11 did; hardware as old as the iPhone 5s and the iPad Air still runs it. And iOS 12 tunes and lifts performance on every device it supports.

That comes from a change in how Apple drives the processor. To save power, a phone's processor normally runs at a low clock speed and jumps to a higher one when it has to handle something demanding. iOS used to ramp it up gently, so performance climbed in stages. iOS 12 ramps it up all at once, which in theory means you feel the extra speed during more ordinary tasks.

My iPhone 6 Plus has about 280 apps installed. Under iOS 11, opening a dozen or more of them, or a Chrome window with 20-odd tabs, would slow the phone to a crawl every time. That never happened on the iOS 12 release. The tech site Ars Technica timed how fast apps launched on an iPhone 5s across different system versions, and found system apps sped up noticeably.

Face ID Got Faster Too

The first time I used Face ID after updating to iOS 12, I could feel the difference. Apple didn't mention it at the keynote, but iOS 12 does improve Face ID a good deal.

Unlocking is quicker, and accuracy is better. When the iPhone X first shipped, Face ID failing to recognize you was common, especially with the phone lying flat on a table while you looked down at it. Because recognition is more accurate now, one failed attempt no longer forces you straight to the passcode. iOS 12 changed the flow: swipe up on the screen again, and Face ID takes a second look.

Face ID also added an alternate appearance you can enroll. You can register the angles it usually struggles with — lying down, or looking down at the phone from above — to improve accuracy in those positions.

Screen Time Can Cap Your Phone Use, Just Not App by App

Screen Time is new in iOS 12, but it isn't an app. You find it under Settings > Screen Time.

The top of the Screen Time page shows how long you've used your phone today and which categories of apps ate that time. Tap in and you get a report, with a bar chart of your longest stretches of use and more detail underneath.

Below the report sit four main tools for limiting your phone use. Setting them up is straightforward: pick the category you want to cap, then pick the time limit for apps in it — the on-screen descriptions are easy enough to follow.

In practice, though, limiting a single app is a chore. You can set usage time by category — the list runs Games, Social Networking, Entertainment, Productivity, Creativity, Reading, Health & Fitness and Other — and give each category its own daily cap.

I capped Creativity, the category Douyin falls under (yes, Douyin doesn't count as Entertainment). Once the cap is set, every app in Creativity stops opening, including apps you have never touched. Blocking Douyin took VSCO down with it.

If you want to limit one time sink like Douyin on its own, you can't do it from the main Screen Time page. You have to open today's report or the past seven days' report, then set the limit from the "Most Used" list further down. In "Most Used" you can check how long you spent in a single app, and tapping into it breaks that down by exactly when you used it.

Tap "Add Limit" at the bottom and you can cap Douyin alone, or edit the list to add other apps you want on the same clock — which amounts to creating a new app category. Once you've added it, the new category shows up on the by-category "App Limits" page.

The third option in Screen Time, "Always Allowed," lets you put the apps you can't do without on a list that's never capped, so you don't have to worry about something like Camera getting blocked. If you depend on a lot of apps, though, tapping through them one at a time gets tedious.

Open a capped app and a full-screen "Time Limit" page covers it. If you need VSCO, all you can do is tap "Ask For More Time," which lets you ignore the limit for 15 minutes or for the rest of the day. If you've set a passcode, the whole business gets more laborious still.

Apps aren't the only things that get capped, either. In my testing, websites in Safari were limited the same way — except that the extra time Apple offers there is 15 minutes or the whole day, nothing in between.

Worth noting: the 15 minutes or one hour here isn't measured app-usage time, it's ordinary clock time. When the 15 minutes are up, you have to ask for more even if you never opened the app.

If you want to track and manage your phone use but aren't ready to update to iOS 12, some apps still do the job.

On iOS, Xiaorong, OFFTIME and Moment are all veteran phone-usage trackers, and RescueTime — a time-management app with far more features on the desktop — released new iOS and Android versions on the 18th.

But next to the Screen Time built into iOS 12, these apps can do very little. Most of them infer your habits from screen wake-ups, or, like RescueTime, from location permissions, and report things like unlock counts and total time on the phone.

The reason is that Apple has opened up almost no low-level access for usage management. Screen wake times and counts, location data and the like are available only to Apple's own Screen Time.

iOS 12 Opens Up Some Low-Level Features

Even so, iOS 12 hands specific low-level permissions to a handful of third-party apps. That is new.

Apple improved password autofill in iOS 12 so it is no longer confined to the iCloud keychain: it opens the underlying password-management library to the third-party app 1Password.

Update to the latest version of 1Password and all you have to do is switch it on under Settings > Passwords & Accounts > AutoFill Passwords. Apple clearly gave 1Password a deeper hook into iOS 12 — you authenticate with Touch ID or Face ID and autofill fires straight away, with no app switching. 1Password on iOS can also share one password vault with the PC and Android versions.

One thing worth mentioning about passwords: Apple now generates a complicated password for you when you sign up for a new account. Accept the strong password and the iOS 12 keychain remembers it and fills it in next time.

Passwords aren't the only case. Apple has also opened low-level features such as call-log labeling and in-car navigation to outside developers.

Tencent Mobile Manager can now flag nuisance calls from the call log without your opening the app. When one comes in, swipe left on the number in the "Recents" list, tap "Report," and you land on a page where you can label it. For a junk text, tapping "Report All Junk Messages" at the bottom of the message takes you to a page where you can label and block it.

Amap is another example. At the WWDC 2018 keynote in June, Apple announced that CarPlay would start supporting third-party navigation apps, including Amap and Baidu Maps. Also worth noting: Apple's own Maps will support indoor maps in China, showing the internal layout of airports and shopping malls.

Because of app review, though, neither Amap nor Baidu Maps has shipped a CarPlay-ready version yet. Amap posted an apology on Weibo today.

Apple began prying iOS open gradually back in 2016 with iOS 10 — CallKit and SiriKit, for instance, gave outside developers access to the phone and to Siri.

CallKit lets third-party voice and video calling apps put their interface inside the iPhone's native Phone app, so developers can build a communication app's features into the Phone app's "Favorites" and "Recents" and have those features invoked from there. Services like Skype and Viber can be folded into native calling this way. The point, mostly, is to make third-party features serve Apple's own.

The Changes to the Interface and the Gestures Are All in the Details

iOS 11 overhauled parts of the interface and interaction to make room for the all-screen design. Next to it, iOS 12 barely looks different at first glance. But Apple has made small adjustments in a number of places.

The keyboard's predictive-text strip and the lock screen's music controls, for instance, used to have a translucent frosted-glass look; now they are darker and less see-through. The AirPlay icon on the lock screen has grown too, which makes it easier to spot.

In the new version, turning on Picture in Picture on an iPad gives the video frame rounded corners. Rounded corners, it turns out, are not only a hardware idea.

On the interaction side, the clearest changes are grouped notifications and multitasking.

Notifications used to arrive in the order they were pushed. In iOS 12 they are sorted by app and stacked as overlapping cards, which keeps the notification screen tidy.

Within 10 minutes of a push, though, several notifications from the same app still appear separately. Older ones from previous days get stacked. Tap a group and the cards drop down to show everything inside. Swipe left on a stack and there's a new "Manage" button.

Multitasking, meanwhile, has gone back to the iOS 10 way of closing apps with an upward swipe. On the iPhone X, once you swipe up into the multitasking view, you no longer have to press and hold an app and then tap a close button as you did on iOS 11 — one swipe up closes it.

Do Not Disturb has changed a good deal too. With it on, nothing appears on the lock screen at all; you see your notifications only in Notification Center after unlocking. Press and hold Do Not Disturb and you get more choices of how long to stay quiet.

Do Not Disturb's settings also gained Bedtime Mode. Switch it on and the lock screen shows a new widget, with only the weather in the middle of the screen and no notifications.

Shortcuts Makes Siri a Little More Useful, If You're Willing to Fiddle With It

Unlike Measure, Stocks and the other apps built into iOS 12, the Shortcuts feature Apple pushed at the keynote — released in Chinese under the name Jiejing, "shortcut" — has to be downloaded separately. The obvious reason is how complicated it is to use.

Shortcuts is really Workflow, which Apple bought in 2016. Apple renamed the automation tool and folded it into Siri. In short, Shortcuts lets you build a custom workflow for your iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch by dragging and combining blocks, with no programming background required.

For most people, though, it isn't especially useful. The common cases are pulling up Maps on the commute, having Siri place a call, saving a note — basic things that take only a few extra taps in the app anyway.

Worse, every shortcut has to be triggered through Siri. You have to find the Siri Phrase setting in the app's top-right corner and record a voice keyword before you can use it.

Say "I'm heading home" to Siri, for instance, and it runs the routine you built: plotting the drive home, connecting to CarPlay to play music, switching on the air conditioning at home.

In practice, Shortcuts really isn't friendly. Dragging and combining blocks may be simple, but the app offers no guidance at all, and each new shortcut takes repeated attempts before it works properly. None of that suits an ordinary user.

Perhaps for that reason, Apple hasn't shown much appetite for pushing the feature. Shortcuts doesn't ship with the system, and even in Siri you have to dig into a second-level menu to add some of the default shortcuts, which takes hunting. It reads more like Apple looking for new things Siri can do to keep users around.

If you're set on tinkering, the better route is to go into the Gallery in the Shortcuts app and use the workflows Apple has already put together. They cover most of what you'd need. But whatever information you fill in yourself has to be exactly right; one error and the shortcut won't run.

Siri also has to catch the keyword perfectly before a workflow starts, so a shorter phrase raises your success rate.

Shortcuts isn't the only place Siri improved: it now understands more kinds of questions, such as "What's my Amazon account password?" That rests on how much data Apple holds; most companies don't have it, however good their voice assistant. It only works, of course, if you use Safari's built-in iCloud password storage.

Privacy Is Better Protected

Apple has tightened privacy further in iOS 12.

Safari can now block the unauthorized tracking done by share buttons and comment widgets on web pages. It also stops advertisers from collecting a device's identifying characteristics, so they can't recognize it or target ads at it around the web.

Safari used to wait 24 hours after your last visit to a server before blocking that third-party site's cookies. Now it blocks them immediately.

When you visit a site, the browser normally passes along the address of the page you were just on. That address can be very specific and can cause trouble — it can reveal exactly which product you were looking at on a shopping site, for example.

In the iOS 12 release, Safari sends only the site's main domain. So what it passes on is "Amazon.com," not the address of a particular product page on Amazon.

Safari extensions are on their way out, too. Apple has said plainly that it plans to stop accepting new extension submissions by the end of this year, and is instead pushing developers toward the Safari App Extensions platform it introduced in 2010.

Photos Moves Closer to Google Photos

Photos has changed quite a bit in iOS 12.

First, the old Featured and Memories have been merged into "For You." There, the system offers to share certain photos with friends — usually recent shots, or ones with people in them.

Memories is now folded into For You, with more places offered as categories you swipe through sideways. Shared Albums has been pushed to the bottom.

The other change in Photos is automatic sorting by image content, as in Google Photos: dogs, cats, places, people, all to make searching easier. This version isn't as fine-grained as Google Photos yet.

Its mistakes are already being mocked online. The plainest one: search for "cat" and the pandas in your library turn up too. And any photo with a bit of neon color in it gets filed under "nightclub." For ordinary-looking images, though, most get sorted correctly.

The Photos app in the iOS 12 release also edits RAW images, the format you normally get off a DSLR.

Battery Management Adds Charts

This is Apple's answer to batterygate: in iOS 12, battery management comes with plainer, more visual statistics.

You can see which apps drained your battery over the past day or two and when your power draw peaked, along with the curve of the battery running down and how long the screen was on.

iOS 12 also grades the health of your battery. On my iPhone 6 Plus, it said the battery needs servicing. Tap into Battery Health and you also see maximum capacity and peak performance capability.

In the iOS 12 battery bar chart, a small lightning bolt occasionally appears where the charge level rises. Apple has not explained anywhere what it means.

Some people take it to mean the battery is charging. But in our testing, some points where the charge rose carried no bolt at all. What is clear is that wherever the bolt does appear, the battery fills faster than it does without it. Whether that amounts to some form of fast charging is still unknown.

We put the question to Apple and had no reply by the time this piece was published.

Memoji Can See Your Tongue

Just as Apple demonstrated at the keynote, you can customize a Memoji in fine detail — hair, eyebrows, eyes, nose, face shape, even freckles. Memoji has no gender switch, which is a nice touch: you don't pick male or female first, you just keep swiping through hairstyles and find masculine and feminine ones mixed together.

It feels a bit like building a character in a video game. Once you're done, you can record yourself sticking out your tongue; tongue tracking is much smoother than it was in the beta. Each Animoji's tongue gets a small design flourish of its own: the robot's tongue is mechanical, the alien's is green, the unicorn's glitters.

The iOS 12 release adds four new characters to play with: koala, tiger, ghost and T. rex.

A Few New Apps

Apple has bundled several apps into iOS 12, and the most useful is the AR ruler, Measure. It's also Apple's own attempt to find something for AR apps to do.

Plenty of AR measuring apps already exist, and Apple's does one thing only. Tap the plus button in Measure, aim it at a point on a real object, drag out a line, and you get the distance.

The app only shows up on phones that support ARKit, and on the iPhone X, AR apps still heat the phone up noticeably.

Accuracy depends on your surroundings, and light matters most. It helps if the object you're measuring is a different color from the background; if the colors are close, the measuring points drift.

Stocks has been upgraded as well. Swipe up in the app and a card appears with financial news from Yahoo. Tapping an individual stock brings up a card too.

Voice Memos has adopted the same card design, and added simple trimming.

The Books app, upgraded in the beta, felt much more like a proper reader. But the Book Store, pulled in mainland China, still hasn't come back — and it's missing from the iOS 12 release too.

The iPhone X's gestures have been ported to the iPad this time.

This is another thing Apple left out of the keynote: iOS 12 brings some of those gestures to the iPad. Control Center now lives in the top-left corner and appears when you swipe down; swiping up from the bottom of the screen leaves an app, and holding the swipe brings up the multitasking view. According to earlier reports, the next iPad Pro will very likely use Face ID — which makes it easy to see why the iPad's gestures now match the iPhone X exactly.

iOS 12 Isn't a New System; It's a Repair Job

Judged by how it feels, iOS 12 really is a release Apple built for optimization. The interface looks much the same, but the important thing is that it returns iOS to what drew users in the first place: speed and stability.

For years, almost every time Apple updated iOS, users joked that it had once again "fixed the bug where the system was too smooth." That was especially true of iOS 11, where the all-screen design and the notch forced sweeping changes to the system's interactions and interface. As a result, when the iPhone X went on sale, many of Apple's own apps weren't ready, never mind the many problems in third-party apps.

iOS 12 reads more like a statement of intent: old phones can run the new system well.

But iOS 12 doesn't only make phones faster. Apple has polished the details in a lot of features.

Opening up, bit by bit, has become a standing attitude for iOS as well. In its early years, the system's interfaces were closed by declaration: low-level things like keyboards and phone calls could only run Apple's own apps. That is part of why so many devices got jailbroken back then; plenty of people jailbroke a phone just to install a better keyboard.

In iOS 8, Apple opened up third-party keyboards. In the versions since, it has gradually absorbed the third-party apps that work better than its own equivalents to cover its gaps, or bought them outright and folded them in.

But the opening has never gone all the way. Usage-limiting apps like RescueTime are the obvious example: the only permissions they can reach are the most basic ones.

Apple prefers to absorb third-party apps that have already clearly succeeded — using Amap, for instance, to make up for the thinness of its own map data in China.

On the whole, iOS 12 is a version worth putting on an old device sooner rather than later. So far, no widespread bugs have been reported either.

Cover image: photographed by QDaily.