iOS 16: The MacStories Review

When is the last time your iPhone truly surprised you?

The answer to this question is a fascinating Rorschach test that can say a lot about a person’s relationship with Apple’s mobile platform. Some might say it was over a decade ago, when they feasted their eyes upon the Retina display for the first time in 2010. Some might say it happened when the iPhones got bigger – and sales skyrocketed – with the iPhone 6 lineup in 2014. Others might argue that it happened with Face ID on the iPhone X, or the first time they tried Portrait or Night mode, or perhaps when they first took an ultra-wide shot.

My point is: if you ask someone about the last time an iPhone truly surprised them, chances are they’ll reply with a hardware feature. That’s not a shocker: Apple prides itself upon the tight integration they’ve been able to achieve between the iPhone’s hardware and iOS; they’ve successfully managed to turn their design philosophy into a selling point of their entire ecosystem.

People buy iPhones because they know they’re going to work well for a long time, and, usually, because the model they’re getting has a cool new gimmick they want to try. For this reason, it’s not absurd to postulate that, by and large, the iPhone’s software serves to enable hardware sales and subscriptions. I do not mean this pejoratively: I like Apple’s approach, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing annual reviews about their operating systems. But I also recognize that on the iPhone (the situation is the exact opposite on iPad) the software now largely takes the backseat compared to hardware and services.

Which is why whenever the iPhone’s software truly surprises me, I get excited.

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MacStadium: Cloud solutions to simplify Mac for business.

Software-related surprises are more rarefied on iOS these days, but the kind of people who are reading this story can point to a few examples in our recent history. Apple buying Workflow, turning it into a system app, and outright claiming that Shortcuts is the future of automation was a surprise. The extent to which Apple integrated dark mode in iOS 13 was a surprise.1 The arrival of two iPad features – Picture in Picture and inter-app drag and drop – on iPhone felt like a surprise. But, of course, no modern feature comes close to the surprise that we all witnessed with iOS 14 two years ago: a renewed focus on user personalization with custom Home Screen widgets and the ability to create multiple Home Screens.2

That’s why, following last year’s welcome (if perhaps a tad uninspired) quality-of-life update that was iOS 15, I’m excited about a new version of iOS again.

iOS 16, launching today for a variety of iPhone models dating back to the iPhone 8, marks Apple’s triumphant return to user personalization, with a twist: while in 2020 customization might have felt like a happy consequence of Apple’s engineering, this time the company has intentionally marketed iOS 16 as an update that will make an iPhone feel truly your own. As we explored in June and July, the first thing you see on your iPhone – the Lock Screen – is fundamentally changing in iOS 16. With the ability to create multiple Lock Screens, choose from a diverse collection of wallpaper sets, and customize each one with widgets, you’ll now have endless possibilities for the screen you always see when you pick up your iPhone.

Sure, there’s an argument to be made for Lock Screen widgets also being developed in service of new hardware, but I don’t think that takes away from the breadth of this feature and how Apple created a whole narrative around wallpapers, widgets, photos, and Focus modes this year. As you’ll see, the customizable Lock Screen will be the main character of this review: I’ve had a lot of fun exploring different permutations of my Lock Screen this summer, and I’ve been able to test dozens of widgets from third-party developers, which I’ll also showcase in this story.

In keeping with my theory that modern iOS updates always need to have a little bit of something for everyone, there’s a ton of other (some bigger, some smaller) features I’ll be covering in this review.3 Messages, one of my most used apps on iPhone, has received a substantial update with the ability to edit and un-send messages, making it, in some ways, even superior to WhatsApp for me now. Mail – of all apps – has gotten a major upgrade with modern features such as scheduled send and, almost unbelievably, a revamped search that actually works. Reminders has officially turned into a serious task manager with even more filters for smart lists and the ability to create and share templates with others.

The new Lock Screen takes center stage this year and everything else pales in comparison to the massive update it received, but, overall, I find iOS 16 a more fun and useful update than iOS 15.

So, as with every September: let’s dive in.

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Design

As has been the case in the past few years, there’s no overarching design theme in iOS 16 – a single idea that spawns several features throughout the system, each one consistent with a unified vision. That’s not to say iOS’ design is incoherent now: it’s just that the time for sweeping redesigns has been over for a while at Apple HQ.

So, in keeping with the tradition of recent years, iOS 16 offers a grab bag of design iterations and refinements in separate areas of the OS, which modernize apps and enable new interactions that weren’t possible before. Let’s take a look.

The New Video Player

The system video player has undergone a major redesign in iOS 16 that eschews the dedicated floating box of controls at the bottom in favor of a more minimal look with playback controls overlaid on the video itself.

The new video player has a more minimal look than before.

There are a few notable aspects of the redesigned video player. The first, obviously, is the striking new look that makes the progress bar more compact, integrates play/pause and skip controls as an overlay of the video, and as a result gives videos more room to breathe – especially in portrait mode. One could argue that in getting rid of the bottom-oriented controls, Apple is going against its own trend to place key interactive elements within thumb’s reach. The way I see it, Apple’s video player is now more consistent with this little service called YouTube, which they tell me is quite popular when it comes to video consumption these days. To pause a video, you just tap the screen once and tap again in the middle; to skip backward and forward manually, there are buttons next to the play/pause one.

YouTube (left) and Apple’s new video player share some similarities.

iOS 16’s video player has a new design for live broadcasts as well.

The progress bar has also been simplified. You can still grab it to scrub through a video, but, unlike iOS 15, there’s no longer an indicator that serves the dual purpose of telling you where you are in a video and acting as a “grab item” for your finger. This may seem like a regression but, in practice, after a few months, I prefer the iOS 16 progress bar: it has better contrast between the watched and unwatched parts of a video, and it grows thicker than before when you’re holding it with your finger to scrub through a video.

When scrubbing through a video, the player’s UI disappears and the progress bar grows thicker in iOS 16.

The best feature of the video player in iOS 16 is another one, though. Forget the minimal look and progress bar: what I love about the iOS 16 video player is that you can hold down anywhere onscreen with your thumb and swipe through it with simple gestures. This “quick scrubbing” mode is smooth and even responsive to the velocity and acceleration of your finger throwing the video around, allowing you to increase the speed at which you’re moving in a video with simple swipes. Here’s what I mean:

Swiping through a video with the new video player.

After trying these new gestures, going back to the iOS 15 video player feels broken for me now. Of course I should be able to flick through a video by swiping anywhere I want. And when something makes me feel like that, it’s usually a good sign.

Redesigned Edit Menu

Wasn’t it strange that, despite iOS’ appearance now being split between light and dark appearances, the copy and paste menu always defaulted to a dark design, even in light mode? We took that element for granted because that’s what it looked like when it debuted in iPhone OS 3.0, but someone at Apple must have felt that its design was anachronistic too. So in iOS 16, the copy and paste menu – which Apple likes to officially refer to as the ‘edit menu’ now – has a light appearance in light mode.

The new look for the edit menu in iOS 16.

There’s a longer conversation to be had about the edit menu fundamentally changing its structure when activated via the pointer rather than touch, but we’ll talk about that in the context of iPadOS 16 next month. For now, you should know that the edit menu is white when dark mode is disabled; it has nicer animations for nested menus (such as formatting controls in Notes); and it comes with more buttons for new data detectors supported in iOS 16, which I’ll cover in the Everything Else chapter.

Pull-Down Menus in More Places

Apple is continuing to drop old-school action sheets in favor of pull-down menus in iOS 16. The more modern, compact, and faster pull-down menus are now used in more places throughout the system, including the Calendar inspector for events, the Shortcuts variable picker, and setting priorities for a reminder. Action sheets look really old by now, so Apple is on the right track here.

In iOS 16, pull-down menus are used in more places, which makes navigation in apps faster as you’re navigating into fewer nested pages.

Now Playing and Music Artwork on the Lock Screen

The Now Playing controls for the Lock Screen have been redesigned and rewritten in iOS 16 to be an interactive Live Activity.4 The Now Playing “widget” is docked at the bottom of the Lock Screen, so it’s easier to reach, and it uses the new, simplified progress bar we’ve seen in the redesigned video player. (It also relies on the same, simplified scrubbing behavior.) Everything is a bit more compact than before, which has also been made possible by getting rid of the secondary bar for volume control (just use the physical volume buttons or open Control Center, I guess).5

The new Now Playing controls on the Lock Screen.

There are two things you should know about the redesigned Now Playing controls on the Lock Screen. The first one is that you can tap the small artwork to swap your Lock Screen wallpaper and widgets with a much larger version of the artwork of the song you’re listening to. When you do this, the Lock Screen takes on the primary colors of the artwork, hides your wallpaper and widgets, but keeps your custom font and font color. I love doing this because it suddenly makes my Lock Screen look like an iPod.

(Side note: Apple, if you’re reading this, can you please figure out a way to integrate real-time music lyrics with the music Lock Screen? Sincerely, the guy who learned English by listening to Oasis and The Smashing Pumpkins.)

Some examples of the new music Lock Screens in iOS 16.

The second thing you should know is that the tiny waveform visualizer in the upper right corner of the Now Playing controls isn’t some fake thing based on generic waveforms that doesn’t change depending on the song you’re playing. It’s a small thing, but that mini visualizer is based on real frequencies and adapts to the rhythm and flow of the current song.

That’s a real visualizer. Sound on.

So here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to open Music and search for 1979 by The Smashing Pumpkins. You’ll hit Play, head back to the Lock Screen, and take a look at the Now Playing waveform visualizer. It’s going to look different after the first 8 seconds. That’s neat. Then you’re going to play D’you Know What I Mean? by Oasis and appreciate how the visualizer follows along to Alan White’s drums. And once you see that, you’re going to wonder why the Music app itself doesn’t have this visualizer too.

Redesigned Progress and Volume Bars in Music

The system-wide video player isn’t the only place where Apple adopted a minimal look for the progress and volume bars. The Music app also has them in iOS 16:

New progress and volume bars also found their way to the Music app.

Initially, I wasn’t a fan of this design – I missed the “grabbers” in both bars too much. Over time, however, it has grown on me. Apple refined the new look, and I think they’re now striking a fair balance between a more simplistic appearance, gestures, and iconography (the volume icons are larger than iOS 15, for instance, and they glow when you’re grabbing the volume bar – just like numbers in the progress bar).

Batch Operations for Multiple Files and Items

This has to be one of my favorite new interactions in iOS 16: in apps that support this technology, you can now perform batch operations on multiple files at once by selecting them and holding down with your finger to invoke a context menu. The selected items will be grouped into a stack and you’ll be able to, say, add multiple images to an album at once or compress selected documents into a .zip archive.

Selecting multiple photos and files at once in iOS 16.

This kind of operation is supported in multiple apps across the system such as Files, Photos, Mail, Notes, and Shortcuts. Alas, it’s not supported in Reminders, where I would have liked to select multiple tasks at once and reschedule them from a context menu.

Transparent FaceTime Call UI

Following last year’s update (remember effects?), Apple subtly “redesigned” FaceTime in iOS 16 to make its interface less obtrusive. The double quotes are necessary because all they did was getting rid of the box around the call controls at the top of the screen and make that area transparent.

In iOS 16, you’ll be able to see more cat. Or a door handle, in this case.

The result is that I can see more of my hair and top of my head now. Did Craig ask for this redesign?6

Battery Percentage Is Back

After a few years of absence, Apple restored the ability to view your iPhone’s battery percentage in the status bar with iOS 16. Unfortunately, I don’t know what Apple was thinking with this one.

The new battery icon in iOS 16.

If you decide to enable the Battery Percentage setting in Settings ⇾ Battery, you’ll get a new battery icon in the status bar where its current percentage value is displayed inside the battery icon. So far so good: it’s an approach that makes sense to save some space. The issue with Apple’s design is that the battery icon stays in a completely filled-in state even if the actual battery left is, say, 55%. So whether you’re at 100% or 55%, the battery icon will always look completely full. The battery’s “juice” will only change color and shape when power gets below 20%.

I find Apple’s design confusing: the battery glyph always says one thing, while the numeric value says another, which adds friction when trying to parse how much battery is left at a glance. There could have been several alternatives to this design, and I think Apple should revisit their take on battery percentage.

SF Symbols 4

The expansion of Apple’s built-in collection of glyphs for developers continues in iOS 16. This year, Apple added over 700 new symbols (including my favorite – the frying pan – plus official versions of the Apple, PlayStation, and Xbox logos), variable colors based on percentage values, and automatic rendering modes so that developers don’t have to worry about applying hierarchical rendering manually anymore. As always, the best app to see everything that is new in this area is the excellent Adaptivity by Geoff Hackworth.

New SF Symbols in iOS 16 include workout options, new types of HomeKit-related glyphs, and…a frying pan.

Expanded San Francisco Font Family

In addition to SF Symbols, the San Francisco font family is also growing in iOS 16 to accommodate three new weights: Compressed, Condensed, and Expanded.

The new weights in San Francisco.

The new weights in use.

The new weights are consistent with SF Pro’s existing traits, and they’re already being used by Apple in apps such as Photos (for Memories covers), News headlines, and Maps. I’m curious to see how and where third-party developers will take advantage of these new stylistic choices.

Lock Screen and Widgets

The new Lock Screen experience is the reason why millions of people will want to upgrade their iPhones to iOS 16 immediately. And rightfully so: the new customization tools created by Apple make even the simple act of checking the time or seeing how many new notifications we have more personal, fun, and, ultimately, a reflection of our digital selves.

While the Apple of a few years ago was actively trying to discourage the constant pickup of our iPhones, the company’s message is different today: not only can you buy an iPhone that always shows you some Lock Screen elements, but whenever you pick it up, you’ll experience a more vibrant, personal Lock Screen that was made just for you.

The Structure of the New Lock Screen

Before we talk about the Lock Screen’s new capabilities, we must analyze its structure compared to iOS 15.

The first difference you’ll notice is that some items have moved above the system clock while others have been relocated to the bottom of the Lock Screen. The current date now sits above the clock, and notifications roll in at the bottom of the page by default, leaving room for your wallpaper to shine. As I’ll explore later in the Notifications chapter, this design change involves multiple display modes for notifications too.

The new iOS 16 Lock Screen.

Placing notifications at the end of the Lock Screen was instrumental to creating new customization opportunities without altering the familiar layout we’ve known for over a decade. In iOS 16, there are two new widget areas on the Lock Screen:

The date string above the clock supports what is called an inline widget. These widgets are simple ones that are primarily text-based. Inline widgets support text and monochromatic glyphs. Even if you replace the default ‘Date’ widget with an alternative inline widget, a shortened version of the current date (such as ‘Sun 7’ instead of ‘Sunday, August 7’) will always appear on the leftmost side of the text box above the clock.

There is a new slot for Lock Screen widgets underneath the clock. These widgets, which I’ll cover later in the Lock Screen Widgets section, look like Apple Watch complications and they come in two sizes For now, there is a single horizontal strip for widgets on the Lock Screen.

Examples of Lock Screen widgets.

The rest of the iOS 16 Lock Screen follows the same structure – and unfortunately falls short of the same limitations – of the iOS 15 one. You can still swipe right to access the ‘Today page’ of widgets, which continue to be non-interactive, and which you cannot place on the main Lock Screen. There are still two shortcuts at the bottom of the Lock Screen to toggle the iPhone’s flashlight and open the Camera; alas, these buttons continue to be non-customizable. This omission sticks out like a sore thumb in the iOS 16 Lock Screen, and it strikes me as an odd vestige from a bygone era that predates customization on Apple platforms.

By this time next year, I hope we’ll be talking about our favorite replacements for the flashlight and Camera buttons on the iOS 17 Lock Screen.

Lock Screen Customization

To be fair, we’ve always been able to customize the Lock Screen, even in the very early days of the iPhone and iPhone OS 1.0.

The customization we have in iOS 16 includes wallpapers – and in fact goes above and beyond anything Apple ever offered for wallpapers on iOS – but that’s only one component of a larger system. A good way to think about it is the following: customizing the Lock Screen is now very similar to customizing your watch face on the Apple Watch.

To enter Lock Screen customization mode, you need to long-press anywhere on the Lock Screen. Doing so will cause the Lock Screen to recede in the background and will take you into a ‘Lock Screen gallery’ UI where you can see the multiple Lock Screens you’ve created, flip through them to preview them, add a new one, or swipe an existing one upward to delete it.

Entering the Lock Screen’s customization mode.

I think I understand why Apple chose a long-press on the Lock Screen as the activation method for customization: it sort of matches the same gesture you perform on the Home Screen to enter wiggle mode, it’s similar to the behavior on watchOS, and I suppose they didn’t want to permanently clutter the Lock Screen with a fixed button dedicated to opening customization mode. That said, I am concerned that this gesture may be too hidden for users who are accustomed to long-pressing notifications on the Lock Screen, not an empty area on the wallpaper. I also assume that there are going to be thousands of tutorials on TikTok on How to Change Your Lock Screen and Other Cool Tricks for iOS 16, so Apple is probably banking on that to spread awareness of this feature. And who can blame them when that worked so well for the Home Screen?

There’s two more things I want to point out about the Lock Screen gallery. First, you’ll notice that each Lock Screen has a ‘Focus’ button that lets you link a particular Focus mode to a specific Lock Screen, which I’ll explain later in the Focus chapter. The second is a complaint. I wish it was easier to manually swipe through multiple Lock Screens during the day just like you can quickly flick through faces on Apple Watch. Right now, you have to long-press to enter the gallery, choose your Lock Screen, then tap it to set it as the current one. In the future, I’d like to see a two-finger horizontal swipe gesture to instantly cycle through Lock Screens.

New Wallpapers

More than the new widgets, the most important aspect of the new Lock Screen is choosing a wallpaper. When you create a new Lock Screen in iOS 16, the first thing you see is Apple’s new wallpaper gallery, which combines the existing ability to choose any image as your wallpaper with a new curated experience that includes wallpapers made by Apple, smart features, and more.

Opening Apple’s wallpaper gallery.

Before we dive in, an important note: all wallpapers in iOS 16, regardless of their design and animations, support Lock Screen widgets. There are some visual effects that are not available if you use widgets, but we’ll get to that later.

There’s a lot to unpack in here, so I’ll proceed by breaking down the individual categories of wallpapers and showing you examples along the way. A good way to think about the wallpaper gallery is that, at a high level, it puts the spotlight on either photos from your library or wallpapers created by Apple. Let’s start from the Apple ones.

Apple’s Wallpapers

The new Weather wallpaper is inspired by the design of the Weather app; as you can imagine, it’s a live weather view that creates a beautiful edge-to-edge rendition of your current location’s weather conditions, which animate in real-time and serve as your Lock Screen background.

The Weather wallpaper with an associated Home Screen.

Now, as an Italian citizen, I’m blessed enough to have mostly experienced clear skies and sunny days this summer, so my Weather screenshots won’t be as diverse as other reviewers’, but I think you get the idea. As you install the Weather wallpaper, you’ll notice that, by default, Apple will complement it with weather-based widgets. Of course, you can replace those later.

The Astronomy wallpaper is a collection of 5 dynamic wallpapers that feature the Earth, Moon, and solar system. The Earth wallpapers (previously seen on Apple Watch) are available in two flavors: Earth, which shows you a 3D model of our entire planet on the Lock Screen and is centered on your location (indicated by a green dot on the globe), and Earth Detail, which zooms in on your current location.7 The Earth wallpapers are based on live weather conditions powered by WeatherKit, so the clouds you see floating above Earth should be somewhat realistic, too. I like these wallpapers a lot, but I wish it was possible to keep the Earth centered on my coordinates without showing the green dot, which I find kind of garish.

The Earth wallpapers. Hello from Rome!

My favorite detail of the Earth wallpaper: the planet’s animation when you unlock your device:

I love this animation.

The Moon wallpapers are available in two similar configurations, but I don’t have any particular feelings about the moon8, so I’ve never used them myself.

One giant leap for the Lock Screen.

The Solar System wallpaper is cool. Also based on the existing Astronomy watch face, it shows you a scaled-down representation of our solar system with planets orbiting the sun. It makes Mars look not even that far away.

The Solar System wallpaper and my associated Home Screen.

Next up, we have a variety of familiar faces in Apple’s portfolio that have come back as options for the iOS 16 wallpaper gallery. Clownfish, the wallpaper from the original iPhone’s introduction that never made it to public release, is back (and upscaled for the occasion) in iOS 16. Pride and Unity wallpapers have been included as well, with multiple color options (two for Unity, seven for the Pride wallpaper with the six diagonal stripes in the middle of the screen). The old animated Bubble wallpapers are here too and they now support nine different color options with the ability to set them in light or dark mode. There’s also an abstract wallpaper featuring swirly yellow and blue shapes that’s been heavily used in marketing materials for iOS 16. I like the number of choices here, but I’m obviously partial to my sweet, beloved clownfish.

From left to right: iOS 16’s default wallpaper; Unity; Pride, Clownfish; Bubble.

For the first time in the iPhone’s history, Apple is also letting you create your own gradient-based Lock Screen background with the new Color wallpaper. As someone who’s constantly on the lookout for these types of images – I even made a shortcut to create colorful gradients for my devices – I am very happy with this wallpaper. By default, you can choose from a set of 18 colors with the ability to set a different intensity level via a slider. However, you can pick any color you want by accessing the system’s color picker. Then, once you’ve chosen a color, you can swipe horizontally to pick between six different styles. They are called:

Vibrant

Tone

Deep

Vapor

Bright

Solid

I like the look of these styles (especially the Tone and Deep ones); given the infinite combination of colors at your disposal, the Color wallpaper is likely going to be one of the most consistent and flexible options for a lot of people.

The Color wallpaper offers endless possibilities for gradients or solid colors.

And then we get to…emoji.

looks around for Jeremy Burge

he’s probably on a boat somewhere

The new Emoji wallpaper is Apple’s attempt to bring some fun to the Lock Screen by appealing to the minds and imagination of Fellow Kids and giving them a framework to craft meme-worthy Lock Screens. The idea behind it is simple: pick up to six emoji (you can also pick the same character six times if you want), then choose the layout you want from five options:

Small grid

Medium grid

Large grid

Rings

Spiral

You can also set a custom color background by tapping the ellipsis button in the bottom-right corner of the screen.

I shouldn’t be the one telling you that you can expect the wildest, spiciest, funniest, most ridiculous Lock Screens to come out of this. Feeling that Italian national pride? This is something iOS 16 lets you do:

That pizza slice continues to be an utter travesty.

How about this: you consider yourself a “foodie” – whenever you go out, you’re the one taking pictures of everyone’s meals for the ‘gram – and you want to show this newfound passion of yours on the Lock Screen. Why not:

Or… you know. The thirst trap wallpaper. Look, it’s not my fault Apple is allowing this. I’m simply advising you on all the features iOS 16 gives you.

This is not my fault.

The Emoji wallpaper is a clever addition to the Lock Screen. It turns hundreds of characters into potential design ornaments, and given that Apple arguably has the best emoji designs around, they actually look pretty good as wallpapers. These wallpapers are not for me, and because of this, I think they’ll be extremely popular with regular folks.

Your Photos and Photo Shuffle

With iOS 16, Apple is also putting great emphasis on your photos as a means to turn the Lock Screen into a personal, beautiful space that is uniquely yours. In fact, I’d even venture to say that photos on the Lock Screen are more important than other wallpapers because of what they reinforce: that modern iPhones can take great pictures, which in turn will make for great Lock Screens. In a way, the Lock Screen is turning into another way for Apple to sell people on new iPhones.

There are three ways you can create Lock Screens featuring your photos:

Manually Picking Photos

Obviously, you can pick a photo to use as your Lock Screen wallpaper. To do this, select the ‘Photos’ option in the wallpaper gallery and you’ll be presented with a brand new flavor of Apple’s Photos picker which integrates your entire library, albums, and new smart categories into a single design.

Picking photos for a wallpaper.

This photo picker takes advantage of on-device image analysis performed by your iPhone and Siri’s intelligence to do a couple things. First, it presents you with a list of ‘Featured’ images that are a collection of random photos iOS thinks will look nice on your Lock Screen. I’m not sure how the algorithm works, but it typically does a good job for me. I see photos of Silvia, my dogs, the beach, and the dog park in here, and the subjects tend to be front and center, well lit, and either smiling or looking directly at the camera. I assume this is an evolution of the technology that has powered the Photos widget for a while; it gets the job done.

At the top of the picker, you’ll find an Albums tab, a search bar that supports the same search features of the main Photos app, and a strip of filters for the kind of content that looks great as a Lock Screen wallpaper. You can filter your photo library by people, pets, nature, or cities. Note that these filters won’t show you all matching items from your library in chronological order: they will show you a subset of featured photos for those categories.

Filtering featured photos.

If you want to see all available photos of, say, dogs that you can use on the Lock Screen, you’ll have to use the search bar and type “dog” in it to find all results from newest to oldest.

Spoiler: all dog wallpapers are perfect.

Suggested Photos

The wallpaper gallery also has a scrollable section of suggested photos that are, effectively, a different way to browse more featured photos personalized for you. I generally like the options offered here.

Suggested photos.

Photo Shuffle

The third way to use photos on the Lock Screen is also one of my favorite features of iOS 16. With the photo shuffle mode, you can make your Lock Screen shuffle through a set of photos on a regular interval during the day. This way, you won’t have to pick a single wallpaper for the Lock Screen, and you can treat yourself to multiple wallpapers without having to create multiple Lock Screens. It’s a win-win for those of us who get bored with the same wallpaper but also don’t want the overhead of multiple, discrete Lock Screens.

Creating a new photo shuffle.

There are two ways to set up a photo shuffle. The first method is choosing the photos you want to shuffle manually. You can select up to 50 photos for a single shuffle on one Lock Screen, and you can choose one among four shuffle frequencies:

On Tap

On Lock

Hourly

Daily

I’ve created two manual shuffles so far. The first one is a selection of photos of Zelda and Ginger that shuffles hourly. I’ve chosen some of my favorite photos of them over the years, and I can revisit the list over time by adding images to or removing them from the shuffle.

Editing an existing shuffle by picking new photos of my dogs.

The other shuffle I manually created is a selection of 50 of my favorite abstract wallpapers from my Wallpapers album. This one is set to refresh daily. I prefer this system to the old method I employed that involved a Shortcuts automation: this approach is native to the Lock Screen and lets me curate the images I want to use and adjust its shuffle frequency with just a couple of taps.

A photo shuffle based on abstract wallpapers from an album.

You can also set up an automatic photo shuffle that takes care of selecting images for you. In this case, the categories are the same ones found in the photo picker I mentioned above: People, Pets, Nature, and Cities. You can select the people you want to see shuffled, but that’s it in terms of control. Everything else will be decided by the system based on what it considers a “good” photo and ideal Lock Screen candidate.

What I like about Photo Shuffle is that it’s “curated randomness”: you’re always going to see a subset of your photos, but the system rotates through them, making your Lock Screen feel new and different according to the refresh interval you’ve set. It’s an ingenious addition to make the Lock Screen more personal with minimal effort. Plus, it goes especially well when combined with the next feature of the iOS 16 Lock Screen.

The Depth Effect

As you play around with different photos on your Lock Screen, you may notice that certain subjects get placed in front of the time – as in, they’re literally superimposed on the clock. You may have seen this in Apple’s marketing shots (they’re very proud of this feature), and here are a few examples of what I mean:

The depth effect in action.

This is called the “depth effect” of the iOS 16 Lock Screen, and it’s meant to give subjects a starring role by thoughtfully placing them on a layer in front of the time. While, yes, this is a fun gimmick that some people may even dislike, there are some fascinating details about how it all works behind the scenes.

The multi-layered depth effect does not require pictures that were taken in Portrait mode. Instead, iOS 16 performs an on-device image analysis and determines on an image-by-image basis whether there’s a clear-enough separation between the subject of a photo and its background. If Apple’s algorithm deems an image suitable for the depth effect, you’ll find it enabled in the bottom-right menu of the wallpaper creation screen:

Depth effect on (left) and off.

In my tests, I noticed that, besides Portrait mode, images don’t even have to be that recent to qualify for the depth effect. For instance, a relatively low-quality selfie I took on a boat in 2014 still worked with the depth effect, as you can see below:

I took this selfie in 2014 when I was off to Dynamic Island.

You can pinch to crop an image while you’re choosing a wallpaper, which will let you play around with the exact positioning of the layer on top of the time. It’s fun to experiment with this and understand where the “cut-off point” lives according to Apple; if you reach it and cover too much of the clock, the depth effect will be disabled until you free up more space again:

Playing around with the depth effect.

As with the Color wallpapers, you can also swipe horizontally on photos to change their styles. There are some fun options available if the photo supports the depth effect: with the Studio filter, you can mimic Portrait mode’s Studio Lighting effect by better illuminating the subject and removing the background altogether; Black & White removes the background and switches the entire photo to duotone; with Color Backdrop – and this is where the magic happens – you can change the color of the entire background of the image.

Setting styles for a depth-enabled Lock Screen wallpaper.

Apple clearly put a lot of thought into creating these photographic options for the depth effect on the Lock Screen, and it shows. With the right conditions, the visual effect generated by the depth effect can be stunning, and all of this is made more impressive by the fact that the image separation tech employed by Apple is independent from the depth mapping technology used by Portrait mode. If that isn’t enough, consider that this new multi-layering tech (which is used elsewhere in iOS 16, as I’ll explain in the Photos and Shortcuts chapters) even supports transparent layers. In the image here, you can see how I was able to place sunglasses in front of the time, but the time was still visible through the transparent lenses of the sunglasses.

There’s one important detail you should know about the depth effect: it won’t be supported if you use widgets below the clock. That’s a bummer, but it makes sense: it’d be weird if people’s faces, dogs’ ears, or, say, tall buildings could just sit in front of widgets, defeating the entire purpose of putting them on the Lock Screen. You can continue using an inline widget above the clock while the depth effect is active, which helps, but essentially you’ll have to choose between widgets and the depth effect going forward.

Setting a Home Screen Wallpaper from the Lock Screen

In addition to letting users customize their Lock Screens, Apple is also trying something else in iOS 16: making it easier to pair a custom Lock Screen with an associated Home Screen.

Of course, you’ve long been able to a set a custom Home Screen wallpaper on your iPhone, but what’s new this year is what Apple calls a ‘wallpaper pair’. There are a couple of ways to pair your Lock Screen with a Home Screen that goes well with it; in a nice touch, Apple sprinkled in some fun options for personalization here too.

When you’re done customizing a Lock Screen in iOS 16, you’ll be asked if you want to create a matching wallpaper pair with the Home Screen or if you want to further customize the Home Screen. The first option, which is highlighted by default, uses the same wallpaper on the Lock Screen and Home Screen, which tells me Apple finds this the most elegant approach for most people.

Setting a wallpaper pair.

Personally, while I can appreciate the consistency of the same wallpaper across multiple screens, I typically want to have a more neutral wallpaper that plays well with my app icons and keeps their names legible on the Home Screen.9 For people like me, Apple added the second step, which lets you customize the Home Screen upon setting a Lock Screen. When you hit Customize, the Lock Screen flies out of the way and leaves room for a preview of the Home Screen with a new design tool that contains some welcome options.

Setting a custom Home Screen wallpaper.

Along the bottom of the screen, you’ll find buttons to use the same Lock Screen wallpaper on the Home Screen (it’s the option labeled ‘Original’), pick a solid color, create a new gradient with the color picker, or manually choose an image from your photo library. Once again, you have no idea how happy I am that Apple now makes it so easy to generate a gradient-based wallpaper as part of iOS itself.

Different color wallpaper options.

To overcome the aforementioned issue of unreadable app names on the Home Screen, Apple also added a ‘Blur’ toggle that is only available for the Original and Photos types that, well, blurs the wallpaper so that icons and text labels can stand out more prominently. This is a thoughtful touch in my opinion, allowing you to strike a nice balance between a consistent Lock-Home Screen wallpaper set that has a slightly blurred version on the Home Screen. I use this a lot.

With blur enabled, app names stay legible on the Home Screen.

Besides the Lock Screen itself, everything I just covered is also available from within Settings under the Wallpaper section. This redesigned page now shows you a side-by-side preview of your Lock Screen and Home Screen with two ‘Customize’ buttons to personalize each independently. So whether you’re unhappy with your Lock Screen widgets or Home Screen wallpaper, you can customize everything from Settings without having to go back to the Lock Screen.

Customizing the Home Screen wallpaper from Settings.

In my opinion, this is handy for changing your Home Screen wallpaper and trying all the new color options Apple has built. This page also includes an ‘Add New Wallpaper’ button, which will reopen the wallpaper gallery to replace your current Lock-Home Screen pair with a new one. In this case, the old Lock Screen will not be deleted.

Customizing the Clock

So far, I’ve only covered the wallpaper part of Apple’s new Lock Screen customization efforts in iOS 16. Before we get to the other protagonist of this story – widgets – there’s another aspect that deserves attention: customizing the clock’s font and font colors on the Lock Screen.

Changing fonts and colors for the system clock on the Lock Screen.

While in Lock Screen customization mode, tap the system clock and you’ll open the new Font & Color panel. In here, you’ll find a total of eight different fonts you can use for the clock and clock alone (the font of widgets won’t change). Technically, these are seven new font options since the eighth one is the classic clock font that’s been with us for years. Some of the new fonts include a couple of serif options, a rounded font, and a cool line-based one. Note that these fonts are unlabeled and that you can switch between Arabic, Arabic Indic, and Devanagari clocks by tapping the Globe icon in the upper left corner of the panel.

Changing the clock’s font is fun, but playing around with colors is even better. Using the same system we’ve seen for creating gradient-based wallpapers, you can tweak the color of the clock and widgets by choosing from a palette of colors selected by Apple or picking your own via a color picker.

Although custom colors will be applied to the clock, widget glyphs, and widget text, they are not supported by the iPhone’s status bar and other system icons or text such as the padlock icon for Face ID, the Home bar indicator, or the flashlight and camera buttons at the bottom. These are some odd limitations in an otherwise very well thought out feature that plays extremely well with wallpapers. I’m sure that millions of people will spend way more time than previously anticipated picking the font-color combo that’s just right for them. But having those colors not apply to the status bar and other elements of the Lock Screen feels wrong and makes those parts of the Lock Screen look out of place. I hope Apple fixes this in a software update.

Lock Screen Widgets

From a functional perspective, the biggest, most important addition to the iOS 16 Lock Screen is the ability to install widgets on it. These aren’t the same widgets you may remember from the Home Screen in iOS 14 two years ago, but they should feel familiar to you nonetheless: Lock Screen widgets are, effectively, the iPhone version of Apple Watch complications. In fact, starting with iOS 16 and watchOS 9, developers can create widgets and complications using the same underlying technology: WidgetKit.

If your first reaction when glancing at an iOS 16 Lock Screen is that the iPhone now comes with complications like the Watch, well…you wouldn’t be mistaken about that.

Widgets on the Lock Screen.

Before we get to some examples of Lock Screen widgets and what you can do with them, there are a few things you should know.

There are three types of Lock Screen widgets, as we’ve seen previously in the Structure of the New Lock Screen section: inline, rectangular, and circular widgets. They pretty much look exactly like watchOS complications: inline widgets are a plain string of text that supports a glyph; circular widgets can be indicators, buttons, or gauges for things like temperature or progress in your daily tasks; rectangular widgets can display multiple lines of text along with glyphs. There are different ways for developers to style these widgets but, in the end, there are always graphical constraints that make all widgets look consistent with one another, even if they come from different apps. For instance, Lock Screen widgets are monochromatic (with multiple levels of opacity). Even if you install the wildest widgets from the App Store, you’re going to have a hard time making an iOS 16 Lock Screen that looks bad. And that’s because Apple imposed visual limitations that enforce a homogeneous look for Lock Screen widgets, as opposed to the Home Screen ones.

Another limitation that Lock Screen widgets have is the purpose they’re meant to serve. See, just like Home Screen widgets in iOS 14, Apple has explained how Lock Screen widgets are designed to be “glanceable” and non-interactive. In practice, this means that Lock Screen widgets display information on the Lock Screen, but when you tap them, they launch an app that takes you out of the Lock Screen. Does this ring a bell? It’s the same behavior I described two years ago with Home Screen widgets.

I’m no fan of the whole “glanceability” philosophy on the Home Screen. I believe what Apple has been trying to sell for Home Screen widgets is a distraction meant to hide a technical limitation of SwiftUI (which is the engine that powers WidgetKit). Widgets on the Home Screen shouldn’t only be glanceable: they should also be interactive. Unfortunately, that’s not changing with iOS 16, meaning that there’s still no quick capture widget for Notes on the Home Screen nor an interactive Now Playing widget.

Widgets on the Lock Screen are the ones that were meant to be glanceable, not the ones from two years ago.

But I’ll say this: Apple’s beloved glanceability is easier to accept on the Lock Screen. If anything, it feels like we’re living in a reverse timeline here: these widgets on the Lock Screen are the ones that were meant to be glanceable, not the ones from two years ago. Think about it: the Lock Screen is the part of your iPhone you actually glance at dozens (hundreds?) of times during the day, not the Home Screen. And if that’s the case, of course it would be great to have tiny modules that you can customize to display short bits of information you find useful. Don’t take my word for it though: just look at the iPhone 14 Pro’s always-on display and how it makes your Lock Screen widgets always glanceable. Unlike with Home Screen widgets, the glanceability of Lock Screen widgets matches Apple’s ideals and the iPhone’s hardware in a combination that makes sense conceptually and practically.

The result: I find myself wanting to put as many of these glanceable widgets as possible on my Lock Screen, and I’m very excited about using them even more on iPhone 14 Pro. So let’s take a look at the new Lock Screen widgets in action.

Apple’s Lock Screen Widgets

Just like I did two years ago with Home Screen widgets, let’s first take a look at what Apple is offering with its own widgets in the first version of iOS 16:

Batteries

Status: keep track of the battery levels of your devices

Available in two sizes

Calendar

Next Event: track your next upcoming event

Available in three sizes

Date

Available in one size

Clock

City Digital: check the time at a location

Available in three sizes

City Analog: check the time at a location with an analog clock

Available in one size

World Clock: view the time in multiple cities

Available in one size

Next Alarm: display an upcoming alarm

Available in three sizes

Fitness

Activity: check in on your rings and movement during the day

Available in three sizes

Home

Summary: see a summary of your entire home

Available in one size

Climate: see a summary of climate sensors in your home

Available in one size

Climate Sensor: see the status of a climate sensor

Available in one size

Security: see a summary of security accessories in your home

Available in one size

Security Accessory: check the status of a security accessory

Available in one size

Lights: see a summary of the lights in your home

Available in one size

News

Today: see today’s news and top stories

Available in one size

Reminders

List: see reminders from one of your lists

Available in one size

Due Today

Available in one size

Stocks

Watchlist: View price quotes of a watchlist during the day

Available in one size

Symbol: view price quotes and track performance of a symbol during the day

Available in three sizes

Weather

Temperature: see the temperature for your location

Available in one size

Conditions: see current weather conditions for your location

Available in two sizes

UV Index: see the current UV index for your location

Available in two sizes

Sunrise and Sunset: see the upcoming sunrise and sunset times

Available in two sizes

Moon: check the current moon phase and upcoming rise or set

Available in two sizes

Precipitation: see rain, snow, sleet, or hail forecasted for your location

Available in two sizes

Wind: see wind speed and direction

Available in two sizes

Air Quality

See air quality index for your location

Limited by regional availability

Available in two sizes

Location

Available in one size

Examples of some Apple widgets.

By my calculation, Apple has created a total of 46 Lock Screen widgets for 9 different apps/system features. Interestingly, that’s almost exactly half the apps that were supported with Home Screen widgets in iOS 14, where Apple debuted 61 differently sized widgets for 19 apps/features.

The comparatively smaller number of apps and widgets supported for the Lock Screen in iOS 16 is indicative of something I’ve felt the entire summer: Apple should have done more with its own widgets this year. Sure, some apps that do support Home Screen widgets aren’t well-suited for the Lock Screen, either because of technical limitations (a Photos widget wouldn’t look great) or because it wouldn’t bring much utility to a glanceable Lock Screen (would you use a Files widget there?). Still, several apps, features, and sizes that would absolutely make sense as Lock Screen widgets just aren’t there in iOS 16.

I find it baffling, for instance, that Reminders doesn’t offer a small Lock Screen widget with a progress bar for today’s tasks. Or that Apple didn’t think it’d be great to have Up Next widgets for Music and Podcasts to show you what’s coming up next in your queue (especially since the Now Playing live activity does not support showing your Up Next queue). Apple’s implementation of Lock Screen widgets varies wildly from apps that have a solid collection of different widgets in multiple sizes (such as Home or the standout of this year’s rollout, the Weather app) to apps that aren’t represented at all on the Lock Screen. Where’s the Shortcuts widget to quickly launch a specific shortcut? What about Siri Suggestions and Contacts10? Or the Mail app?

Configuring Lock Screen widgets (right) is very similar to the same system previously seen on the Home Screen (left): just tap a widget to edit it. Unrelated: why is there no search field for Lock Screen widgets?

I’ve had a great time with the Apple-made widgets I’ve been able to use this summer. I lean more toward the productivity side of widgets and work remotely with people from all over the world, so I’ve especially appreciated the rectangular Reminders widget to keep an eye on my tasks for the day and the Clock widget for multiple time zones. I expect to spend a lot of time tinkering with Home widgets given that we bought a house this year and I’m rebuilding my HomeKit setup.

You can still use the Today page (left) from the Lock Screen.

I’ve also thought about adding Calendar widgets to the Lock Screen, but since regular-style widgets are still available on the Today page by swiping to the right, I’ve preferred to keep a traditional Fantastical widget pinned there for now.

Third-Party Lock Screen Widgets

Apple’s somewhat lackluster showing of first-party Lock Screen widgets is, thankfully, leaving some pretty big opportunities for third-party developers to come in and provide users with more options for their Lock Screens. As you can imagine, we’re going to extensively cover third-party Lock Screen widgets on MacStories for the next few weeks (you can find all our iOS 16 coverage here) but I still want to showcase some of my favorite examples in this review.

David Smith’s Widgetsmith, which found incredible success two years ago with Home Screen widgets, is going to enter a second phase of its life (and potentially become even more popular) thanks to Lock Screen widgets. In fact, my argument from above applies here too: I’d say that Widgetsmith’s glanceable widgets make a lot more sense (and are more useful) for the Lock Screen than the Home Screen. I’ve had so much fun designing and tweaking Lock Screen widgets using the latest version of Widgetsmith, which is basically Apple’s missing widget design tool for iOS.

Remember how I said there’s no circular Reminders widget? Widgetsmith lets you create one (with the style you want) via the app’s redesigned (and simplified) Reminders integration. You can create inline widgets for anything, including displaying a custom phrase at the top of your Lock Screen. You can design a medium widget showing the path of the sun and – get this – Smith even figured out how to display photos as Lock Screen widgets.

With the latest version of Widgetsmith, you can design your own Lock Screen widgets.

Designing Lock Screen widgets in Widgetsmith 4.0 is an addictive experience, in a good way. This app has long exemplified what I love about user customization, and the new version for iOS 16 and the Lock Screen takes it to the next level. Whenever I have an idea for a Lock Screen widget, Widgetsmith is the first app I open.

Another developer that has (unsurprisingly) done a fantastic job with Lock Screen widgets is Joe Hribar with his excellent time tracking utility, Timery. With the latest version of Timery, you can check your tracked time on the Lock Screen, start a new timer or existing saved timer and – my favorite part – install a widget that shows you a timer running in real-time. All of these widgets are highly configurable too, so you can filter your timers by project or even choose what the Timery app should do when one of the widgets launches it. To configure a Lock Screen widget, you just need to tap on it while you’re already in editing mode, like on the Home Screen.

Timery’s widgets put time tracking data and controls on the Lock Screen.

Like the Home Screen ones, Lock Screen widgets can be configured by tapping on them while in edit mode.

Personally, I love that I can see whether I have a timer running on the Lock Screen when I’m working, and I’ve also installed a widget to start one of my saved timers more quickly.

Speaking of unsurprising apps: the latest version of CARROT Weather supports over 20 different widgets on the iOS 16 Lock Screen, and each of them is configurable to show different data points for your current location.

CARROT Weather has one of the richest Lock Screen integrations I’ve seen to date.

I want to mention two of CARROT’s new widgets specifically: the Custom Conditions one (pictured below, underneath the clock on the left) lets you design your own rectangular weather conditions widget with the ability to load up to two custom data points. The other is a widget I can’t believe Apple didn’t build: a forecast widget that shows you conditions for three days at a glance. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Brian Mueller did a fantastic job with Lock Screen widgets either given the app’s pedigree on iOS and watchOS (not to mention the amazing update for iPadOS that is also coming out soon, which we’ll cover on the site), but it’s incredible to see these widgets in action and how well they work thanks to background updates on the Lock Screen.

I love the daily forecast widget in CARROT Weather.

Remember how I mentioned Apple is leaving some opportunities for third-party developers to swoop in with Lock Screen widgets Apple itself didn’t make? Well, take a look at the examples below. Marco Arment’s Overcast will soon gain widgets to reopen the app and see what’s playing; GoodLinks will have widgets to load a random link or check out links from a specific read-later list; LockPod is a new utility that lets you create Lock Screen widgets to play specific albums or playlists in Apple Music. LockFlow will let you trigger specific shortcuts from the Lock Screen. You get the idea.

From left to right: GoodLinks, Overcast, Parcel, and LockPod.

With LockFlow, I can create launchers for any of my shortcuts. Pictured here: a shortcut to reopen one of my notes in the Notes app.

Over the coming days and weeks, you’ll see hundreds of third-party apps add support for Lock Screen widgets. Some of them will be useful and make sense as glanceable experiences; others will just be gimmicks with little to no real-world utility that some companies have decided to build just to check some boxes in a feature list. Expect to see a lot of Widgetsmith-like apps for customizing your Lock Screen with personalized phrases and symbols, and be on the lookout for a new category of launchers that will allow you to launch apps and shortcuts directly from the Lock Screen via URL schemes. These are some of the trends I expect to see on the App Store in the short term. And as always, we’ll cover the best apps and widgets on MacStories, AppStories, and Club MacStories.

Notifications and Focus

In a slightly surprising move given Apple’s track record, one of the major additions to iOS last year – Focus – is already seeing some notable improvements in iOS 16 with an easier way to get started building Focus modes and an expansion of Focus into apps and the Lock Screen.

Additionally, as I noted in the previous chapter, Apple has taken the Lock Screen revamp in iOS 16 as an opportunity to rethink some design aspects and behaviors of notifications too. Let’s start there.

Notifications

I mentioned before that notifications now roll in from the bottom of the Lock Screen rather than being displayed in the middle of it by default. I like this approach. There’s more room to showcase the wallpaper and widgets on the Lock Screen. Notably, this marks another move from Apple toward interfaces that are anchored at the bottom of the screen – something they’ve been expanding over the past few years.

This design change is part of a bigger reshuffle of notifications’ display options in iOS 16. Available in Settings ⇾ Notifications, you’ll see that there are now three different display modes for notifications: the new aforementioned stack (with notifications that roll in at the bottom of the page), the classic list, and another new option: the count.

From left to right: the brand new stack mode (left), the also-new count, and the classic list display mode for notifications.

The count mode is interesting: it reduces unread notifications to a single numeric badge displayed at the bottom of the Lock Screen that says, for instance, ‘3 Notifications’. You can tap the count to expand notifications again, which makes this a great way to save a lot of space on the Lock Screen while still keeping an eye on how many new notifications are coming in.

The new Count mode for notifications.

There are actually two ways you can activate the count display mode for notifications. The first one is to enable it by default in Settings; whenever you wake up your iPhone from sleep, count mode will be active.

Alternatively, you can keep using either the stack or list display modes but temporarily minimize notifications into count mode. To do this, you just need to drag down notifications on the Lock Screen to minimize them into a count. You can then expand the count and revert to your previous display mode whenever you want.

Alas, this is it in terms of notification changes in iOS 16. There are no notable improvements to the Notification Summary (another feature from last year) and no new features to more effectively categorize notifications into groups. As someone who tries to keep notifications to a minimum, I’m happy with both the new stack and count modes as new ways to further cut distractions on my Lock Screen.

There will be a major new feature for apps that send real-time notifications launching at some point during the iOS 16 cycle: Live Activities, which Apple briefly showcased at WWDC and re-introduced as part of the Dynamic Island for iPhone 14 Pro last week. These new special types of rich notifications will allow users to stay up to date on real-time events such as sports games, deliveries, rides, and more; while there is a developer SDK for them already, they’re not available to consumers yet as part of this first release of iOS 16. Which means that I won’t cover Live Activities in this review and will instead follow-up with a separate story once they launch to the public.

In the meantime, you should know that, as I mentioned in the previous chapter, the Now Playing controls on the iOS 16 Lock Screen were rewritten as a Live Activity that supports interactions, which third-party developers won’t be able to do. In addition to Music, the Clock app also supports a special Live Activity in iOS 16: timers have been reworked by Apple to be an interactive Live Activity that shows you how much time is left and has buttons to pause and cancel the timer directly from the Lock Screen.

A running timer on the Lock Screen in iOS 15 (left) compared to the new Live Activity-based one in iOS 16.

Although I like how timers work on the Lock Screen now – they’re so much better than the tiny text that was displayed in iOS 15 – I’m also bummed that developers won’t be able to make this kind of interactive Live Activity this year. But we’ll talk about that more in depth in the future.

Focus

The first thing you should know about Focus in iOS 16 is that Apple made it easier to get started with it. The company must have heard the complaints regarding the fiddly nature of creating Focus modes last year, so in iOS 16 they’ve split the process of configuring apps and people into separate Allow and Silence lists.

In iOS 15, it used to be that you had to manually allow each person and app one by one; by default, Focus would silence everything except the people and apps you allowed. So if you had a selection of contacts and apps you did not want to be silenced while in a Focus mode, well, that involved a lot of tapping around – especially if you wanted to create multiple Focus modes for different contexts.

While iOS 16 does not bring the ability to set up a Focus “template” or duplicate an existing Focus mode (both options would help a lot), it does at least include a feature to switch the default behavior of Focus. Now, you can make Focus default to allowing everything except the people and apps you silence. The advantage of this approach is that a silence list is easier to manage if you just want to prevent some particularly nagging apps or people from contacting you, which has been my problem with Focus for the past year. If you’re worried about letting phone calls through, don’t: there is a setting to allow phone calls while in Focus mode even from people that have been silenced. It’s off by default.

In iOS 16, you can create silence lists for Focus modes.

The other area where Focus in iOS 16 provides a more cohesive experience than iOS 15 is in setting up the screens you see on your devices when a specific mode is active. iOS 16 brings a refreshed experience for associating a Lock Screen, Home Screen, or watch face with a Focus mode, which can be done in a couple different ways.

As we’ve seen before, you can link a Focus mode to a specific Lock Screen by clicking the Focus button on it. I’ve done this for my custom ‘Bedtime’ Lock Screen: every time I switch to it, the linked Bedtime Focus mode also becomes active. Note that Apple has built actual two-way linking here: if I manually activate the Bedtime Focus mode first, then the Lock Screen also changes accordingly.

Linking a Lock Screen to a Focus mode.

In Settings, you’ll also find a new ‘Customize Screens’ section that provides you with an overview of the Home Screen, Lock Screen, and watch face you can link to a Focus. Apple has done a great job here. When you select a Lock Screen or Home Screen, you’ll get a special gallery view inside Settings that displays your existing screens, lets you create a new one, or – the big addition this year – offers suggested screens that are relevant to the Focus mode you’re setting up.

For example, when I was setting up a Reading Focus, iOS 16 suggested a Lock Screen with an emoji wallpaper made of books and eyeglasses, which I thought was fun.

Suggested Lock and Home Screen pages for a Reading Focus. Pay attention to the suggested emoji for the wallpaper and apps on the Home Screen.

Similarly, when I tapped on the Home Screen, the system suggested new pages featuring apps and widgets such as Books, Notes, Apollo, News, and Reeder, which make sense for a reading activity. I’m assuming that these suggestions are partly based on user habits as well as the tech that powers automatic categorization in the App Library, and it’s a neat feature. When I was creating a Work mode, iOS suggested productivity and business apps; for a Fitness Focus, it offered Home Screen pages featuring Music, Podcasts, Weather, and Fitness.

Suggested screens for the Sleep, Fitness, and Work Focus modes. I appreciate the espresso cup in the Work mode. You know me well, iOS.

Interestingly, when it comes to watch faces, iOS 16 only lets you choose among your existing faces and doesn’t suggest new ones created for you based on Watch apps and complications. Overall, I like this system, and I think it’s another welcome tool to remove friction from the Focus experience, but I won’t use it much myself since I only have one Focus mode I enable at night.11

Focus Filters

The most interesting change to Focus in iOS 16 is the expansion of the feature directly into apps. While Focus debuted last year as, arguably, a glorified version of Do Not Disturb with Home Screen integration, the addition of Focus Filters in iOS 16 has the potential to turn Focus into a truly system-wide filtering system that works for notifications, screens, and app content.

That’s indeed the best way to think about Focus Filters: they are a way for you to filter out specific content inside your favorite apps when a Focus mode is engaged. For instance, you could decide to hide your work email when your Weekend Focus is active or, vice versa, hide your personal iMessage conversations and calendars when you’re at the office. Focus Filters define default behaviors in apps and they’re controlled by an associated Focus mode.

Focus Filters are about going one step beyond notifications and Home/Lock Screens with the ability to hide information inside apps themselves. There’s one wrinkle, though: app developers will have to explicitly add support for Focus Filters in their apps, meaning that you won’t be able to filter out whatever you want in the apps you use. Thankfully, developer adoption should be pretty straightforward: Focus Filters are based on the same App Intents technology behind Shortcuts, so I expect this feature to be quite popular.

You can find available Focus Filters in the new section of an individual Focus mode inside Settings ⇾ Focus. Scroll to the bottom, tap the ‘Add Filter’ button, and you’ll see a new page with all the app filters you can use displayed in a grid and sorted in alphabetical order. The way you find these filters is reminiscent of browsing Shortcuts actions offered by apps.

Adding app filters to a Focus mode in iOS 16.

By default, Apple has created four app filters for iOS 16:

Filtering accounts in Mail to show you specific inboxes

Filtering calendars in the Calendar app

Filtering conversations in Messages based on the people you’ve previously configured for a Focus mode

Filtering Safari by tab group

In addition, there are also system filters, which define default behaviors for iOS when a Focus mode is active. For this initial release of iOS 16, there are only two system filters: setting the appearance to light or dark and enabling Low Power Mode.

You can, of course, stack multiple app and system filters together in the same Focus mode, which is where things get interesting if you consider how third-party apps can join in on this filtering action too. When you open an app that’s been filtered by a Focus Filter, you’ll see various UI elements that tell you about it. The most common element is a bar at the top of an app’s UI that says ‘Filtered by Focus’. You’ll notice that this bar has a ‘Turn Off’ button, which is another important aspect to understand about Focus Filters: while they define default behaviors for content inside apps, they do not completely hide that content and there’s always a temporary override you can apply to turn off the Focus Filter. The decision to include a temporary off-switch is debatable (should Focus Filters behave more like restrictions in Screen Time?), but I don’t mind it, personally.

Focus filters can always be temporarily turned off inside apps.

You may also see icons in apps to tell you whether certain elements are filtered or not. In Mail, for instance, accounts you’ve filtered out will get a special icon in the inbox list:

Focus filters in Mail.

I’ll be honest: I’m more intrigued by Focus Filters – and specifically app filters – than I ever was about Focus itself. More than the overarching idea of finding “focus” in my life by tuning out nuisances, I am interested in the idea of “focusing” on specific parts of my favorite apps when I’m doing a specific activity.

(My Galaxy Brain theory: Apple renamed the Activity app to Fitness because down the road they’re going to rename Focus to Activities now that the feature is becoming so much more than Do Not Disturb.)

I’m more intrigued by Focus Filters – and specifically app filters – than I ever was about Focus itself.

It’s still the early days of Focus Filters, but I have a great example I want to mention that should give you an idea of the flexibility afforded by this new system. GoodLinks, the excellent read-later utility by Ngoc Luu, has added support for Focus Filters in iOS 16. With the GoodLinks app filter, you can define a default tag; once the associated Focus mode is activated, when you open GoodLinks you’ll only see articles in your read-later queue with that specific tag.

Focus filters enabled in Fantastical and GoodLinks.

I took advantage of this for my ‘Music’ Focus, which is the one I use when I want to listen to music, discover new albums, or read my favorite music websites. In the filters section of this Focus, I stacked two filters: one for Safari to default to my ‘Music’ tab group (which has its own set of favorites – another new feature in iOS 16), and another for GoodLinks to show me articles tagged with music. This way, when I trigger the Music Focus, I’ve defined a series of default settings for my browser and read-later app of choice that will make them behave consistently with the activity I’m doing at the moment.

Focus filters in GoodLinks and Safari (right).

I find this a powerful idea that I could see work well for a variety of scenarios: loading a particular folder of documents in your text editor when a Focus is active; filtering your podcast player to shows you enjoy while driving; filtering a music app to specific playlists and albums, and so forth. If developers do the work, and if users have the patience to set these up, I could see Focus Filters be an interesting new step for Apple into the area of “contextual computing”, which I’m sure would help for future platforms where removing as much friction from the experience as possible would help.

If anything, my only complaint about Focus Filters today is that I wish Apple had built more of them for their apps. I would have liked to see more controls for iMessage conversations (there’s no way to filter out pinned threads, for example) and filters for apps such as Reminders, Notes, Music, and Files. Given that the technology is based on App Intents, hopefully Apple will be able to add more app filters as time goes on just like they can with Shortcuts actions.

Shortcuts

In iOS 16, the Shortcuts app hasn’t undergone a major redesign or technical rewrite; instead, Apple’s efforts have focused on adding more actions for system apps, extending the developer API, bringing more stability, and making Shortcuts more approachable for new users.

The last point is both important and likely the reason why some Shortcuts power users will be disappointed by this year’s update. There isn’t a lot for them in this new version of the app: as we’ll see in my iPadOS review, there’s no integration with Files quick actions, no support for Stage Manager actions, and no system-wide hotkeys still. If you’re an advanced Shortcuts user and were wishing for more system-level enhancements in addition to stability this year: I hear you, but we’ll talk about this later on.

What we do have in iOS 16 is a fascinating new feature to get newcomers started with the Shortcuts app, a grab bag of useful new actions for Apple apps, and some solid developer-related enhancements that will make third-party actions much better than before. Let’s take a look.

App Shortcuts

With iOS 16, Apple is launching a new feature designed to make Shortcuts more discoverable, and therefore useful to more people, overcoming the steep learning curve that has long scared thousands of users away from the app.

Now, forgive Apple for their historically poor choice of words when it comes to this app, but the feature is called App Shortcuts. I know, I know. Jokes aside, App Shortcuts are interesting for two reasons: they weren’t made for users like me; and they show Apple going in a completely different direction when it comes to onboarding users with the Shortcuts app.

App Shortcuts are simple, one-action shortcuts that are ready to use as soon as you install an app from the App Store that has been updated to include them. App Shortcuts come bundled with apps, and you don’t have to do anything to set them up. In the past, users had to discover ‘Siri shortcuts’ inside apps and explicitly register them in Siri with a custom phrase; that entire system is gone with App Shortcuts. Essentially, Apple is now putting the burden on developers rather than users: app makers will have to decide which parts of their apps’ functionalities they want to make available as App Shortcuts, which you can start using right away with no setup required.

App Shortcuts in iOS 16.

The whole point of App Shortcuts is removing pressure and friction from users so they can get immediate value out of the Shortcuts app and its integration with iOS. Apple has accomplished this in a variety of ways with App Shortcuts in iOS 16. The first one: once you’ve upgraded to iOS 16 and have updated some of your favorite apps as well, when you open the Shortcuts app you’ll no longer see an empty library or, at best, a handful of Apple’s generic recommended shortcuts. Instead, you’ll find a new section at the bottom of the Shortcuts sidebar filled with pre-installed App Shortcuts from your apps. Technically speaking, these shortcuts aren’t doing anything out of the ordinary: they’re one-action shortcuts to perform common actions in apps. The difference from before is that app developers created them for you based on what they think is going to be useful in their apps.

This is immediately a better experience for folks who were turned off by the Shortcuts app in the past and found the blank shortcut editor daunting. App Shortcuts are ready to go: just click one and run it. Apple is advising developers to keep their selection of App Shortcuts flexible but reasonable, covering the typical actions that users typically perform in their apps. For example, the videogame tracking app GameTrack has an App Shortcut to see your finished games in a popup window; Voice Memos has one to quickly record a new voice memo; Focused Work has App Shortcuts to quickly pick a session or pause one (I used these during for my writing process this summer); GoodLinks has a handy one to open a random article you saved for later.

Some examples of upcoming App Shortcuts.

App Shortcuts are one-action shortcuts that do one thing quickly; their parameters are pre-configured by developers; their names (and therefore invocation phrases) should be short and memorable so that users can also run into them in other places of the OS.

App Shortcuts for Focused Work can also be used from Siri and Spotlight in addition to the Shortcuts app.

That’s the other key design trait of App Shortcuts: discoverability. In iOS 16, App Shortcuts can be discovered in a couple additional ways. First off, if you ask Siri to show you something in an app and that also happens to be a pre-installed App Shortcut, it’ll work right away in the assistant. Second, if you search for an app in Spotlight, in addition to seeing the actual app in search results, the system will also show you the first App Shortcut included in it, which is another way to discover these shortcuts. You can, of course, also find App Shortcuts by typing their full name or by expanding the list of results in Spotlight. And third, Apple is replacing the ‘Add to Siri’ button with ‘Siri Tips’ – small and dismissible banners inside apps that tell you about App Shortcuts you can use for the current app.

Examples of Siri Tips in Focused Work (left) and CardPointers.

If you want, you can hide an app’s App Shortcuts from Siri or Spotlight by pressing the ‘i’ button in the app’s dedicated section.

I can’t know for certain whether Apple’s strategy will be successful: only time will tell if new users will flock to the Shortcuts app thanks to App Shortcuts they discover in iOS 16. I do believe, however, that App Shortcuts are Apple’s best shot to date when it comes to introducing users to the incredible potential of Shortcuts. This approach makes sense, and I find it more valuable than the built-in Shortcuts Gallery because a) App Shortcuts can be discovered throughout the system, not just inside the Shortcuts app and b) they’re inherently personalized for users since they’re based on the apps they have installed.

App Shortcuts are Apple’s best shot to date when it comes to introducing users to the incredible potential of Shortcuts.

What’s also fascinating about App Shortcuts is the opportunity they present in terms of creating a natural progress path for users who want to go from a pre-installed App Shortcut to a custom one. App Shortcuts cannot be modified: wherever you tap on one, you’ll always run it instead of opening the editor view. If you long-press on an App Shortcut in the dedicated section of the Shortcuts app, you’ll see that you can use it as a starting point for a custom shortcut via the ‘Use in New Shortcut’ button.

Using an App Shortcut as the starting point for a custom shortcut.

If you decide to use an App Shortcut as the foundation for a new, custom shortcut, you’ll be able to build upon the developer’s work and maybe tweak the shortcut a little, or add a menu for multiple options, or perhaps even bring in new actions from other apps.

This progressive disclosure of the Shortcuts experience is the aspect I’m most intrigued to witness over the coming months. App Shortcuts weren’t created for someone like me, and that’s exactly the point: we need new users in the Shortcuts app. I hope Apple’s plan works this time.

New Actions

As I noted above, one of the threads in Shortcuts this year is that Apple hasn’t focused on adding new system-level actions; instead, they’ve expanded the list of actions for some of their built-in apps, with a particular attention to actions that change settings or open specific views of those apps. The ability to tweak app settings from Shortcuts is a potentially interesting new trend, and one worth keeping an eye on in the future.

The lack of system-level enhancements this year hurts the Shortcuts power-user community for a couple reasons.

First, I think it’s about time for personal automations to go beyond the usual set of triggers offered by Apple; there should be a developer API for third-party triggers in Shortcuts automations, and that’s not here this year either.

Second, the lack of new system actions feels like a missed opportunity on iPadOS. As we’ll see next month, Shortcuts’ support for multitasking-related actions on iPad continues to be largely non-existent, despite the addition of a brand new multitasking mode this year. It’s the same issue over and over again.

That being said, let’s take a look at these new actions provided by Apple in iOS 16. Notes has seen a major expansion of the actions offered to users, with the inclusion of new actions to manage tags and folders, tagging and moving notes, and even the ability to change specific settings of the Notes app from Shortcuts.

Notes

Delete Notes

Pin Notes

Open Notes Account

Change Notes Setting

Open Notes View

Create Folder

Delete Folders

Move Notes to Folder

Open Folder

Add Tags to Notes

Create Tag

Delete Tags

Open Tag

Remove Tags from Notes

The settings you can change include app-wide options such as resuming the last used quick note or toggling Notes’ automatic conversion of tags. While I don’t plan to use these new actions myself, I can see how they’d come in handy when combined with automations that tweak Notes’ behavior based on time of day or your location. Unfortunately, the ‘Open Note’ action still doesn’t support opening a note directly if it was passed from a ‘Find Notes’ action; the ‘Find Notes’ action still doesn’t support searching inside the Quick Notes folder either.

Next up is Voice Memos, which has gained a whole suite of actions to create recordings, manage them, search and open them in the Voice Memos app, and, once again, change settings from Shortcuts.

Voice Memos

Search Voice Memos

Open Folder

Open Recording

Delete Folders

Play Recording

Create Folder

Change Playback Setting

Delete Recordings

Create Recording

An interesting limitation here is that, unlike the existing ‘Shazam It’ action, Apple hasn’t designed a special Voice Memos UI to create audio recordings inline via the microphone in Shortcuts. Actions to create recordings or listen to them will always kick you back to the Voice Memos app, and I would have liked to see a deeper integration with Shortcuts for the audio experience. An aspect I do like (which you can see in the screenshots above) is the ability to pick specific recordings from the Voice Memos app via the redesigned variable picker in Shortcuts.

The system app with the biggest expansion of actions in Shortcuts for iOS 16 is Safari. Following last year’s controversial (and ultimately satisfying) update, the Safari team seems to have focused on greatly increasing the app’s automation capabilities for this year’s OS updates, and the results are terrific. Take a look at this list of actions:

Safari

Open Tab Group

Create Tab Group

Open New Tab

Open New Private Tab

Open View

Find Bookmarks

Open Bookmark

Find Reading List Item

Open Reading List Item

Find Tab Groups

Find Tabs

As you can see, there are actions to create and open tab groups, launch Safari into specific views, and brand new actions to find items in Safari regardless of whether they’re bookmarks, Reading List items, tabs, or tabs in a group. My two favorite additions are the Open View and Find actions. With the first one you can launch Safari into any of its different UI modes. For instance, you can use this action to launch Safari and open the tab overview UI, or create a launcher for Reading List, or just toggle the sidebar.

A simple shortcut to open Reading List in Safari.

Those of you who have relied on Shortcuts for years know why these actions are a big deal: they’re a first sign of Apple entering a new era of GUI scripting for apps that doesn’t involve any code but is instead all done via visual actions. If this becomes a trend, the implications for pro users and the Accessibility community will be huge: imagine the benefit of controlling app interfaces from a single shortcut for someone who has motor or visual impairments, or the ability to execute macros in iPadOS apps like you may be used to doing with tools like Keyboard Maestro on the Mac. At least I want to believe this is where we’re heading with these actions.

The Find actions are another powerful addition for Safari users this year. With these actions, you can search and open your tabs, Reading List items, or bookmarks from Shortcuts without having to do so manually in Safari. The ability to search Reading List items is especially nice since it allows users to create more advanced workflows for a feature that has been seemingly forgotten by Apple.

My Topic Reader shortcut, coming later this week on MacStories Weekly.

I was so happy about this addition, I prepared a shortcut called Topic Reader, which uses the new ‘Find’ action of Safari to let you browse your Reading List by topics rather than standalone articles. I’ll release this shortcut later this week for Club MacStories members in MacStories Weekly.

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Moving on, we have Mail, which has gained two actions in iOS 16:

Mail

Open Mailbox

Search Mail

The ‘Open Mailbox’ action is neat in that it lets you pick any mailbox so you can quickly view it in the Mail app. For a SaneBox user like me, that means I can create shortcuts to jump into my SaneLater and SaneNews mailboxes via Siri or the Shortcuts widget. Alas, the ‘Search Mail’ action is also a simple launcher that will open a search for the selected query in the Mail app; you won’t see search results in the Shortcuts app.

Speaking of Shortcuts, the app itself has received new actions in iOS 16 to create and delete shortcuts as well as the ability to open a specific folder in the app.

Shortcuts

Create Shortcut

Delete Shortcuts

Open Folder

Now, why would you want to delete a shortcut from a shortcut (you know) instead of doing so manually? This sort of meta-addition to the app will be useful to power users who have hundreds of shortcuts installed and may want to clean up their libraries.

Alas, I was hoping this action would come in handy when combined with the ‘Shortcut’ variable type, which contains a property that returns the action count of a shortcut in iOS 16. By combining the ‘Get My Shortcuts’ action, the ‘Action Count’ property, and the new ‘Delete Shortcuts’ action, I thought I could create a shortcut to delete all shortcuts in my library that contained 0 actions. These are the shortcuts I create when I want to test something quickly, then I delete their actions, but forget to delete the shortcuts themselves. Unfortunately, the ‘Delete Shortcuts’ action doesn’t seem to accept a list of shortcuts saved in a variable, which is shortsighted.

This should work, but it doesn’t.

These are the big additions for apps in Shortcuts for iOS 16. Then we have a grab bag of other new actions, which aren’t as important but that I still find useful:

Clock: The ‘Open Tab’ action lets you open one of the views in the Clock app.

Location: There are new actions to ‘Get Parked Car Location’, ‘Get Details of Parked Car’, and ‘Set Parked Car’. Notably, the last action lets you manually set a location for your parked car with the ability to attach a note and image to that location, which is not something you can do with the Maps app alone. I will explore this feature in the special issue of MacStories Weekly we’ll release later this week. Also worth noting: the location returned in Shortcuts for iOS 16 is a rich Maps snippet that’s much nicer-looking than iOS 15.

The new Maps snippets in iOS 16.

Scripting: The ‘Set Personal Hotspot’ action lets you turn your hotspot on/off or toggle its state.

Files: You can start a search in the Files app by looking for some text with the ‘Search in Files’ action.

Documents: The new ‘Optimize File Size of PDF’ action lets you reduce the file size of PDFs by compressing images inside them. (If those images are already compressed, the selected document may end not being smaller than the original.)

Miscellaneous: All the Apple apps that support Focus Filters in iOS 16 also come with an associated Shortcuts action to set or toggle the filter from Shortcuts. You’ll find ‘Set Focus Filters’ actions for Mail, Safari, Calendar, and Messages.

You can set Focus filters from the Shortcuts app too since the feature is based on the same App Intents technology used by Shortcuts.

I saved the funniest new action for last. The ‘Remove Image Background’ action is the Shortcuts equivalent of the new feature in the Photos app that lets you press on a photo to lift its subject and drag it into other apps. As we’ve seen in the Lock Screen chapter, Apple has implemented this background removal technology in various places throughout iOS 16, and that includes Shortcuts. With this action, you’ll be able to remove the background from any image passed to it (provided the subject can be isolated successfully) and, optionally, crop the resulting image to the bounds of the new subject. I don’t know why I’d ever want to do this in Shortcuts, but when the results look like this and they’re hilarious, why not?

Zelda doesn’t like a t-shirt on her head.

Other Shortcuts Improvements

Besides new actions, there’s a variety of other user-facing and developer-related improvements in Shortcuts for iOS 16 worth covering.

You can now create notes with rich text. This is a big one if you’re a heavy user of the Notes app and Shortcuts. In iOS 16, actions to create notes and append text to them are no longer limited to plain text. You can now append rich text and attachments to Notes, which will keep your formatting intact whether you’re saving rich text from a webpage or, say, passing some Markdown to Notes that you want to convert to rich text. It’s still impossible to save native rich links or checklist items via Shortcuts, but support for rich text (which is also one of the new supported input types in the Shortcuts app this year) is a solid improvement from iOS 15.

There’s a redesigned and more powerful variable picker. The variable picker has been redesigned in iOS 16 to be faster, more compact, and more powerful than before. For starters, it’s now a context menu instead of an old-style action sheet, and it comes up onscreen more quickly:

The new variable picker is a native pull-down menu that also supports sub-menus.

The best part, however, is that the variable picker now suggests magic variables that you can insert in empty parameters based on actions that precede the selected one in the editor. In my experience, this has turned out to be a great enhancement to the process of building advanced shortcuts in the app. Instead of having to manually pick a magic variable every time, I typically see the variable I want to use right there in the picker, where I can select it and use it as a parameter in an action. The old magic variable picker is still around, and of course you can still assign variables manually, but I’m using suggested variables in the picker more and more these days.

There’s a new document menu. I’ll talk about this more in depth next month with my coverage of the Files app in the iPadOS review, but Shortcuts is one of the apps that has received the new document menu in iOS and iPadOS 16 this year. This menu is accessed by tapping a shortcut’s name at the top of the editor; it contains options to rename, share, duplicate and move, export a shortcut as a file, or add it to the Home Screen.

The new shortcut menu in iOS 16.

This menu is a new system-wide element in iOS 16, which you can also see in Files and other document-based apps. In Shortcuts, it serves as a centralized location for options that continue to be available elsewhere (such as adding to the Home Screen, sharing, or exporting to a file) or that used to be nested inside sub-menus before. I like it, but in adopting it, users have lost the ability to instantly rename shortcuts by clicking the title bar once.

You can now search for shortcut icons. Speaking of the new document menu, it now also comes with the ability to search for symbols you want to use as icons for your shortcuts. Although there aren’t any new colors or symbols you can use in iOS 16, you can at least search for them by name now, so that’s nice.

Actions are now broken down into categories. As you start using the updated Shortcuts app for iOS 16, you’ll notice that actions from apps are now organized in categories. This is a welcome change that third-party developers can also take advantage of with their apps. Rather than having to find an action in a long list of unsorted items, you can now browse, say, Safari actions by category such as ‘Tab Groups’ or ‘Reading List’, which makes the process of building custom shortcuts faster and more intuitive. It’s another good change to make the app more approachable for a wider audience.

Actions for apps are easier to browse and discover in iOS 16.

Predicate filtering comes to third-party ‘Find’ actions too. I covered this on AppStories a few weeks ago, and this developer-related change is one of my favorite improvements to Shortcuts actions this year.

In iOS 16, developers can create ‘Find’ actions to retrieve content from their apps using the same predicate filtering technology that Apple has been using in its actions for years. You may not be familiar with the idea of “predicate-based filtering”, but you’ve probably seen and used these actions before: it refers to the ability to find content using natural language-like filters such as ‘Name is…’ or ‘Text contains…’ and so forth, stacking those filters together in a complex query. Actions such as ‘Find Reminders’, ‘Find Photos’, and ‘Find Calendar Events’ have used this system for years.

You’ve probably used predicate filtering-based actions already.

Until today, third-party developers could create actions to find and filter content from their apps, but they couldn’t use the same predicate-based filtering that Apple offered in its actions. This is changing with iOS 16, and it’s going to make ‘Find’ actions for third-party actions a lot more flexible…if developers adopt them. Fortunately, I’ve already seen some fantastic examples of these actions in use: apps like GoodLinks, GameTrack, and Book Track have all adopted this more flexible style of filtering, and there are more apps on the way with support for it, such as Things.

New filtering actions for GameTrack, Book Track, and Focused Work.

The same action – finding a link in GoodLinks – becomes much more flexible in iOS 16 thanks to predicate filtering.

With predicate-based filtering, developers won’t have to make actions with a predefined set of filters anymore, and you’ll be able to choose how many filters you want to mix and match as well as decide whether you want to filter by all or any conditions being true. This addition to the Shortcuts framework may have flown under the radar, but I hope more developers adopt it soon.

Faster, redesigned, and more interactive prompts. Lastly, we need to cover the new look for Shortcuts prompts generated by privacy permission prompts and actions such as Show Result, Ask for Input, and Show Alert. They’re bigger, have larger confirmation buttons with actual color in them, text fields are easier to see and click into, and – the best part – they come up onscreen much faster than before. The latter point is part of a general performance improvement in Shortcuts this year (yes, Shortcuts feels snappier), but it’s most apparent in how quickly prompts and alerts are displayed compared to iOS 15.

The new look for Shortcuts prompts in iOS 16. They’re also faster and no longer block interactions with apps.

The enhancements don’t stop at visuals, though. In iOS 16, all kinds of prompts displayed by the Shortcuts app no longer disappear if you move between apps. Lists and alerts stay pinned onscreen if you switch apps now, which means you can multitask and change your context while a shortcut is running. This is a fantastic change for Shortcuts users: it enables you to do things like double-checking a photo in greater detail before picking it, or switching to Safari, grabbing some text from a webpage, and dropping it into an Ask for Input field.

Shortcuts prompts are faster and no longer block interactions with apps.

I haven’t been able to test this myself since Apple still hasn’t made new actions to design more complex interfaces in Shortcuts, but, in theory, results snippets for apps (the alerts you see when you have ‘Show When Run’ enabled in an action) now support multiple tappable links in them too. Once again, in theory, this means apps could show you a notification-like banner that behaves like a medium-size widget with multiple buttons contained in it that you can tap to launch stuff. I haven’t seen any practical examples of this new kind of prompts yet, but I’m excited for somebody to figure out what to do with them.

As I’ll explore next month in my iPadOS 16 review, I’m concerned about the lack of system-level enhancements in Shortcuts this year, and I’m not alone. While I think Apple has done a remarkable job in understanding how to attract new users to the app this year, they haven’t balanced that with new functionalities for existing, advanced users of the app who have built complex workflows around it over the years.

As a power user, it feels like we’ve been stuck doing the same things over and over in Shortcuts for the past couple of years.

As a power user, it feels like we’ve been stuck doing the same things over and over in Shortcuts for the past couple of years. I don’t think I need to repeat what the app needs again, but suffice to say, some new Notes actions aren’t enough. My biggest concern is that Shortcuts is at risk of an identity crisis – an app that may continue to be not intuitive enough for new users, and not advanced enough for power users. I hope to be proven wrong.

Apps

New versions of iOS aren’t just about splashy new system features and new designs; with an ever-growing collection of built-in software, the most interesting updates are often found in the apps we use every day.

Even More Apps Coverage

As in previous years, we shared some initial coverage of new apps and system features in iOS 16 earlier this summer in our OS Preview 2022 series. I won’t rehash those in-depth stories here, but in case you missed them, you can find them using the links below:

Maps: The 2022 MacStories OS Preview Series: Maps and CarPlay

Home: Everything New Coming to the Home App in iOS 16 and macOS Ventura

Photos: Hands On: iCloud Shared Photo Library and Family Checklist

Mail: Everything New Coming to Apple Mail

Books

After a quiet couple of years, the Books app has received a series of substantial enhancements in iOS 16. Like the majority of people on Earth, I don’t consider myself a voracious reader, but each year I hope I can become one. For this reason, I’m always intrigued by updates to the Books app because maybe this time I’ll be able to appreciate them.

The audiobook listening experience has been improved with a redesigned full-screen player but, more importantly, the addition of a mini player at the bottom of the screen, similar to the Music app. The mini player has buttons to play/pause and skip back by 15 seconds; it also works for audiobook previews from the Audiobooks Store, so you can listen to an audiobook sample while you’re still browsing around to make up your mind.

The new mini player for audiobooks.

Amusingly, the full-screen audiobook player uses the old iOS 15-style design for progress and volume bars and hasn’t adopted the new ones seen in Music and the video player for iOS 16.

Also, Apple added widgets for the Books app. If you read a lot, you’re going to like the large widget, which shows you the book you’re reading now, how many minutes you’ve read today, and your weekly progress.

The biggest changes to the Books app this year, however, are in its core component: the reader interface. In iOS 16, the Books reader has received the “Safari treatment”: all UI elements have been moved to the bottom of the screen and integrated into a single button that reveals a menu containing options that were previously at the top of the screen, such as search, your bookmarks, and font settings. It’s a dramatic redesign of the Books UI, as you can see in the comparison images below:

The new reader UI in iOS 16.

What I find fascinating about this is that this type of a menu is a completely new element that has no precedent on iOS: it’s a button that invokes a list of more buttons, one of which is a slider (the Contents one, which you can swipe to flip through a book quickly). It gets better: the Themes & Settings panel reveals a sheet at the bottom of the screen with multiple themes as well as a nested Options page where you can dig even deeper and choose from more fonts than before, configure spacing and justification, and preview your changes inline. There’s a lot going on in the Books UI.

Reader settings in Books.

Like I said, I’m not a committed reader, so I can’t comment on the merits or issues of this design with the same passion that drove me to criticize, then praise, Safari’s redesign last year. I find this new design…shocking at first, but well done, maybe? I’m curious to hear what folks who read a lot of books every year think of this design in the iPhone app.

Calendar

As we’ve seen elsewhere in iOS 16, Apple has adopted pull-down menus more extensively in built-in apps this year, including Calendar. In the inspector for a calendar event, tapping on fields such as Repeat or Calendar will no longer take you to a separate sub-page; instead, you’ll stay in the event details screen and the selected menu will open inline.

New menus in the Calendar app.

There is a new context menu shown when you long-press an event: this menu, which uses new iOS 16 APIs to include three shortcuts at the top (I’ll focus on this in my iPadOS 16 review), adds new options for copying events, pasting them, and moving them between calendars.

The new Calendar menu.

In iOS 15, long-pressing an event only gave you an option to delete the selected item. Now, besides having a much faster way to assign an existing event to a different calendar, you can also paste events elsewhere in the Calendar app by selecting an empty block of time and pasting the copied event. In a nice touch, if you don’t paste but decide to create an event manually, the ‘New Event’ page will still detect the copied event in your clipboard and offer you to use it as a template.

Copying and pasting events in iOS 16.

Camera

Except for the new functionalities coming to the iPhone 14 Pro line, there are two notable changes for the Camera app this year.

The first one, which I’ll cover in the Photos section and Everything Else chapter as well, is improved support for Live Text. In the iOS 16 camera, when you focus the frame on text recognized in an image you’ll see data detectors pop up at the bottom of the viewfinder. There are shortcuts to copy all text, navigate to a recognized address, translate text, and more. Live Text continues to be incredible and its integration with the Camera app is even better this year.

The updated Live Text UI in the Camera with new data detectors.

Second, on iPhone 13, 13 Pro, and 13 Pro Max, the Camera app now supports foreground blur in portrait photos. This means you can blur objects in the foreground of an image to get a more realistic depth-of-field effect in your portrait shots. As you can see in the comparison shots below, if you have the right subject and composition, this option looks quite nice and adds a bit more gravitas to the subject you’re focusing on.

Portrait mode foreground blur as seen on an iPhone 13 Pro Max (right). Notice how the white figurine on the right gets blurred in iOS 16.

FaceTime

Besides the transparent UI I covered in the Design chapter, pretty much nothing has changed in the FaceTime app after last year’s big redesign and rollout of SharePlay. The one new functionality this year is the ability to hand off a FaceTime call from an iPhone to a Mac running macOS Ventura.

Home

The redesigned Home app.

My girlfriend and I bought a house this year, and we moved in two months ago. As you can imagine, I haven’t had the time to settle into my new workspace just yet between going on vacation and extended delivery times for furniture, so I haven’t had the time to play around with new HomeKit accessories or the redesigned Home app for iOS 16.

Fortunately, our John also moved, but he’s had the time to rethink his whole HomeKit setup and dive into the new Home app for iOS and iPadOS 16. So if you want to learn more about everything that’s changed – and where the Home app still falls short – make sure to read his story here.

Mail

Alright, who had ‘Major updates to the Mail app’ on their WWDC bingo card this year? I tip my hat to whoever did: your patience has been rewarded in what is, arguably, the biggest update to Mail since its introduction in 2007.12

In iOS 16, Apple has completely revamped Mail’s search to make it faster, more reliable, and intelligent thanks to search suggestions and tolerance for typos built-in. There’s the ability to schedule emails to send later and follow-up reminders for emails that you haven’t gotten a response for in a while. You can also create reminders to snooze messages for later and be reminded to check them out when you have time.

Mail in iOS 16 can set reminders for emails, send messages later, and more.

Mail’s update is so important, and, for the most part, surprisingly well done, we thought it deserved its own standalone article on MacStories, which John published a few days ago here. I’ve had this feeling since I first tested the new Mail app in June: I can’t believe Apple finally modernized it and did a good job with it. There’s still work to do, but I’m happy to be using Mail as my default email client again.

Messages

The app that plays the biggest role in Apple’s platform lock-in has received two substantial new features in iOS 16 that are playing catch-up to Meta’s WhatsApp and other modern messaging apps, plus some collaboration enhancements that build atop SharePlay, which we’ll explore more in depth with an iPad angle next month.

At long last, the Messages app for iOS 16 lets you edit messages and outright un-send them by deleting them. The ability to delete a previously sent message isn’t new in this space: WhatsApp has had this option for years. In iMessage, you can retract a sent message within two minutes after sending it; you can do so by long-pressing a message and selecting the new ‘Undo Send’ button, if available. Amusingly, doing so will burst the message’s bubble in a nice, whimsical touch that feels uniquely Apple.

Deleting an iMessage in iOS 16.

On the recipient’s end, similar to other messaging services, the other person will know that you deleted a message. If they are on older versions of iOS, they may still see the deleted text, and Apple tells you this with an informative notice in the Messages app. As more people update to iOS 16, this message will likely go away. Personally, I’m not the type of person who deletes messages – if you send a message, own it – but since so many other people do, I’m glad Apple has adopted what is an industry standard at this point.

Deleting messages in iOS 16. Or as Apple calls it, “undo sending”.

Editing a message is the more interesting option in my opinion. You can edit a message within 15 minutes of sending it, and you can perform up to five edits to a given message. In a notable move, the recipient will be able to see that you edited a message (of course) alongside a full record of all edits made to the message.

Essentially, Apple has created the Edit button we’ve always wanted from Twitter, and they nailed it on their first try. It didn’t even take them to change five different CEOs to do it.

Editing a message in iOS 16. Chicago “pizza” is the worst.

You can edit a message by long-pressing it and selecting the new Edit option, which will kick you back into the compose field with the text already filled-in, so you can make your edits. In the chat transcript, you’ll see an ‘Edited’ button underneath messages that have been edited; tap it, and you’ll expand the message to show all previous versions of it.

What Apple has done with its editing feature may seem trivial, but it’s not. The decision to limit edits by amount and time, as well as allowing recipients to view edits, shows that the company has thought about the potential scenario where some folks may send abusive messages, then edit them, hoping to get away with something they previously said. iMessage in iOS 16 won’t let them do that, and it’s the right call.

There are some other enhancements to the Messages app worth mentioning. Those of you who use Messages as an inbox may be happy to hear you can now mark messages as unread. So now, even if you did read a message, you can be a terrible friend, mark it as unread, and reply on your own time. I…shall we say, dislike it when others do that to me, but, hey, you do you.

Note that marking a message as unread won’t change the status of the read receipt on the recipient’s end. If you have read receipts enabled and you’ve read a message, marking it as unread on your device will not cause the message to be reverted to ‘Delivered’ on the other person’s device. I’m sorry, but the damage is done. This is the right move from Apple.

Marking messages as unread.

Also new in iOS 16: you can recover previously deleted conversations for up to 30 days, just like Files and Notes. This feature is somewhat hidden though. To access it, tap the ‘Edit’ button in the main Messages view (I know: why is it under an ‘Edit’ menu?) and select ‘Show Recently Deleted’. This will take you into your iMessage trash, where you can find deleted messages and recover them.

Recovering deleted messages.

Lastly, there are some notable improvements to the collaboration features in Messages, but we’ll explore these in the context of iPadOS with a standalone story next month. For instance, SharePlay now works with iMessage, and Messages has also been integrated with productivity apps such as Notes and Pages for collaborative features. But that’s a topic for another time.

Music

There are many things Apple doesn’t get right about the Music app and Apple Music’s integration with iOS. When I say “many”, I mean we had to do an entire episode of AppStories about our ideas to fix the Music app.

Unfortunately, iOS 16 doesn’t take any meaningful steps toward improving the Music app in what has to be the smallest update to the app in an annual iOS release to date.

There are a total of two new features in the Music app for iOS I can cover this year. The first one is the ability to drag a song from an album or playlist into your queue. Simply hold down the song, drag it onto the mini player, wait a second for the queue to open, and drop it wherever you want. It’s a nice addition.

Dragging songs into the queue.

The second feature is the addition of a star button to mark an artist as favorite. It’s not entirely clear to me right now what adding an artist to your favorites is supposed to accomplish. For sure, what I do know is that you can find a list of all your favorite artists buried somewhere in the Listen Now page, which continues to be in dire need of a redesign aimed at increasing its information density.

You can mark artists as favorites in iOS 16.

Beyond that, though, what does favoriting artists achieve? It doesn’t force push notifications for all their new releases to arrive, and when they do, they’re not as fast as checking MusicHarbor. It doesn’t create any new kind of automatic mix based on your favorite artists, which is a missed opportunity. So what does it do? Does it invisibly train the algorithm behind the scenes? Does it tell Apple anything valuable about my music taste?

But more importantly: it’s 2022, why should I have to manually mark an artist as favorite when the service should understand that about me on its own?

Notes

Notes for iPhone is another example of an app that received quality-of-life improvements and miscellaneous enhancements after the rollout of bigger changes last year.

By default, the Notes app now groups notes by date. New grouping and sorting options are available via a menu from the upper-right corner that replaces the custom action sheet Apple was using before, which looks much better. You can disable the grouping if you want, but, personally, I like how it breaks down my library by date, allowing me to find related notes more easily.

Notes groups items by date now.

The other action sheet that has been replaced by a native pull-down menu is the one that used to contain options for note settings and sharing. In iOS 16, Apple has separated sharing and note settings. The new menu is more compact than before, has three compact buttons at the top to scan text, pin a note, and lock it, and hides less text than before.

Smart folders were introduced last year as a way to complement Notes’ new tagging feature, but compared to smart lists in Reminders, they felt more like a proof of concept. Apple has gone back to the drawing board for smart folders in Notes this year and they’ve shipped what feels like the true version 1.0 of this feature. You can now choose from a much larger series of filters, including:

Date Created

Date Edited

Shared

Mentions

Checklist

Attachments

Quick Notes

Pinned Notes

Lock Notes

New filters for smart folders in Notes.

As in Reminders this year, you can match any or all filters – an added flexibility that should allow you to put together reasonably advanced smart folders to surface specific subsets of notes from your library. One of the filters I’m fascinated by at the moment is the checklist one: by choosing between finding checked or unchecked items, it’s now possible to create smart folders that filter notes that contain open checklist items, which is an intriguing way to think about task management inside the Notes app.

Finding open checklist items in Notes.

The ‘Shared’ filter is itself a new top-level section of the Notes sidebar, but it can also be used as a standalone filter and combined with others. For instance, you could use this to find shared notes that have open checklists and also have a specific tag. The ability to combine filters by ‘any’ or ‘all’ parameters is also available in the Notes sidebar in iOS 16: when you select multiple tags, you can now choose to filter notes that contain all of them or any of the selected ones.

Filtering tags in the dedicated section of the Notes app.

Still conspicuously absent from Notes’ filters? The ability to search for notes by title and body text. This is one of my favorite aspects of putting together smart searches via Dataview in Obsidian, and I’m a disappointed Apple didn’t have a native, visual answer for this in iOS 16’s Notes app.

Apple brought the standout addition to last year’s Notes update for iPad – Quick Note – to the iPhone this year…albeit in a limited fashion I don’t understand.

As we’ve seen with Picture in Picture over the past two years, the iPhone is perfectly capable of dealing with small, floating popup windows. And yet for iOS 16’s Quick Note, which can only be activated via a toggle in Control Center, Apple thought it’d be best to make it a full-screen window that only lets you capture new quick notes and does not let you swipe through your existing quick notes, like on the iPad.

Quick Note on the iPhone can be invoked from Control Center (left) or used from Safari to save webpages. The floating panel (right) is only supported to reopen highlights on webpages.

It’s bad enough that Apple didn’t add support for activating Quick Note’s floating window via a gesture, but limiting Quick Note to creation-only on iPhone? That’s unnecessarily punitive and lazy, and I’m sad we’ll probably have to wait an entire year for improvements on this front.

In the privacy department, Apple has vastly simplified the process of locking notes to make them private. Instead of forcing you to create a specific password for the Notes app, private notes are now locked with your device passcode and Touch/Face ID – the same system you use to lock your device. This way, your notes will be end-to-end encrypted and you won’t have to remember an additional password for the Notes app; this is another sign of Apple pushing to move beyond passwords in the near future.

There are some other additions to Notes I’ll discuss next month in my iPadOS 16 coverage, such as the new tools to add shapes and signatures to drawings, handwriting improvements, or the new sharing and collaboration features for iCloud users.

I won’t lie: I was hoping to see changes in the Notes app this year directly inspired by services that have reshaped the note-taking market over the past couple of years such as Notion, Craft, and Obsidian. Instead, despite some very nice improvements, I can’t shake the feeling that Apple’s Notes app feels and works like a pre-pandemic note-taking product.

At this point, every modern note-taking app supports some kind of command palette for keyboard-driven access to commands, has an in-app Spotlight-like search for navigating to notes, and lets you refer to other notes via internal links. These features have become commonplace in every single major note-taking app these days. Some of them even come with a healthy developer ecosystem and support integration with task managers and other services.

Will it take Notes a decade to catch up on this front, like Mail? I hope not. For now, while I like Notes’ design, native feel, and Quick Note for iPad, I’ve gone back to Obsidian for personal notes and Craft for collaborative ones.

Photos

The most important changes in the Photos app this year revolve around its integration with Live Text (which I’ll explore more in depth in the Everything Else chapter), shared libraries, and improved use of context menus for batch operations and other actions.

As I’ll explain later, the Live Text interface in the image viewer has been greatly enhanced in iOS 16 with the addition of new smart data detectors to perform more actions contextually within the image. This is no surprise given how remarkable the Live Text technology is and how popular it has gotten over the past year. Among the changes I want to call out in this chapter is the ability to translate text recognized in an image right from the Photos app itself. Translations overlaid on top of images are also a feature of the Translate app this year, but doing the same while in Photos feels magical.

The new Live Text UI in iOS 16.

Our John already covered shared libraries and iCloud Family Sharing in Photos, so I’ll focus on the other additions to the Photos app here. In iOS 16, the Photos app can detect duplicate photos and videos. If your Photos library consists of old iPhoto/Aperture/Everpix libraries that were merged multiple times over the years, this feature is for you: head over to Albums ⇾ Duplicates, and – if your library has been indexed (i.e. give it a few days) – you’ll see a list of all the items that iOS considers duplicates. You can then merge duplicates, thus slimming down your library and getting rid of legacy files.

Merging duplicates in the Photos app.

As Apple explains, items may be classified as duplicates both if they’re an exact copy of each other and if they appear to be similar but have different resolutions, file formats, or other “slight” differences. In my experience, this duplicate detection and merging tool has been spot-on. When you merge items, the Photos app will keep one version of the duplicate set, but will combine the highest-quality and most relevant data and move discarded items to your Recently Deleted folder. I did this months ago and removed hundreds of items from my iCloud library, so I recommend it.

Speaking of the Recently Deleted album: both it and the Hidden album now require authentication to be opened. You can disable this if you want in Settings ⇾ Photos ⇾ Use Face/Touch ID…but do you really want to?

In the People album, you can now sort people by name or custom order.

The Visual Look Up feature – the one that can recognize people and dogs and landmarks in photos – has been updated in iOS 16 to support birds, statues, and bugs. In my tests, the improved Look Up worked pretty well for famous statues I photographed at the Louvre in Paris, but it also thought a crab I photographed at the beach was an insect, so, yeah, your mileage may vary.

In theory, in the For You tab, you should find new types of memories for This Day in History and children playing. I haven’t seen either because I don’t have kids and…well, I guess I haven’t seen This Day in History for the same reason why Photos continues to think the woman tattooed on my arm is a person: its underlying intelligence is still hit or miss.

If you use Memories and the Photos widget on a regular basis, you’ll be happy to know iOS 16 brings a new setting to disable featured content from appearing in Spotlight and widgets. This is going to help for those times when you don’t want to see a hurtful memory pop up as a featured item, but I can’t help but think that what I mentioned above also applies here: these apps should be smarter in figuring things out on their own, not require us to manually turn off certain options or hide things.

Next up: batch operations. In Photos for iOS 16, you can now select multiple items at once and long-press to show a context menu with actions you can perform for all of them at the same time.

Batch actions for multiple selected photos.

As you can see, you can add multiple images to an album at once (finally!), adjust their timestamps and location (great for old pictures!), as well as copy or hide them. There’s another amazing (and hidden) thing you can do here though: you can now copy and paste edits between photos. To do this, select an edited image and choose ‘Copy Edits’ from its context menu. If there are other images you want to apply the same edits to (for me, it’s usually the magic wand tool + Vivid filter), select them, long-press, and choose ‘Paste Edits’. And voilà, you’ve now brought a series of consistent, non-disruptive edits across images in just a couple taps.

Copying and pasting edits between images.

If you’re the kind of person who spends a lot of time editing photos, you should also be happy to hear that the Photos app now lets you undo and redo individual edits in a photo. I can’t believe we’ve gone all these years without having this much better flavor of undo and redo in Photos, but yes, it’s only new this year, and it works perfectly.

I saved the best – and most ridiculous, in a good way – addition to Photos in iOS 1613 for last: the ability to lift the subject of any photo and drag it out as a transparent PNG into other apps.

Here’s how you can do this: in any photo – it doesn’t have to be shot in Portrait mode – hold down on what you think the subject is, and an animated, shimmering outline will surround it as long as there’s a clear separation between the subject and background.14 Then, drag it away and do whatever you want with it:

Dragging subjects out of the Photos app.

Now, don’t ask me why Apple built this because the reason is beyond me. Were they so proud of their subject separation technology that doesn’t require Portrait mode that they just had to put in Photos (and Shortcuts) too? Did an intern prototype this and Craig thought was a good idea and here we are? Or, the Galaxy Brain theory: what if this is an ingenious way to teach people about drag and drop between apps on iPhone without making it feel like a Nerd Thing?

I love this feature because, on paper, it has no practical reason to exist and arguably makes watching Live Photos a bit worse than before15, and yet it works so well and it’s going to be perfect to generate meme material on iOS. I’ve also seen other use cases for it though: a few days ago, for instance, I wanted to mock up some bedroom designs based on IKEA furniture, but the IKEA website has JPEG images and I needed PNGs with alpha transparency. So I saved all the images to the Photos app, used the subject selection feature to isolate the products I wanted, and dragged the resulting PNGs into Pixelmator. What would have required Photoshop or basic graphic editing skills before can now be done with a single drag and drop gesture, so maybe Apple considered this aspect too? Subject selection can be used as a simple design tool in iOS 16, and I have to assume that it’ll come in handy for Apple’s upcoming Freeform app as well.

Dog PNGs thanks to Photos in iOS 16.

Regardless of whether or not you’re going to use shared libraries, the new features in the Photos app this year are well thought out, useful, and perfectly integrated with the app’s existing design and structure. The Photos team at Apple should be proud this year…except for those questionable “intelligent” suggestions, which still need some work.

Reminders

Of all of Apple’s apps, Reminders continues to be the one with the most interesting trajectory. Over the past few years, what started as a simple todo app has evolved into a capable task manager that progressively reveals its complexity to users who seek it. Which is to say: you can still keep using Reminders as a simple todo app via Siri; but if you want, you can also use this app with smart lists, tags, subtasks, attachments, and much more.

Apple is progressing down this path with iOS 16’s update to Reminders, which brings even more customization options, refinements for all kinds of users, and new features to boot.

The Today and Scheduled lists have been redesigned to support grouping by default, just like in Notes. The Today section has likely taken a page from Cultured Code’s Things app: reminders are now grouped by morning, afternoon, or evening tasks automatically based on their due time. If you create a new reminder within any of these sections, the task will be automatically assigned a due time relative to the section it’s in.

The new sections of the Today page.

Although there are no settings to define manual thresholds for what should be considered morning or evening, if you use drag and drop to move tasks between these sections you’ll see what Apple’s definitions for these times of day are. Morning is 9 AM, afternoon is 3 PM, and Tonight is 6 PM.

Likewise, the Scheduled section has been enhanced with additional grouping options for future tasks. Now when you scroll down to view tasks scheduled for several weeks ahead, you’ll see that Reminders will first group them under a ‘Rest of [Month]’ section, and then it’ll also show you groups for the next 12 months. I’m not sure I’d ever want to scroll ahead by several months in this view, but if you have only a handful of tasks in the app, maybe this option is for you.

The new Scheduled view.

Speaking of reminders due today, my pal Stephen Hackett is very happy about another addition to Reminders this year: a toggle in Settings that lets you show both overdue and due today items in the app icon’s badge count. I personally keep the Reminders badge disabled because it’s better for my anxiety, but if you’re into this, then make sure to visit Settings.

Another feature I don’t use myself, but which I know a lot of people do, is the ability to attach notes to a reminder. This aspect of the app is also getting much better in iOS 16 with the ability to format text in the notes field. When entering a note for a reminder, select the text you want to change, hit the ‘Format’ button, and you’ll be able to choose between bold, italics, underline, and three types of lists (bulleted, numbered, and dashed). I’ve never been the type for crafting rich formatted notes in my tasks, but if you are, I think you’re going to like this.

Richer notes in Reminders for iOS 16.

There are some big changes in the list department of Reminders this year, which are going to make the app palatable to more advanced users than before. First up: there’s a new Completed smart list that shows you a reverse-chronological feed of all tasks you completed in the app. If this list is hidden, you’ll be able to access it by tapping the ‘Edit’ button in the main Reminders page, selecting the ‘Edit Lists’ button, and checking the new ‘Completed’ item. This list also means there’s now a proper way to clear all completed reminders from the app itself without having to use a shortcut.

The new Completed smart list and options for clearing completed reminders.

In tapping the Edit Lists button, you’ll also notice something else: you can pin all types of lists and smart lists to the top of the Reminders start page now. This is something I’ve been wishing for since Apple unveiled the new Reminders design in iOS 13, and it’s finally here. In addition to hiding the Apple-created smart lists I don’t want, I can also make my own regular and smart lists top-level items for faster access, which is fantastic.

You can now pin any list or smart list you want.

If you don’t want to use drag and drop, you can also pin lists by swiping right on them and selecting the new yellow pin button.

Speaking of smart lists, there are improvements for power users on this front, too. Following last year’s welcome debut of smart lists in Reminders, Apple updated the feature with the same Match All/Any option found in Notes as well as an additional ‘List’ filter to include or exclude a list from a smart list.

The new filters for smart lists in iOS 16’s Reminders app.

I’m happy to see smart lists improve on a yearly basis, but I still find myself longing for more flexibility. And I don’t think the features I’m looking for are too esoteric or complicated. For instance, you still cannot stack multiple filters of the same kind together; if you want to make a custom ‘Overdue + Tomorrow’ smart list that filters both reminders due today and due tomorrow, you can’t because you can’t add multiple ‘Date’ filters to the same smart list. The most baffling omission, however, is in the new ‘List’ filter: you can only include or exclude one list at a time. While the corresponding filter in the Notes (‘Include/Exclude Selected Folders’) lets you choose multiple items at once, in Reminders you can’t select multiple lists in a filter. I don’t get it.

In Notes (left), you can choose to include multiple folders in a filter. In Reminders, you can’t do the same for lists.

I’m willing to cut Apple some slack here since smart lists are a relatively new feature, but I also hope the Reminders team is taking a look at what other task managers do in this area. Apple doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel with smart lists, and there are still a lot of options they need to get right for power users.

One of the lesser known functionalities of Reminders is the ability to group lists together. You can do this by using drag and drop to move one list onto another and then creating a group for them. iOS 16 makes grouped lists more useful with the ability to tap on the group itself, open it, and view all tasks that belong to the lists contained in it.

The new design for grouped lists.

This is interesting because you can get creative with the lists and smart lists you add to a group, and you can end up with some useful custom visualizations of your tasks that weren’t possible before. For example, you could use this system to build your own quasi-Kanban board system in Reminders for lists that are in ‘research’ and ‘working on’ stages, then use drag and drop in the group view to move tasks between them. This is what I did for my ‘iOS 16 Review’ group in Reminders this year, where I was able to move items back and forth between the ‘Research’ and ‘Write Next’ lists from the main group UI. Alas, you can’t switch this view to use columns (like in Trello) and you can’t show a group in the Reminders widget either.

If you use shared lists, make sure to check out the new controls you have for notifications and list participants. The shared list management UI with FaceTime and iMessage integration is also part of the new collaborative features we’ll explore next month, but one thing I want to mention now is the ability to control notifications for shared lists. In iOS 16, you can choose to be notified by a shared list when someone adds a new reminder to it as well as when they complete one.

New controls for shared lists.

I want to close out this section by covering the most surprising addition to the Reminders app this year: templates. In Reminders for iOS 16, you can turn any list into a template that you can reuse yourself or share as an iCloud link with others. To do this, select the new ‘Save as Template’ button in a list’s menu; you can give your template a name and, optionally, choose to include completed tasks in it or not. Once you’ve got a template saved, you’ll be able to use it as a starting point when creating a new list in Reminders.

Saving a list as a template.

The addition of templates opens up a lot of fascinating use cases for the Reminders app. At a basic level, you can save your classic packing checklist or YouTube video project as templates so, the next time you’re packing for a trip or are about to publish a video, you can quickly set up a list with the same series of tasks you need to complete. This kind of personal usage is in itself useful, and it’s surprising because it’s typically an advanced feature you find in more pro-oriented task managers. At any point, you can even edit your template and add new reminders to it without modifying the original list it was based on.

Editing a template without modifying the original list it was based on.

When creating a new list, you now have the option to start from a template.

What’s going to be interesting, however, is the shared aspect of templates. When you share a template as a link with someone else, the recipient will be able to add it to their Reminders app and see all tasks exactly as you formatted them. I think you see where this is going. Reminders supports dates, tags, images, rich links, subtasks, priorities, and flags; in iOS 16, shared templates support all these pieces of metadata with the exception of image attachments, which will be removed when sharing a template with someone else.16 This means that you can now use a Reminders template to, say, share media recommendations for TV shows or movies; you can set up a template that’s a guide to a city with links for places to visit and restaurants to check out; you can create a template for a book club with direct links to the Apple Books store, and so forth.

An example of a template for locations to check out in Rome.

I don’t foresee relying on templates for my own use of the Reminders app, but I’m intrigued by their potential in a shared environment. The Reminders team keeps on knocking it out of the park with their app updates every year; I’m keen to see how they’ll build upon all these features introduced in iOS 16.

Safari

Compared to last year’s – how can I put this – tumultuous redesign, this year’s updates to Safari are thankfully scarce and focused on quality-of-life improvements. With the exception of collaboration features and passkeys, which we’ll cover in separate articles here on MacStories, changes to Safari this year largely amount to tweaks to functionalities introduced last year.

Tab groups now support their own sets of favorite websites, separate from “global” favorites in Safari. This addition is welcome and useful for those who use tab groups more as a way to customize Safari for a specific “mode” rather than a research tool, which Apple heavily advertised last year. For instance, when I’m in my Pokémon tab group, I may want to see group-specific favorites such as Pokémon Showdown, Pikalytics, or Aaron Zheng’s channel before “regular” Safari favorites such as MacStories and Twitter. I like this improvement a lot, although I do not understand why the new ‘Recently Closed Tabs’ start page section is only an option if you’re in a tab group.

Tab group-specific favorites in Safari.

At long last, you can pin tabs in Safari for iPhone and iPad. On iPhone, you can do this by long-pressing in the address bar and selecting the new ‘Pin’ option, which will turn the selected tab into a semi-permanent item pinned at the very top of your tab overview. On iPhone, pinned tabs look like small rounded rectangles in the tab grid, and they won’t be closed when you invoke features such as ‘Close All Tabs’. I use pinned tabs all the time on my Mac, so I’m glad I can pin important pages on iOS as well now.

You can now pin tabs in Safari.

A couple of Safari features now sync between devices thanks to iCloud. Website settings, such as reader mode or whether or not you want to use content blockers on a website, are now kept in sync between devices. This is great because you can now set your preferences once and avoid repeating the process manually on all your other devices. More importantly, Safari extensions are synced between devices too.

In Settings ⇾ Safari ⇾ Extensions, you’ll find a new option labeled ‘Share Across Devices’. When this toggle is turned on, your list of extensions will be synced between devices so that you can see which other extensions you have enabled on another device signed into your iCloud account. This list is available in Settings, and there’s a button next to each extension’s name to immediately download the associated app without opening the App Store. The process to redownload extensions is seamless, and while you’re still going to have to grant permissions for extensions on each device, sync goes a long way toward making it easy to keep a unified list of extensions without having to remember what to install from the App Store. I love it.

Syncing Safari extensions between devices.

Each extension’s enabled state is also synced across devices. If you enable an extension on your iPad then open Safari for iPhone, the browser will tell you that a new extension was enabled somewhere else via a new banner at the top of the page.

Speaking of extensions: on the developer front, Apple has added new APIs for scripting as well as declaring content-blocking rules, but they’ve also made the storage quota for extensions unlimited rather than limited to 10 MBs. I hope these changes mean developers will be able to make more complex and useful extensions for iPhone and iPad.

There are two other big changes to Safari in iOS 16: passkeys, which promise to usher us into a password-free future with none of the security downsides of passwords and increased security throughout, and new collaboration functionalities for Safari itself. We’ll cover both of these in the future.

Translate

The Translate app has gained a new Camera view in iOS 16, which, as you can imagine, lets you point the iPhone’s camera at something, freeze the frame, and translate it. While you were able to manually translate text recognized in images and the Camera with Live Text before, what’s different about the Camera view in the Translate app is that it translates the original text in-place within the photo itself. If you don’t want to take a new picture, you can also import one from your library.

The new Translate camera in iOS 16.

Although the Translate app’s Camera view may not be as visually and technically impressive as actual, real-time translation in a live camera mode, it gets the job done, and I bet it’s going to come in handy for a lot of tourists who are going to open the app, see the camera icon, and point it at something. You can even share the photo with the overlaid translation as an image via the share sheet, and you can tap on translated boxes of text to open a sheet with the full translated text and other controls.

Fun fact: I had my first real-life encounter with a tourist and the Translate app this summer. An American lady wanted to buy some prosciutto while I was at the supermarket and used the app to communicate what she wanted to the clerk. (The hang-up: she did not understand grams. But let’s not get into that.) You know me – I wanted to help and offer to translate in Italian for her, but my job got the best of me and I decided to quietly observe and use the experience as research material. So here we are.

Everything Else

As is often the case with new versions of iOS, there are dozens of smaller features and details to be discovered in the nooks and crannies of the OS. iOS 16 is no different, so let’s take a look.

Device Compatibility

For the first time since iOS 13, which dropped support for the iPhone 5s and iPhone 6, Apple is changing the device compatibility matrix in iOS 16, which has higher requirements than last year’s software update.

On the “regular” iPhone side, the iPhone 6s and 7 lines are out, with the iPhone 8 becoming the minimum threshold to update to iOS 16 (with several features, of course, not available for older devices). On the SE side, iOS 16 also drops support for the first-generation iPhone SE and now requires a second-gen SE or later. Lastly, the discontinued, but never forgotten, iPod touch is also out and isn’t supported by iOS 16. If you kept one around because of the good memories, you won’t be able to put a custom Lock Screen on it.

iPhone models compatible with iOS 16.

Dictation

iOS 16 comes with a greatly improved dictation feature that lets you alternate between using voice input and the keyboard in a single, fluid flow that feels much better than dictation in iOS 15.

Dictation and keyboard input now coexist in iOS 16.

As you can see from the screenshot above, when tapping the microphone button underneath the keyboard, the dictation UI no longer takes over it. That’s because dictation and keyboard input can now coexist when you’re typing something. The microphone icon simply gets highlighted to indicate that your device is listening, but then you can go ahead and mix and match dictating and typing text together as you please. This new way of dictating text and switching to typing specific words or names makes so much more sense than before, it’s one of those things that will instantly make you wonder how we went so long without it. Of course it’s supposed to work like this.

It’s not just about having the keyboard (and related QuickType suggestions) available when dictating, though. iOS 16’s dictation takes care of automatically inserting punctuation such as commas, periods, and question marks as you dictate. While the feature isn’t 100% accurate, it gets the job done in most scenarios and it has saved me a lot of time when I was dictating text messages. In my tests, the dictation engine did a good job understanding pauses in speech where commas need to be placed, and it also seems to understand the intonation of a question, putting a question mark at the end.

Dictation now supports entering emoji by name, and that has worked reasonably well for me too. Being able to quickly dictate something like “hey, what should I buy for dinner? – smile emoji” while driving and have it transcribed with the proper formatting is nice and deserves a finally from us. I’ve never been a big fan of dictation because of how much it felt like a separate, and more limited, “mode” of the keyboard. I think the changes in iOS 16 are going to make people like me use it a lot more.

Control Center

First introduced in iOS 14, the Privacy menu in Control Center is growing in iOS 16 with the ability to expand it and see a full list of all the apps that recently accessed your location, camera, and microphone.

The new Privacy menu in Control Center.

When you swipe down from the status bar to show Control Center on your iPhone, you’ll see an updated privacy indicator with the name of the app that recently accessed one of the system’s sensitive data types. There can now be multiple apps mentioned in this text label, and there’s a button that indicates you can press the label to navigate into a detail view. This new page is a complete breakdown of all the apps that recently used your location, camera, and microphone. This is a good way to get a detailed overview of what’s accessing what on your device; I just wish it was also possible to tap on the items listed in this screen to open their associated Privacy settings page.

Also in Control Center for iOS 16, there’s another finally for me in the form of the improved music recognition toggle based on Shazam. At long last, songs recognized from Control Center will be automatically synced with the Shazam app.

Control Center’s Shazam feature and the Shazam app now keep the same history of tracks.

I long resisted the urge to use the faster, and more accessible, Shazam button from Control Center because it didn’t sync with my history in the app and the Shazam playlist in Apple Music. That’s no longer the case. Even more impressive: because of this change, you can now see your entire history of Shazam tracks inside Control Center by long-pressing the icon and scrolling the list of songs.

Screenshots

There are two new buttons available when clicking the ‘Done’ button in the screenshot markup UI. One of them is a genius addition for which the engineer/designer who pitched it deserves an immediate raise and promotion. The other is just fine.

The new Copy and Delete button is exactly what I needed.

First, you can add a screenshot to a quick note. This is nice, but since iOS 16’s Quick Note is limited to creating notes and doesn’t support appending to existing quick notes, it’s not as useful as it could have been.

The real stroke of genius is the new ‘Copy and Delete’ button. It does exactly what it says: it’ll copy the screenshot to your system clipboard and delete it, without saving it to the Photos app at all. I love this feature because it feels like someone at Apple looked directly into how I use my iPhone and created a feature to save me a lot of time.17

I do this all the time: I take a screenshot, crop or annotate something, save it to Photos, go to the Photos app, copy it, delete it, then open iMessage or Twitter, and paste it. I don’t want to keep random screenshots in my library forever and pasting images is usually faster and easier than choosing them from a photo picker. With this addition to the screenshot markup tool, Apple has cut all those steps down to a single button, which I’ve already used hundreds of times. Whoever thought of this:

Thank you. Ask for that raise.

Spotlight

The first thing you’ll notice about Spotlight in iOS 16 is that there’s a new way to get to it: a Search button at the bottom of the Home Lock Screen. The button expands into the Spotlight search box with a neat animation when tapped:

If you don’t like this button and would rather have the page indicators back, you can disable it in Settings ⇾ Home Screen ⇾ Search. You can, of course, still swipe down on the Home Screen to open Spotlight.

In terms of new features for Spotlight, there are some, but they’re not groundbreaking. Running shortcuts is better than before, but that’s because shortcuts are faster to run in iOS 16, period. There are suggestions for recent searches and new kinds of Siri suggestions, but those haven’t been that useful in my experience.

Spotlight in iOS 16 seems to suggest shortcuts more often.

For the most part, I’ve noticed that Spotlight offers to turn on Do Not Disturb if there’s an upcoming calendar event and that’s about it. Spotlight can now find image results (including Live Text matches) for images stored in Messages, Notes, and Files, which is cool, and it should show more information for sports leagues and teams which is…not my forte, exactly.

Shared with You

One of the additions to iMessage from last year, the Shared with You system, is growing in iOS 16 with a developer API that will allow third-party apps to piggyback on iMessage with a sharing feature that is ideal for Apple users, native, and more contextual.

In case you missed my coverage of Shared with You and how its integration between apps and iMessage conversations works, you can find it here, and all the details apply to how the feature works for third-party apps in iOS 16.

When you share an item from an app compatible with Shared with You with someone else on iMessage, the app will generate a Universal Link. That link is a form of attribution that tells the system a specific app is responsible for generating certain types of links. In compatible apps, developers can then create dedicated “shelves” for Shared with You items and aggregate all links that were, well, sent to you. Developers are free to customize the UI they want to use, but one consistent element they’ll always have to use is the ‘attribution pill’ – the button that tells you who shared an item with you, which you can tap to reopen the iMessage conversation exactly at that point where the item was shared. It’s just how it works in apps like Safari and Music, but in third-party apps too.

Shared with You shelves in GameTrack (left) and Book Track. When you reply to an item in Shared with You (right) the message will be a direct reply to the original one.

You can still disable individual sources of Shared with You content in Settings.

Opening up Shared with You to third-party developers so soon is a smart decision: it’s another way for Apple to further increase the iMessage lock-in in their ecosystem; and it incentivizes developers to adopt the feature so they can have a modern sharing system without having to do much work themselves. Early examples of apps I tried with Shared with You integration include GameTrack and Book Track. I expect all kinds of apps that deal with media and read-later services to adopt Shared with You in the near future.

Siri

While not revolutionary, there are some nice quality-of-life improvements to Siri in iOS 16.

Just like dictation, you can now dictate emoji names and Siri will transcribe them to the proper character. This is especially nice when combined with the new option to skip the confirmation step when sending an iMessage, which you can enable in Settings ⇾ Siri & Search ⇾ Automatically Send Messages. Now when you have that urge to send a particular emoji to a friend or loved one, you can just say ‘Hey Siri, text Joe with monkey emoji’ and Siri will assemble the message and prepare to send it without you having to confirm anything else.

Texting emoji with Siri.

If you pay attention, you’ll see that the Send button is actually a progress bar in this case, so you have a few seconds to cancel sending the message if you’ve changed your mind about the vibe you’re giving off with your text.

Also new in iOS 16, you can hang up Phone and FaceTime calls by saying “Hey Siri, hang up”. Now, I don’t know why I’d personally ever want to do this without sounding like a jerk, but I know that there are important Accessibility-related reasons for Apple to add this option. Speaking of Accessibility: in Settings ⇾ Accessibility ⇾ Siri Pause Time, you can now adjust how long Siri waits for you to finish speaking before responding to a request. This is a useful option for stutterers or people with other speech impediments or simply folks who like to talk to Siri carefully and deliberately.

Offline Siri has been expanded to support HomeKit, the Intercom feature, and voicemail. Lastly, if you want to discover the Siri commands or App Shortcuts supported by apps, you can now ask Siri “what can I do here?” when inside a specific app. Doing so will show you a special Siri notification with a list of commands and App Shortcuts you can try.

Live Text and Data Detectors

I tweeted about this a few weeks ago, and, as you can see, people seem to be really into these changes coming to iOS 16.

As part of Apple’s efforts to regularly improve the “intelligent” features of our devices, iOS 16 is gaining built-in, system-wide conversion for all kinds of units in every app that has a native text field or supports data detectors. In practice, this means that iOS 16 can recognize when you’re typing a currency value, a time zone, temperature, or even the weight and length of something, underline it, and offer you to instantly convert it to another popular unit.18

For instance, if you type “35 C” in Messages, the other person on an iPhone running iOS 16 will be able to tap the value and get an instant conversion to Fahrenheit. Same if you receive a message that contains a currency, weight of something in grams, and so forth. The popup includes the ability to copy converted values, and it even supports disambiguation for multiple values if it’s not sure of which unit you want to start with. If you just type “21 degrees”, for instance, iOS 16 will display an additional menu to pick between Celsius, Fahrenheit, or actual degrees. In another amazing detail, the icons used for different temperature values actually have meaning and are based on the perceived temperature.

iOS 16’s unit conversion feature in Messages, powered by data detectors.

This feature also works for time zones: if someone sends you an email and they mention “5 PM PT” but you live in Europe, you’ll be able to tap the time zone and see what that time corresponds to in your time zone. As someone who’s been working for over 13 years with people based in the United States and who’s often struggled with time zone converter apps, I can’t emphasize this enough: built-in time zone conversion for text (Siri could already do this) is going to save me a lot of time.

Even better, all these built-in conversions aren’t limited to apps like Notes and Messages where you can tap on detected units to convert them. If you’re in an app like Twitter or Safari and manually select text, the redesigned edit menu of iOS 16 will show a snippet with converted values as well. To do this, just select the text with the value you want to convert, swipe left inside the edit menu, and you’ll get your conversion there too.

Converted units in the edit menu for selected text.

iOS 16’s support for unit conversion reaches deep into the operating system at multiple levels: it’s supported in data detectors, the edit menu, Siri, in Visual Look Up, and even in Translate’s new Camera mode. It’s probably too early to tell whether Apple has Sherlocked multiple categories of converter apps with these enhancements, but one thing’s for sure: since I discovered this, I haven’t used any third-party app or shortcut for unit conversions.

Speaking of Live Text, in addition to supporting the aforementioned data detectors, Live Text is also supported in video frames now. Watch a video, pause it, and if there’s text in the frame, you’ll be able to interact with it using Live Text. This entire feature continues to feel incredible, and with support for data detectors, translation, and videos in iOS 16, I’m amazed by the quality work that the Live Text team at Apple is putting out on an annual basis.

And More…

Add credit card CVV to autofill info. For years now, Safari has been able to automatically fill credit card information on webpages by using the cardholder’s name, card type, number, and expiration date previously configured in Settings. The only field that couldn’t be auto-filled was the card’s security code (or CVV), which you had to manually type each time you were using a credit or debit card in Safari.

Adding the CVV to a credit card in Autofill settings.

This is changing with iOS 16, which allows you to (optionally) store the CVV code in Autofill’s settings. To do this, you’ll have to open Settings ⇾ Safari ⇾ Autofill, select an existing credit card, then tap ‘Edit’ in the top-right corner of the screen to enter editing mode. This way, you can add the card’s verification code and you won’t be asked to manually type it again the next time you’re purchasing something online.

Keyboard haptics. iOS 16 introduces an Android-like keyboard haptic mode that makes each key press on the iPhone’s software keyboard result in subtle haptic feedback from the Taptic Engine. You can enable this in Settings ⇾ Sounds & Haptics ⇾ Keyboard Feedback. I turned on this option months ago after the first developer beta of iOS 16, and I haven’t looked back since. Typing without haptic feedback would feel broken on my iPhone now; it brings a new layer of tactility to the keyboard that makes it more enjoyable to type on a small screen.

Wallpaper crop when cropping photos. When cropping an image in the Photos app, you’ll find a new format to crop images to a wallpaper size that fits your devices. That’s another way Apple is making it easy for you to create Home and Lock Screen wallpapers this year.

Clipboard permissions when pasting. In iOS 16, Apple is cracking down on apps that automatically read the contents of your clipboard when you open them by displaying an alert whenever an app tries to access the clipboard without your consent, from which you can allow or deny access:

Prepare to see this alert in a lot of your favorite apps.

Now, I’m all in favor of Apple making tools to protect our privacy and ensuring that we always have control of our data, but in doing this, I should also note that Apple has made apps that had legitimate reasons to read the system clipboard more annoying to use – and less useful – in iOS 16. An app like Parcel, for example, could automatically read your clipboard and suggest adding a new delivery for an item if it found a valid tracking number in your clipboard. That process is not so seamless anymore in iOS 16, and the same is true for other apps that would offer to do something upon reading the clipboard, such as Fantastical (for dates) and Matter (for articles).

Apple recommends developers use a native ‘Paste’ button in lieu of automatic clipboard monitoring, but I disagree with their approach.

Opener is an example of an app that has switched to Apple’s recommended Paste button.

There should be an API to grant a specific app automatic, persistent clipboard access by authorizing it once. Instead, whether I’m using Matter or Obsidian (where all ‘paste’ commands trigger this alert over and over now), I feel like I’m constantly being punished by doing something I know, and I’m just annoyed by the alert at this point. I wish I could turn it off. Hopefully, with enough feedback, Apple will come up with a better solution for developers and users next year. The solution isn’t to punish users with incessant alerts: it’s to give developers new and modern clipboard APIs.

Show your Wi-Fi password. File this under “I have no idea how we went so long without it”: in iOS 16, you can see the password of the Wi-Fi network you’re currently connected to. Open your Wi-Fi settings, tap on the Password field, then authenticate with your device’s preferred method, and the password will be revealed to you along with a Copy button. This has already come in handy for all those times when I needed to re-enter my Wi-Fi password on non-Apple devices such as my gaming PC, Nintendo Switch, or Steam Deck. Seriously, how is this only shipping in iOS 16?

Landscape Face ID. Although we still don’t have a proper landscape Lock Screen for iPhone, this iOS 16 tweak is going to prove valuable for all those times when you want to unlock your device while laying in bed (or looking at it sideways, I guess). Face ID now works in landscape mode. The feature seems to be limited to the iPhone 13 line, and it works as advertised.

New settings for measurement system and first day of the week. European users who like to keep your iPhones in American English, rejoice: in Settings ⇾ General ⇾ Language & Region, you can now override values for the measurement system and first day of the week to always be, say, Metric and Monday, respectively. This is exactly what I did to keep my iPhone set to English, use the U.S. App Store, but also live with a default measurement system that, you know, makes sense.

Dedicated AirPods settings page. The long national nightmare of hidden AirPods settings on iPhone is finally over with iOS 16: when AirPods are connected to your device, a top-level page appears in the Settings app, allowing you to quickly jump into your AirPods preferences.

No more need to go find connected AirPods in Bluetooth settings.

This way, you’ll no longer have to go find your connected AirPods under Bluetooth settings. In another nice touch, the AirPods page comes with a preview of the model you have at the top.

iCloud backup over LTE and 5G. You know how much Apple loves 5G. We all love 5G. Tim Cook especially. If you have 5G you’d be happy to hear that iOS 16 now lets you perform iCloud backups over 5G. And LTE connections, too, I guess. But nobody cares about those schmucks without 5G anymore, right?

New Memoji. As always in a new version of iOS, there are some improvements to Memoji. This year’s addition include six new poses for stickers, 17 new and updated hairstyles, more nose types and neutral lip colors, and more. As an Italian, I am almost contractually obligated to mention that the best Memoji pose has been delivered to us in iOS 16, and you know what it is:

Conclusion

As a reviewer and user, iOS 16 is some of the most fun I’ve had with my iPhone in a while. Perhaps even more so than two years ago with Home Screen widgets. After three months spent testing iOS 16, I think the reason is obvious. This time around, customization isn’t a happy accident: with iOS 16, Apple is embracing personalization as a feature, and they’re letting us go wild with how much we can customize and tinker with the Lock Screen, Focus modes, Home Screen pages, widgets, and more. On iPhone 14 Pro, the ability to always see the Lock Screen is a feature of the product itself.

iOS 16 is some of the most fun I’ve had with my iPhone in a while.

If you’re into customizing how your iPhone looks and works for you, iOS 16 is a fun and reliable update. It’s as simple as that. Millions of people will update to iOS 16 because they’ll want to play around with their Lock Screen aesthetic, and in doing that they’ll discover two things: that Apple has really thought this through with an extensive set of wallpapers and customization options; and second, that the third-party iOS developer ecosystem is as vibrant as ever.

There’s never been a better time to be into trying different apps and tinkering with your iPhone than iOS 16.

I have two main complaints about widgets and the Lock Screen in this year’s update.

First, I find it odd that we still cannot customize the camera and flashlight buttons on the Lock Screen. The time is right for Apple to finally let us swap those launchers for something else; I hope that’s in store for iOS 17.

Second – and I find this somewhat ironic – my issue with Lock Screen widgets is that I want to use them more. iOS 16 doesn’t let me install enough of them at the same time. I constantly feel hamstrung by the limit of a single row of widgets underneath the clock; I wish I could install more widgets there and get even more value out of them. I have a large iPhone 13 Pro Max, so why shouldn’t I be able to decide how much information I want to show on my Lock Screen? If I want to have more clutter than other people, well, I should be able to decide that for myself – just like I can on the Home Screen.

For this reason, looking ahead at next year’s iOS release, I hope Apple adds, at the very least, a second row for circular and rectangular widgets. I love the idea of glanceable Lock Screen widgets much more than Home Screen widgets, and I have too many options to choose from in iOS 16. This is a good problem to have for Apple. I think the company can achieve a better balance here between Lock Screen design and the number of widgets allowed at the same time.

I also want to share a thought about Focus before I wrap up this annual review. Apple seems to be investing heavily into Focus as a cross-platform technology that can control apps, people who can contact us, and the screens we see on our devices.

Last year, when Focus was introduced, it seemed like an extension of Apple’s “digital well-being” initiative from a couple years prior, but I think it’s evolving into something different and vastly more exciting. In iOS 16, between its integration with the Lock Screen, Home Screen, and watch faces, Focus filters for apps, and existing support for automations, Focus is turning into a system-wide customization mode. If you ask me, it shouldn’t even be called ‘Focus’ anymore: it goes well beyond a fancier version of Do Not Disturb at this point. Apple’s Focus system has turned into a pervasive context layer that can change how our devices look, what kind of notifications we get, and what type of content our favorite apps show us.

I can’t help but wonder: what’s Apple’s angle for a dedicated AR device and Focus here? It’ll be interesting to follow the breadcrumbs left by iOS 16 a few years from now.

So let me ask you again:

When is the last time your iPhone truly surprised you? Now that we’re here, I’ll tell you my answer.

It was a few weeks ago earlier this summer, when I realized I’d just spent a couple hours doing…nothing, really, with my iPhone.

I wasn’t doom-scrolling Twitter, perusing other people’s stories on Instagram, pretending to catch up on my read-later queue, or compulsively buying games I’ll never play on Steam.19 Instead, I realized I’d just spent a couple hours tinkering around with my iPhone, trying different Lock Screens, going through my photo library to find great wallpaper-worthy shots, and testing all kinds of new widgets from third-party apps across multiple Lock Screens. It felt fun. And in that moment I realized that, although briefly, I was back to a decade ago, when without a worry in the world, I could just enjoy the simple act of playing around with my pocket computer, discover its new features, and download all the apps I could get.

So that is the last time my iPhone surprised me: when I realized that, for some of us, its software can still be a form of digital escapism – a source of genuine, geeky fun that’s become something of a lost art these days. Something that I’d perhaps forgotten to appreciate over the past few years. A feeling that, at least for me, is returning – with style – in iOS 16.

With iOS 16, customization is truly back. And this time, Apple’s along for the ride with us from the start.

Credits

My annual iOS and iPadOS reviews are a labor of passion, curiosity, and – to an extent – sheer endurance. I do them because I love everything about the process. The review wouldn’t have been possible without the support from the following people people and dogs:

My girlfriend Silvia, for her wisdom, support, love, and patience. Finding a better work-life balance for these reviews in the summer is one of my goals for the future. This review wouldn’t be possible without you. I love you.

John Voorhees, a friend and fantastic business partner. Running MacStories with you is a bit more fun and interesting every day.

Zelda and Ginger, my two dogs and the love of my life. Thank you for making me happier every day.

Alex Guyot, for putting his magic web development skills to good use with MacStories and the Club.

Michael Steeber, for bringing a unique voice and style to the review’s animation and graphics.

Finn Voorhees, who consistently makes all my Obsidian ideas happen and work exactly like I want them.

Lachlan Campbell, for their invaluable feedback and kind encouragement.

Myke Hurley

Stephen Hackett

Obsidian, Working Copy, Timery, Shortcuts, Runestone, and Spring – amazing iPad apps that helped me create this review.

Oliur for their Gradient Blur Wallpaper Pack, used in some screenshots.

My Chemical Romance, for being my soundtrack this summer. I can’t wait to see you guys on tour.

Every app developer who sent me betas during the summer.

Every engineer at Apple who always makes reviewing iOS and iPadOS each summer fun. Well, maybe iOS a bit better than iPadOS this time around.

Every Club MacStories, Club MacStories+, and Club Premier member.

Our Discord members, for always pushing me to do my best, within healthy limits.

And finally, every MacStories reader, for allowing me to do what I love every single day. Thank you.

Then again, wasn't that in service of OLED displays? ↩

Perhaps the iPhone 14 Pro's Dynamic Island will be another major surprise for iPhone users. Fascinatingly, it's going to be a unique blend of hardware and software that shows how Apple has been playing the long game with their design strategy for the past few years, which is now paying off. However, the iPhone 14 Pro is not out yet and I haven't tested the Dynamic Island, so that's beyond the scope of this review. ↩

That's in addition to the apps and features we've already covered in our annual OS Summer Series on MacStories. ↩

This is a first example of Apple using a private API for its own apps in iOS 16. Live Activities for third-party apps will officially roll out to developers later this year, with a pretty big asterisk: they won't be interactive like Apple's. ↩

Unless you're streaming music to connected speakers via AirPlay. In that case, the secondary volume bar appears. I don't understand the discrepancy. ↩

Even if he did, I think the reason behind this change is making room for the Dynamic Island on iPhone 14 Pro. ↩

I wonder: what happens if you set one of the Earth wallpapers on your Lock Screen and take your iPhone with you to space? Where will the green dot be? I assume the related question would be: what happens to GPS if you travel to space? ↩

Save for this moment. ↩

People who use photos or complex geometric wallpapers that make app names unreadable on the Home Screen: why? Is it a piece of performance art? ↩

Expect to see a lot of third-party widgets for quickly launching phone and FaceTime calls from the Lock Screen. ↩

I need some Focus inspo, as the kids say. ↩

Sadly, there's still no sign of the special split-screen mode that Steve Jobs demoed 15 years ago. Some features take time? ↩

For devices with the A12 chip and later. ↩

This is powered by Apple's image segmentation technology. ↩

If you want to watch a Live Photo now, you need to keep holding longer on an image. By the way, the subject selection feature also works in paused videos. ↩

My guess: in this first version, Apple felt a bit paranoid about people leaving personal photos in shared templates and ran out of time to build the necessary privacy controls for it. I bet support for images in shared templates is coming in the future. ↩

Now that I think about it, could this be the kind of enhancement that Apple created by observing user patterns aggregated in logs collected by millions of iPhones worldwide? How much is "innovation" actually the result of parsing logs and understanding what people do with their computers and optimize for that? ↩

Quick actions for data detectors are available on devices with the A12 Bionic SoC and later. They're supported in English, Chinese, French, Italian, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Ukrainian text. ↩

Let's face it: I'm still playing Elden Ring. At least until Pokémon Scarlet and Violet come out. ↩