iOS and iPadOS 15: The MacStories Review

In my career as an iOS reviewer, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a response as universally positive and enthusiastic as the general public’s reception of iOS 14 last year. From the “Home Screen aesthetic” popularized by TikTokers to the incredible success of widgets and the resurgence of custom icons, few iOS updates managed to capture the cultural zeitgeist as globally and rapidly as iOS 14 did. The update broke out of the tech community and, perhaps for the first time in decades, made UI personalization a mainstream, easily attainable hobby. For once, we didn’t have to convince our friends and family to update to a major new version of the iPhone’s operating system. They just did it themselves.

The numbers don’t lie: five weeks after its release, iOS 14 was already set to surpass iOS 13’s adoption rate; in April 2021, seven months after launch, over 90% of compatible devices were running iOS 14. Which begs the obvious question: if you’re Apple, you’re planning to follow up on what made iOS 14 successful with even more of it, right?

Well, not quite.

Supported By

MacStadium

MacStadium: Cloud-hosted iOS build machines.

With the world coming to a halt due to the pandemic in early 2020, Apple could have easily seized the opportunity to slow down its pace of software updates, regroup, and reassess the state of its platforms without any major changes in functionality. But, as we found out last year, that’s not how the company operates or draws its product roadmaps in advance. In the last year alone, Apple introduced a substantial macOS redesign, pointer support on iPad, and drastic changes to the iOS Home Screen despite the pandemic, executing on decisions that were likely made a year prior.

Surprisingly, iOS 15 doesn’t introduce any notable improvements to what made its predecessor wildly popular last year. In fact, as I’ll explore in this review, iOS 15 doesn’t have that single, all-encompassing feature that commands everyone’s attention such as widgets in iOS 14 or dark mode in iOS 13.

As we’ll see later in the story, new functionalities such as Focus and Live Text in the Camera are the additions that will likely push people to update their iPhones this year. And even then, I don’t think either of them sports the same intrinsic appeal as widgets, custom Home Screens, or the App Library in iOS 14.

It’s a slightly different story for iPadOS 15, which comes at a fascinating time for the platform.

As I wrote in my review of the M1 iPad Pro earlier this year, Apple needed to re-align the iPad’s hardware and software on two fronts. For pro users, the company had to prove that the new iPad Pro’s hardware could be useful for something beyond basic Split View multitasking, either in the form of more complex windowing, pro apps, or desktop-like background processes; at the same time, Apple also had to modernize iPadOS’ multitasking capabilities for all kinds of users, turning an inscrutable gesture-based multitasking environment into a more intuitive system that could also be operated from a keyboard. It’s a tall order; it’s why I’ve long believed that the iPad’s unique multiplicity of inputs makes iPadOS the toughest platform to design for.

Apple’s work in iPadOS 15 succeeds in laying a new foundation for multitasking but only partially satisfies the desires of power users. Apple managed to bring simplicity and consistency to multitasking via a new menu to manage the iPad’s windowing states that is easier to use than drag and drop. Perhaps more importantly, Apple revisited iPad multitasking so it can be equally operated using touch and keyboard. If you, the person reading these annual reviews, have ever found yourself having to explain to a family member how to create a Split View on iPad, tell them to update to iPadOS 15, and they’ll have a much easier time using their iPads to their full extent.

But after three months of running iPadOS 15 on my M1 iPad Pro, I can’t help but feel like power users will still be left wishing for more. Yes, iPadOS 15 brings extensive keyboard integration for multitasking with a plethora of new keyboard shortcuts and yes, the new multitasking menu and improvements to the app switcher benefit everyone, including power users, but iPadOS 15 is a foundational update that focuses on fixing the basics rather than letting the iPad soar to new heights.

While Apple is probably preparing bigger and bolder updates for next year, there are still plenty of features to discover and enjoy in iOS and iPadOS 15 – some that could still use some refinement, others that already feel like staples of the modern iPhone and iPad experience.

Let’s dive in.

Exclusive Extras

eBooks, Shortcuts, Obsidian Plugins, Safari Extension, and Making Of

As a Club MacStories member on any plan you can access an exclusive selection of perks related to this review:

Three eBooks.

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iOS and iPadOS: The Details A compilation of smaller interesting details about the apps and features of iOS and iPadOS 15 from the new ‘Details’ section of this review.

Advanced Shortcuts

Safari Speaker Pro, a shortcut for converting web content into spoken word audio and embedding it in an Obsidian note or sharing it with apps

Shortcut Exporter Pro, a shortcut for bulk exporting your library of shortcuts all at once, or by modification date or folder for backup or sharing.

A Special Issue of MacStories Weekly

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Federico’s Three Custom Obsidian Plugins

Todoist Tasks, a plugin that allows you to create and check off tasks inside Obsidian and sync them with Todoist.

Markdown Insert, a plugin for streamlining the process of creating Markdown web and image links.

Export Markdown with Embeds, a plugin for compiling a single Markdown document from multiple linked files.

Highlights Comes to Beta Beat

Members of the Club MacStories+ Discord community can drop by the Beta Beat channel to test Highlights, a brand new iOS and iPadOS 15 Safari extension by Finn Voorhees for highlighting webpages and generating Markdown from the highlights complete with reference links.

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Compatibility and Setup

While iOS and iPadOS 15 follow in last year’s iOS and iPadOS 14’s footsteps when it comes to maintaining backward compatibility with older devices dating back to the iPad Air 2 and iPhone 6s line, this year Apple improved the reset and setup process with easier ways to get ready to upgrade to a new iPhone or iPad. For the first time, the company will let you back up using iCloud even if the backup would be bigger than the storage available with your storage plan. You’ll also have the option to stay on iOS or iPadOS 14 and receive bug fixes until you upgrade. Let’s take a look.

A Note on This Review

This review was written while testing every beta of iOS and iPadOS 15 on a variety of devices, including an iPhone XS Max, an iPhone 12 Pro Max, a 2018 iPad Pro, a 2021 iPad Pro, and an iPad mini. Most of the story was written and edited while using iOS and iPadOS 15.0 between June and September. The entire review was edited between August and mid-September.

Throughout the review, you’ll find new sections labeled ‘The Details’ at the end of specific chapters. This year, I’ve decided to add these sections to make it easier for readers to discover smaller, yet interesting details about various apps and features of iOS and iPadOS 15.

Compatibility

First, some good news for customers and bad news for developers. I’m in a good mood, so good news first: both iOS and iPadOS 15 are compatible with the same devices that supported iOS and iPadOS 14 last year, plus, obviously, the latest iPhone and iPad models released in 2021. This brings the list of supported devices to 19 iPhone models, the semi-forgotten 7th generation iPod touch (don’t tell Stephen), and 19 iPad models – a total of 39 unique devices, excluding the ones launching in late 2021. Let’s visualize the table of devices capable of updating to iOS and iPadOS 15 in its full glory:

iPhone | iPad | iPod touch
iPhone 12 Pro Max | iPad Pro 12.9-inch (all generations) | iPod touch (7th generation)
iPhone 12 Pro | iPad Pro 11-inch (all generations) |
iPhone 12 mini | iPad Pro 10.5-inch |
iPhone 12 | iPad Pro 9.7-inch |
iPhone SE (2nd generation) | iPad (5th to 8th generation) |
iPhone 11 Pro | iPad mini (4th and 5th generations) |
iPhone 11 Pro Max | iPad Air (2nd to 4th generations) |
iPhone 11 | |
iPhone XS | |
iPhone XS Max | |
iPhone XR | |
iPhone X | |
iPhone 8 | |
iPhone 8 Plus | |
iPhone 7 | |
iPhone 7 Plus | |
iPhone 6S | |
iPhone 6S Plus | |
iPhone SE (1st generation) | |

But here’s the bad news for developers: both iOS and iPadOS 15 are compatible with the same devices that supported iOS and iPadOS 14 last year.

Last year, I was convinced iOS and iPadOS 14 would serve as an admirable swan song for older devices such as the iPhone 6s and 2014’s iPad Air 2; much to my surprise, even though they will be cut off from a variety of new features that require more powerful hardware, users will be able to update those devices to iOS and iPadOS 15 too. While I continue to believe Apple’s goal to maintain compatibility with seven-year-old hardware is commendable (and the rest of the tech industry should be inspired by this), it’s undeniable that this approach will give app developers a few headaches.

There’s always going to be a tension between developers wanting to take advantage of the latest and greatest technologies on modern hardware and Apple willing to support their customers with software updates for as long as possible. Ultimately, I think Apple is doing the right thing, and I’m sure developers will figure this out as they always have. Still, it’s worth wondering when, exactly, supporting old hardware becomes a liability for the evolution of the app ecosystem as a whole.

As I hinted above, several iOS and iPadOS 15 features won’t be available on older devices even if they can be updated to the latest OS. This year, these include major additions to iPhone and iPad that Apple heavily promoted in the lead-up to this release, such as video effects in FaceTime and VoIP apps, animated backgrounds in the updated Weather app, AR walking directions in Maps, and on-device speech recognition for Siri. For most of these features, it appears the cut-off point is the A12 Bionic chip, meaning you’ll be able to use them only if you have an iPhone XS/XR or later. It’s important to point out these limitations since, performance considerations aside, people on older iPhones and iPads will have a vastly different experience using iOS or iPadOS 15 compared to others.

Setup

Apple brought a handful of smaller, yet welcome improvements to the setup process of iOS and iPadOS 15. Right off the bat, if you visit the Settings app today, you’ll notice a new option in General ⇾ Software Update that lets you choose whether you want to upgrade to the new OS right away or stay a while longer on the previous version and continue to receive “important security updates until you’re ready to upgrade to the next major version”.

Traditionally, Apple aggressively pushed the adoption of its latest major revisions to iOS and iPadOS, going as far as automatically downloading updates in the background in addition to offering the ability to have them automatically installed. I’m sure the strategy helped boost install rates for the latest versions of iOS and iPadOS but, speaking from personal experience, I know it also annoyed users who feel uncomfortable updating their devices (especially older ones) to a new version of iOS or iPad that may degrade performance. The approach doesn’t scale well for devices set up as part of large companies or educational institutions either, as they may be required to wait several months before upgrading their fleet of devices to a major new version. For all these reasons, I find this a reasonable change to iOS’ software update policy but, once again, I have to wonder how it’ll impact the third-party app ecosystem going forward.1

The second addition to the setup process relates to iCloud storage and the new iCloud+ subscription plans. A common source of frustration I’ve heard from friends and family over the past few years is that, when it comes to moving from an older iPhone to a new model, they’ve often struggled to back up and restore their data (usually photos) because they weren’t paying for iCloud and had no sufficient storage left in their free tier. Rather than finally upgrading the free tier from the meager 5 GB limit that’s been in place for years, Apple is trying something else: when moving to a new device, Apple will grant you unlimited, yet temporary storage for up to three weeks, free of charge, so you can back up your device and transfer data via iCloud to a new one more quickly.

This is a clever move, but I’m still not sure what to think. Instead of upping free storage to a more reasonable capacity, Apple is letting you try bigger iCloud storage for a few weeks so you can move on from an older device and then decide whether you want to start paying or not. This makes sense if you consider how, as a services company, Apple needs to “convert” as many users as possible to a paid iCloud plan. As a user, I would have preferred to see a proper expansion of the free 5 GB tier that’s starting to feel downright hostile at this point. Given the company’s cash reserves, I feel like Apple could – and should – do better here.

Lastly, iOS and iPadOS 15 sport a handful of new options when resetting a device and setting it up from scratch. Upon resetting a device, you’ll see a new ‘Erase This [Device]’ page that details the apps, data, and Apple ID information that will be removed from the system. This page also shows whether Activation Lock has been left enabled in Find My or not, which can be a useful reminder if you’re planning on selling your device or passing it down to a family member.

The new Erase screen in iOS 15.

Also in Settings ⇾ General ⇾ Transfer or Reset iPhone, you’ll find a new ‘Prepare for New iPhone’ section that loads a guided tutorial to make sure you’re ready to move to a new device. The tutorial does a couple of things: it provides you with instructions on how to set up a new device and how to trade-in or recycle an iPhone (“good for you and good for the planet”, the page says), and it checks the status of iCloud Backup on your device. If iCloud Backup is turned off, you’ll be prompted to turn it on so you can rest assured all your apps and data will be transferred to the new device when it arrives.

Preparing for a new iPad in iPadOS 15.

This “onboarding” flow also works the other way around: after setting up a new device with the proximity-based system, you’ll see a ‘What’s next for this device’ message on the older one that gives you tips on what to do with it, including trade-in and recycling options. Given Apple’s commitment to the environment and long-established trade-in program, it makes sense for these prompts to be part of the reset-and-setup process now.

The same UI shown in the ‘Erase’ page is also used in iOS and iPadOS 15’s actual setup process. Labeled ‘Make This Your New Device’, this page lists all the data and information that was imported from your other device during setup; you can expand the Apps and Data tab to view more details, or you can tap ‘Customize Settings’ to pick other options, including not restoring anything at all on the new device.

I’m not sure if any ‘regular’ user is ever going to see this screen, but because I know MacStories readers will, I wanted to mention it: the iOS 15 setup process also detects if the device was running a beta release before, and it offers to automatically re-enroll the device in the beta program at setup.

Re-enrolling a device in the beta program at setup.

Lastly, when you’re done restoring or updating to iOS 15, you’ll be presented with a cursive welcome message that should be familiar to anyone who purchased a new iMac this year. The ‘hello’ screen only comes up once after updating to iOS 15, so if you want to capture it and show it off on social media, make sure you save it when you see it. I like that Apple is doubling down on this fun, Mac-inspired identity for iOS and iPadOS devices as well; I hope we see more of this in the future.2

Oh hello there.

Overall, while the setup process itself hasn’t changed, I’m a fan of the extra options and guided explanations Apple added this year both before and after installing iOS 15. I still think the company should increase storage included in the free iCloud tier, and I believe restoring from an iCloud Backup could still use improvements3, but updating to a new version of iOS or switching devices has never been as easy as it is in iOS 15; I’m curious to see how this goes for millions of people.

Design

For the past few years, it felt like Apple was pursuing a new iOS design language while sidestepping the responsibility of undergoing a full-blown redesign. While I wouldn’t rule that out completely (never say never with Apple), it seems increasingly improbable at this point. The company has seemed pretty comfortable slowly iterating on iOS 7’s design with a constant trickling of refreshed elements and returning visual affordances across multiple generations.

In iOS 15, there are barely any design changes worth noting as Apple mostly focused on refining interactions introduced with last year’s iOS 14 and its compact UI revamp.

Table Views

iOS 15 brings a refreshed appearance for table views. Changes are fairly minor on this front, but since the table view is one of the most common UI elements in iOS and iPadOS, chances are high you’ll notice these subtle improvements in several of your favorite apps.

In iOS 15, section headers in table views no longer have a separate background color (unless they’re pinned to the top), and they also feature a different font that isn’t forced to be displayed in uppercase. Additionally, iOS 15 features extra spacing above the aforementioned section headers, giving multiple sections in table views more room to breathe. You’ll likely spot these changes in apps that implement ordered lists of items, such as the alphabetical list of people in the Contacts app:

The new look for table views in iOS 15.

I was also able to compare old and new table views in Geoff Hackworth’s Easy Shopping List app, which uses a standard table view layout to present you with lists of items to purchase at the grocery store. Here, you can also see how the system deals with empty sections now; in iOS 15, toolbars are also transparent (they blend in with the rest of the table view) when content is scrolled to the bottom.

Table views in Easy Shopping List.

Transparent toolbars (and tab bars, too) can be seen in a variety of system apps; for instance, when viewing an event’s detail page in the Calendar app, you can see how content is no longer separated from the title bar and bottom toolbar containing the ‘Delete Event’ button. They’ve also been implemented in Files, Clock, and Reminders. This change makes the same app feel “bigger” on iOS 15 because certain parts of the UI aren’t sectioned off with different colors anymore, which I can appreciate on a large iPhone.

The new transparent toolbars in the Calendar app.

Toolbars are transparent in iOS 15 when content is scrolled all the way to the bottom.

The same is true for toolbars displayed inside popovers on iPad:

A toolbar inside a popover in iPadOS 14.

The same popover in iPadOS 15.

Also related to table views is the adoption of the “inset grouped” style (first introduced in iOS 13) in more system apps. In Settings, Mail’s list of accounts, and Calendar’s event creation screen, you’ll see that Apple switched to the padded style of table views in lieu of the old edge-to-edge one.

New padded table views in Settings.

Refreshed table views in Mail.

I don’t have anything in particular to say about this other than it looks modern and makes apps such as Settings more consistent with their iPad counterparts (which had already switched to this kind of table view presentation).

Time Picker

Last year, Apple did away with one of iOS’ most popular, longstanding UI interaction paradigms: the date and time wheel. With iOS 15, the company listened to user feedback and largely undid what they introduced last year.

In iOS 15, Apple has reverted the behavior of its time picker and rolled back its presentation style to the old, iOS 13 one: when you open a time picker, the AM/PM wheel is back by default, allowing you to scrub through different times of the day; if you want to type a time manually using last year’s typing mode, you need to tap the wheel to enter an optional, numeric input method.

Welcome back, old friend.

Months spent using iOS and iPadOS 14 on my devices (as well as scheduling lots of calendar events for video calls over the past year) made me realize I was wrong about preferring the manual input method to the tried and true time picker wheel. Particularly on iPhone, the wheel is faster, more intuitive, and easier to discover. I hinted at this in my review last year, but I’m guessing discoverability was also an issue with iOS 14’s time picker redesign: I’ve heard from several users who were confused by the new time picker, which was also so small, they didn’t even know they could scroll the time displayed inside it.

iOS 15 fixes this by returning to an old design that is familiar to everyone, combining it with a typing mode that takes what worked last year and makes it optional. There is value in being able to quickly type out a time after all, so I’m glad the option is still here. The “new” design also makes it easier to select the hour and minute portions of the time by tapping them.

You can select hours and minutes by tapping them.

On iPad, the new time picker is also a fascinating example of the system intelligently adapting to the user’s current input method. If you select a time picker by touching the screen with your finger, you’ll see the wheel by default; conversely, if you activate it with the pointer while using a trackpad or mouse, the time picker will be displayed in typing mode as the system assumes you’re using an external keyboard. I find this a clever way to shape the iPad’s user interaction based on the platform’s modularity; I’d like to see Apple do this more often for other iPad UI elements.

The time picker on iPad.

In using iOS 15, you’re going to notice another variation of the time wheel – one displayed as a pop-up inside integrated date and time pickers. For instance, while using the new ‘Adjust Date’ option in Photos, if you tap the ‘Time’ label, you’ll get a compact wheel in a pop-up.

The new compact time wheel in iPadOS 15.

You can still select numbers inside the wheel to type instead, and the same interaction considerations I mentioned for iPad above apply to this version of the time picker too.

Home Screen and Widgets

Aside from the inclusion of widgets on the iPad Home Screen, Apple hasn’t brought any meaningful changes to the iOS Home Screen following last year’s redesign. Instead, the company has focused on expanding the list of built-in widgets, tweaking stacks, and adding more options for management of individual Home Screen pages.

Let’s start with the new widgets Apple added in iOS 15. A total of six apps/system features offer new widgets in multiple sizes this year:

App Store

Available as ‘Today’ for editorial stories (3 sizes)

Contacts

Available as ‘Contacts’ (3 sizes; supports XL on iPad)

Find My

Available as ‘People’ (small and medium)

Available as ‘Items’ (small and medium)

Game Center

Available as ‘Continue Playing’ (3 sizes; supports XL on iPad)

Available as ‘Friends Are Playing’ (3 sizes; supports XL on iPad)

Mail

Available as ‘Mailbox’ (medium and large)

Sleep

Available as ‘Data and Schedule’ (small size only)

The new Mail, Contacts, App Store, and Game Center widgets.

Additionally, there are some updates to existing widgets in iOS 15:

Calendar now offers a small ‘Month Calendar’ widget to view the current month at a glance as well as an XL widget size for iPad;

Files supports the new XL size on iPad, and it can be configured to display files from specific folders. Furthermore, the widget supports drag and drop on both iPhone and iPad;

Music, Photos, Podcasts, and TV support the new XL size on iPad.

The Music widget can now display ‘Now Playing’ and ‘Paused’ labels if music is playing or not. It still doesn’t come with playback controls, unfortunately.

The new XL widgets for Files and Music on iPad.

I’m happy Apple is continuing to grow the list of built-in widgets and finding ways to expand existing widgets with new options. Of the new widgets, I’m especially impressed by the Contacts one: like the Shortcuts widget before, the Contacts widget uses private APIs to support interactions on the Home Screen without opening the Contacts app.

You can configure the Contacts widgets to show a grid of your favorite contacts, which will be displayed as profile pictures along with their Focus status and Find My location (if shared with you). When you tap a contact, you’re taken to a special overlay card that collects multiple call and messaging options and all kinds of content that person shared with you, including message threads, notes, links, calendar events, photos, and data from third-party apps. Remarkably, for Myke’s profile card on my devices, the system even displayed episodes of the Upgrade podcast – I assume because it matched Myke Hurley as the creator of Upgrade along with Jason Snell. Indeed, Jason’s profile card listed Upgrade as well, confirming my theory.

The Contacts widget supports inline interactions on the Home Screen.

New in iOS 15 for widget developers: it is now possible to redact personal information displayed inside widgets in certain contexts. For instance, if a widget displays sensitive user data, it may be best to hide that information when the widget is accessed from the Lock Screen. This is made possible by a new privacySensitive modifier available to developers.

Apple also brought a host of improvements to widget stacks in iOS and iPadOS 15. I was highly skeptical of widget stacks last year: I lamented how their stacked design didn’t aid in discoverability, and I didn’t find the system-provided Smart Stack to be all that smart in surfacing suggested widgets throughout the day.

In iOS 15, Apple hopes to make stacks more enticing by simplifying the management of widgets contained within them and going even further with intelligent recommendations. First off, there’s an updated stack editing page that features a ‘+’ button to add a new widget to an existing stack via search (so you don’t have to add it to the Home Screen first, then drag it into the stack) as well as a new live preview of the list of widgets installed in the stack. You can now scroll through live versions of the widgets in a stack rather than seeing a list of names, which is more intuitive than before. Additionally, you can now drag a widget out of a stack and drop it somewhere else on the Home Screen.

Stacks have a new editing UI, and you can now drag individual widgets out of stacks to put them back on the Home Screen.

There’s a new look for the ‘Smart Rotate’ toggle when you’re editing a stack, which is also joined by a new option this year: widget suggestions. When this option is enabled, iOS and iPadOS 15 will automatically add or remove widgets from a stack based on various signals during the day such as location, time of day, calendar events, and other user patterns. In my experience, this hasn’t been much smarter than the previous ‘Siri Suggestions’ widget (which is still available separately), and it mostly just feels like another name for the same set of “intelligent” suggestions Apple has been trying to make happen for the past few years. I’m not impressed with this option, and I plan to keep it turned off for all my stacks.

Jiggle mode fans rejoice: you can now enter this mode by long-pressing the Home Screen page indicators directly. In iOS 14, you had to long-press next to the dots to enter jiggle mode.

Lastly, Apple has added two new options to the Home Screen page management interface (the one you get by entering jiggle mode and tapping the Home Screen page indicators above the dock). In iOS 15, you can reorder pages with drag and drop and, in addition to hiding specific Home Screen pages, you can also delete them.

Too bad you still cannot set per-page wallpapers.

To delete a Home Screen page in iOS 15, hide it first, then tap the ‘-’ button next to it. In doing so, iOS 15 will tell you apps installed on that page will continue to be available in the App Library. I continue to believe it would make sense for Home Screen page management to be more directly tied to user automation (imagine if you could have a ‘Work’ page that only shows up at the office, a ‘Workout’ page for the gym, and so forth); however, as we’ll see in the next chapter, I think Apple’s strategy for this revolves around iOS 15’s new Focus functionality.

SF Symbols

Arguably, the most visible changes in iOS 15’s design department come in the form of a vastly expanded set of SF Symbols, the dynamic system images provided by Apple to developers since iOS 13. Apple updated SF Symbols on multiple occasions over the past couple of years (specifically, in iOS 14, 14.2, and 14.5), and the collection has grown since its original release with the addition of variants such as outlined and filled glyphs, slashed and enclosed versions, and a multicolor mode. With iOS 15, SF Symbols has reached version 3.0 and is gaining over 600 new images, bringing the total number of glyphs to over 3,000.

I was able to check out the updated set of images in SF Symbols 3.0 using Apple’s official SF Symbols app for Mac, as well as the always-excellent Adaptivity app by Geoff Hackworth. In iOS and iPadOS 15, you’ll find an expanded roster of glyphs for Apple products, which include Apple Watch and HomePod images:

New Apple product symbols.

As Apple continues to invest in Apple Arcade and integrate third-party gaming controllers on their platforms (more on this in Game Controllers), SF Symbols is adding new images for videogame controllers and joystick options:

Anybody want some videogames?

Unsurprisingly given the pandemic and Apple’s updates to FaceTime in iOS 15, there’s a handful of new communication symbols:

SF Symbols 3.0 also includes a variety of interface layout and window management symbols. These are labeled ‘rectangle’ by the system, and they seem to depict different takes on Split View, Picture in Picture, and moving windows across a rectangular display. I understand why these glyphs may be necessary on macOS, where more complex window management is already a reality, but if I were to read the proverbial tea leaves, I’d have to wonder if these could be used on iPad, too, at some point:

Beautiful, beautiful rectangles.

Let’s also spare a minute to appreciate this incredible symbol featuring a checkmark with a warning sign. I’m pretty sure this is what you see when your GTD goes horribly wrong:

Success and failure at the same time. A true metaphor of life.

In addition to images, the other big update to SF Symbols this year is the inclusion of two new rendering modes joining the existing monochrome and multicolor ones: hierarchical and palette. The new hierarchical mode is based on SF Symbols’ new built-in structure, which can now be comprised of primary, secondary, and even tertiary layers. This mode uses a single color with varying degrees of opacity to create a sense of depth and emphasis on particular areas of a symbol, all while allowing a single hue to drive the overall aesthetic of a set of images. It’s easy to imagine how this could be used by apps that have UI themes based on specific accent colors.

The new hierarchical rendering mode.

The palette mode, on the other hand, uses two or more contrasting colors within the same symbol to highlight specific elements of the image. It’s somewhat similar to the existing multicolor mode, but it’s more meant for apps that want to implement a consistent palette (hence the name) while emphasizing contrast between layers of a symbol using colors that can be individually controlled (along with opacity) by developers. Colors in multicolor symbols are also fixed (they’re chosen by Apple), whereas the palette style is entirely customizable by developers.

The new palette rendering mode.

In an otherwise minor visual update for both iOS and iPadOS this year, there’s a good chance the only new design-related change you spot in your favorite apps is a new SF Symbols icon or rendering mode. I’m curious to see how third-party apps will use the new hierarchical mode, which seems like a great fit for apps that implement multiple ‘themes’ based on tint colors.

More Design Changes

As always in new major versions of iOS and iPadOS, there are a handful of smaller design updates that, while not substantial enough to play a bigger role in the platform’s design language, are still worth covering. Here are the highlights from iOS and iPadOS 15.

A new look for nested options in menus. Menus that contain nested options have a new appearance in iOS 15: rather than replacing the original menu, submenus now expand inline and are overlaid on top of the main menu, which slightly recedes in the background. Submenus are revealed by tapping a chevron next to their label. This change doesn’t require apps to adopt a new API: it’s applied automatically by the system. This design provides a superior sense of hierarchy and works better for navigating long menus with several nested options.

You can see how the interaction differs between iOS 14 and 15 in the comparison below; if you want to try it yourself, I recommend playing around with the context menus seen in the MusicHarbor app.

The new look for nested menus in iOS 15.

The new look for nested menus in iOS 15.

A native API for Maps-like sheets. Third-party developers have rolled their own custom versions for years now, but Apple is introducing a native sheet controller API in iOS 15 to let apps present Maps-like sheets that can (optionally) only fill half the screen on iPhone.

These new sheets – which Apple is using throughout iOS 15 with Translate, Safari, Look Up, and other apps – can be set by developers to medium size (they cover half the screen) or large size that fills the entire screen.

Half sheets for a variety of system features.

Full-screen sheets aren’t new (Apple started using them all the way back in iOS 13), which means that medium-size sheets are the real stars of the show here, and Apple is aware of this. Medium sheets are packed with options: developers can make them resizable; they can optionally add a grabber at the top of the sheet; they can even customize the corner radius to make sheets fit their app UIs better. Medium sheets support automatic keyboard avoidance (if the keyboard comes up, the sheet expands to fill the screen automatically – a nice transition), and developers can choose to enable a non-modal behavior that lets users interact with content within and beyond the sheet. On iPad, developers can choose to display a sheet as a popover, which becomes an iPhone-like sheet if an app is turned into a compact Split View or Slide Over.

I expect to see these new native sheets in a lot of iPhone apps starting this fall. Developers have been asking for these for a long time, and Apple delivered with a native solution that is highly customizable and multi-platform. Furthermore, medium sheets enable a fascinating new kind of in-app multitasking in iPhone apps: imagine, for instance, being able to pick images from a photo picker in the lower half of the screen and see a bigger preview of the selected item at the top. Of all the design changes in iOS 15, this is the one that intrigues me the most since its implementation may lead to welcome productivity gains in my favorite apps.

Focus and Notifications

Apple has been on a long journey to help us reclaim control of notifications and find more balance in our digital lives.

From Do Not Disturb While Driving and the digital well-being initiative behind Screen Time in iOS 12 to last year’s Sleep mode and iOS 15’s combination of Focus and redesigned notifications, the company is clearly interested in building tools to rebalance our relationship with distractions caused by apps. Which, if you think about it, is kind of ironic since Apple created the problem in the first place by opening the App Store. But that’s a topic for another time.

In iOS 15, we see Apple’s latest one-two punch to help us tackle the onslaught of notifications on our iPhones and iPads: a vastly expanded (and rebranded) Do Not Disturb combined with redesigned notifications that can also be bundled up in summaries. Rather than making us think about the effects of distractions, and how many times we interact with our phones (i.e. Screen Time), Apple is going straight to the root of the problem in iOS 15.

Will it work?

Focus

Of all the new features in iOS and iPadOS 15, the one I’ve been using – and enjoying – the most is Focus, which already feels like it has been part of iOS for years now. In a way, that is sort of true: Focus is the new umbrella term to describe Do Not Disturb and its spin-off modes such as Driving and Sleep, which Apple added in iOS 11 and iOS 14, respectively.

Starting with iOS and iPadOS 15, Do Not Disturb, Driving, and Sleep are three of the many Focus ‘modes’ you can create on your device; this change is reflected in Settings (where Focus has replaced the old Do Not Disturb page) as well as Control Center, where you’ll find a new Focus button to either activate Do Not Disturb or choose from your list of Focus modes. More importantly, however, is the fact that Apple considerably expanded the notification preferences available in Focus while, for the first time, allowing you to create your own Focus.

Activating Focus in Control Center.

Here’s how you should think about Focus: it’s both a revamp of the standard Do Not Disturb and Do Not Disturb-like modes of iOS and iPadOS, and it’s also a way to create a custom Do Not Disturb mode that fits your needs at different times of the day and in different contexts.

At a high level, the core idea behind Focus is the same as Do Not Disturb, but more fleshed out: when you want to, well, focus on particular aspects of your work or personal life, you can enable a Focus to silence notifications from specific apps or people, trigger automations in Shortcuts, and even rearrange your Home Screens. Focus is Do Not Disturb on steroids – it’s a tool that lets you easily match your devices to your current mindset and context.

As with Do Not Disturb, you’ll find toggles in Control Center to enable Focus for one hour, until later in the day, or until you leave the current location.

What stood out to me when I started playing around with Apple’s presets for Focus (which include the basic Do Not Disturb, Driving, and Sleep, plus templates for Fitness, Gaming, and Reading) is the number of personalization options that were previously hard to find or not available at all with the classic Do Not Disturb.

When you’re setting up a Focus (regardless of whether it’s a built-in or custom one), you can choose to select people and apps that are allowed to notify you while Focus is active. This setup process couldn’t be any easier: select a Focus mode you want to customize in Settings ⇾ Focus, and you’ll be able to switch between tabs for People and Apps in the ‘Allowed Notifications’ page; search for the ones that should be allowed to break through the Focus “barrier” on your device, and that’s it. No need to fiddle with details in contact cards or deal with Screen Time settings.

Configuring people and apps allowed to notify you while a specific Focus is active.

You have the same controls when setting up a new custom Focus as well.

You can select different apps and people for each Focus, and I think this is why Focus will resonate with people once they update to iOS 15. For instance, I allowed my mom and girlfriend to notify me at night while the Sleep Focus is active, and I also enabled phone calls from Favorites4; for my general ‘Writing’ Focus, however, I chose to allow a wider pool of contacts and apps, so that can I see more messages from important-but-not-critical contacts and services during the day. The ability to mix and match people and apps lends itself well to a multiplicity of Focus modes; I can imagine how folks will use this to create different modes for, say, being at the office, working out at the gym, playing games and watching movies, and more.

iOS 15 is smart in that it’ll recognize the same contact across multiple communication services: if you allow your spouse, notifications from them will come through whether they’re using iMessage, WhatsApp, Discord, or Mail, which is a nice touch. However, this is only possible if developers properly mark up their notifications as ‘communication’ ones and adopt the necessary SiriKit API.

There’s a lot more to Focus than just picking apps and contacts for notifications, though. You can decide to sync your Focus across devices: this is enabled by default in Settings, and if you leave it on, when you enable a Focus on your iPhone, it’ll automatically activate on iPadOS 15 and macOS Monterey too, and vice versa. (I’ve left this on.)

Another global Focus preference (which, however, you can override for each mode) is the Focus Status – a way to tell apps and people that you have Focus enabled and are silencing notifications. By default, your Focus status is shared with the Messages app, which displays a purple message inside conversations to let you know who’s got Focus enabled on their device. There’s also an API for third-party apps to read your device’s Focus status and display this information accordingly in their UIs.

Focus status in iMessage. Yes, I should have bothered Myke at 2:33 AM.

If you’re getting strong AIM away message vibes from this feature, you’re not alone. Unfortunately, you cannot customize the default Focus status text for iMessage anywhere in Settings. This is something I hope Apple will address in a future update to iOS 15 so I could put together nicer ‘away messages’ for different modes and people in my life. I also wonder if third-party messaging apps will let us do this by expanding upon the Focus Status API provided by Apple.

With Focus, Apple has also expanded the options available to let specific apps break through the wall of silence and notify you anyway. In iOS 15, apps can register some of their notifications as time sensitive; by default, these include calendar alerts before an event is due or notifications from cameras and sensors in the Home app. Time sensitive notifications stick around on the Lock Screen a while longer than regular notifications (up to an hour), ignore scheduled delivery for iOS 15’s Notification Summary feature, and you can choose to allow them in Focus as an additional override for important notifications.

If developers do the work of properly categorizing their notifications – assuming they don’t abuse this feature – this means you’ll be able to leave an app disabled in Focus for general notifications but opt-in for its time sensitive ones only. In their Human Interface Guidelines, Apple describes time sensitive notifications as the ones that “directly impact the user and require their immediate attention”, a categorization that casts a wide net over notifications sent from apps. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of popular services start labeling regular notifications as time sensitive just to make sure they can reach users and “engage” them regardless of Focus.

You can confirm which apps support time sensitive notifications in Settings ⇾ Notifications under the page for each app. This screen is also where you’ll be able to turn off time sensitive notifications for apps that may decide to abuse the feature in iOS 15.

Time sensitive notifications can break through Focus, if you allow them.

But back to Focus. If you’re on the other end of a conversation where someone has silenced their notifications with Focus, you can also choose to become the problem yourself and mark your message as, effectively, time sensitive and ignore the other person’s Focus status. This is achieved in Messages with a ‘Notify Anyway’ button displayed after sending a message. I joke about it, but I can see why there may be legitimate use cases for choosing to bother someone regardless of their Focus mode, such as personal emergencies. I find the system well-designed, and it has already helped me be more conscious of how many times I ping my friends each day; I now try to avoid texting them too much if they have Focus on, and I prefer to save my messages for when their Focus status disappears. I don’t think you want to be known as a ‘notify anyway person’ by your friends, so my recommendation is to use this option responsibly.

Yeah, this also happens if you Notify Anyway. Don’t.

As was the case with Do Not Disturb before, notifications are silenced when Focus is active, but they’re still being quietly delivered to your device. At any point while Focus is enabled, you can open Notification Center and find a new section labeled ‘While in [Focus Name]’ that groups notifications received while in Focus. As soon as you turn off Focus, those notifications are unbundled and displayed in Notification Center again.

Notifications you missed while in Focus are grouped together.

Automating Focus and Home Screens

Where Focus shines for me is in its integration with the Home Screen and Shortcuts: you can choose to only show specific Home Screen pages when a Focus activates, and you can also use Focus as a trigger for Shortcuts automations. I’ve been taking advantage of these advanced functionalities in a couple interesting ways.

On my iPhone, I was annoyed by some of the limitations of Apple’s default Driving Mode, so I decided to recreate it as my own Focus called Ticci Driving. This Focus allows notifications from two people and a handful of apps, silencing everything else except time sensitive notifications and calls from Favorites.

My custom driving Focus.

When you’re setting up a Focus, you can choose from a variety of automatic activation methods, which include a ‘smart’ one that is controlled by iOS at ‘relevant times’ throughout the day, plus manual triggers such as a schedule, location, and opening specific apps. These controls are reminiscent of automation triggers previously seen in Shortcuts and Home, and they should feel familiar to anyone who’s ever set up an automation in either of those apps.

Automatic activation options for Focus.

Despite the similarity to Shortcuts, I was surprised by Focus’ lack of triggers otherwise available for Personal Automations in the Shortcuts app. In my case, I want to activate the Ticci Driving Focus every time my iPhone connects to my car’s Bluetooth unit, but Bluetooth isn’t an available trigger in Focus. So I had to go about this the opposite way: I had to set up a Personal Automation with a Bluetooth trigger in the Shortcuts app, then use the new ‘Set Focus’ action to ask me to confirm whether I wanted to enable Ticci Driving every time my iPhone connects to my car’s Bluetooth entertainment system. In the future, I’d love to see consistent triggers for Focus and Personal Automations, as well as an option to disable confirmation for Bluetooth-based automations.

Activating a Focus from Shortcuts via an automation.

I did something more interesting on my iPad Pro running iPadOS 15: I set up a Home Screen dedicated to this iOS review, and I filled it with widgets and shortcuts related to my big annual project. Furthermore, I set up a Focus called iOS Review that silenced all notifications and hid all my other Home Screens. For the past few months, whenever I sat down with my iPad Pro to work on the iOS review and enabled its Focus mode in Control Center, all I saw was my glorious iOS review-themed Home Screen:

My iOS 15 review Home Screen.

There’s one last piece to Focus’ system integrations: it can be used as a trigger for Personal Automations in the Shortcuts app. To take advantage of this, I created an automation to start a timer in the Timery app whenever I activate the iOS Review Focus. This automation runs a single ‘Run Shortcut’ action, which invokes a shortcut I created beforehand to start a specific timer for the iOS review. When I enable the Focus in Control Center, a prompt is displayed onscreen with a list of timers to choose from.

Focus as an automation trigger.

As soon as I activate the iOS Review focus, a shortcut runs and lets me pick a timer.

I like this approach because it helped me never forget to start a timer every time I worked on the review this summer. All the parts of this process are seamlessly integrated with Focus; the only thing I need to do to make all this happen is pressing a button in Control Center.

Focus: The Details

Let’s round up some of the hidden and interesting details for Focus in iOS and iPadOS 15:

You can pick a custom color and icon for custom Focus modes. When setting up a custom Focus, you can choose from a selection of 10 colors and 39 icons to assign to it. I’m not sure why it’s not possible to pick any color via the system color picker or why the icon selection is limited to 39 options. This screen is reminiscent of the one seen in Reminders to customize lists, but the available icons are different. I don’t understand these limitations, and I’d like Apple to allow any color and any available SF Symbol for custom Focus modes.

Custom colors and icons for Focus modes.

Your current Focus is shown in the status bar. On iPad, you can see the icon for the currently active Focus in the right corner of the status bar, next to the battery. On iPhone, you have to swipe down to see the expanded status bar on top of Control Center.

There’s a setting to hide notification badges while Focus is active. You can find it in Settings ⇾ Focus under the selected mode’s ‘Home Screen’ page. This option will disable badges for apps installed on your Home Screen. I always keep this enabled.

Focus can be disabled from the Lock Screen. Your currently active Focus is also displayed on the Lock Screen as a button underneath the clock. Tapping this button reveals the same Focus UI found in Control Center, which lets you disable a Focus from the Lock Screen.

Long-press the Focus icon to open the Focus menu.

You can optionally dim the Lock Screen and hide notifications from it. You can find this option in Settings ⇾ Focus under the selected mode’s ‘Lock Screen’ page. I prefer to keep the dimming option turned off, but I like to show silenced notifications on the Lock Screen.

iOS 15 will suggest apps and people for allowed notifications based on your “past activity”. At least in theory. Apple claims that iOS and iPadOS 15 will use on-device intelligence to suggest different sets of people and apps for “work” and “personal” Focus modes. So far, the only recommendations I’ve seen were the ones available when setting up the built-in ‘Personal’ and ‘Work’ modes – and even then, those recommendations just seemed random to me. For context, iOS 15 suggested my mom, a contact in Apple PR, and my favorite seafood restaurant5 in the same Focus.

I should also note that I, like others, work from home, so maybe the system isn’t able to differentiate my activity by location? As with other “intelligent” features of iOS, I usually just ignore these claims.

iOS 15 will also suggest different Focus modes based on your context. Same as above. Apple says the system will rely on “signals” such as time of day and location to suggest different Focus modes. But where? And how? I’ve never seen these suggestions, so I’m not sure.

You can “install” multiple copies of the same app for different Home Screens. If you, like me, plan on setting up multiple Home Screens for different Focus modes, you’ll be happy to know you can add multiple icons for the same app in both iOS and iPadOS 15. To do this, simply drag an app from the App Library or Spotlight onto the Home Screen multiple times, and you’ll end up with multiple copies of it. I found this useful when setting a standalone music Home Screen: I wanted to show the Music icon on both my ‘regular’ Home Screen and the dedicated music one, so I installed two icons for the same app and put them on separate pages. Of course, there’s also the meme version of this.

Pretty much sums up my brain this summer.

Focus is an obvious evolution of Apple’s efforts and their best implementation of Do Not Disturb to date. The versatility of Focus is remarkable, and the integration with Home Screen and Shortcuts will allow users to come up with creative uses of the feature. While Do Not Disturb was a blunt tool to silence all kinds of notifications, Focus is a flexible filtering system that adapts to the user and their different needs at different times of the day.

In the three months I’ve been using iOS and iPadOS 15, I’ve found myself liking and relying on Focus a lot more than I initially thought; I have a feeling this feature will be a success.

Notifications

The other half of iOS 15’s notification management story involves, well, the notifications themselves. In addition to the time sensitive notifications I mentioned above, Apple refreshed the design of notification alerts and brought new management tools to mute notifications and bundle them up in scheduled summaries. After three months of using iOS and iPadOS 15, however, I feel like Apple thinks these notifications updates are more important than they actually are.

Let’s start with the design. In iOS 15, Apple made notifications more compact and informative by moving their icons (or profile pictures, in the case of message notifications) to the left side and making them bigger, all while applying a bold weight to the notification title at the top of the alert. As a result, it’s easier to see where a notification comes from, and different alerts take up less vertical space in Notification Center and the Lock Screen. I like this change.

Notifications are more compact in iOS 15 despite having bigger icons.

Inline notification actions are also more compact this year.

There are also new ways for developers to categorize their apps’ notifications, but I don’t fully understand why these new types exist or what they’re meant to do. As we mentioned before, critical notifications are the ones that can break through anything on your device (including the ring/silent switch), and time sensitive notifications are new in iOS 15 and have their own section in Settings, plus a specific label on the notification itself.

So far, so good. But iOS 15 also adds categorization for ‘passive’ and ‘active’ notifications too. According to Apple, passive notifications include information that “people can view at their leisure” while active notifications are the ones people “might appreciate knowing about when it arrives”. These two types of notifications don’t have any special UI, have the same restrictions in terms of breaking through Focus and scheduled delivery (more on this below), and just feel like a technical implementation we can safely ignore.

The new options Apple added to manage notifications are more interesting and applicable to everyday usage. In the Options menu you access by swiping across a notification, you’ll see two new shortcuts that let you mute an app’s notifications for one hour or the entire day. I appreciate the inclusion of these buttons since they’re pragmatic solutions to a common problem. They remind me of Tweetbot’s time-based mute filters – one of the best features of the app.

New temporary muting options for notifications.

For context, these options have replaced the old ‘Manage’ screen. Quiet delivery has been replaced with the Notification Summary, which I’ll cover below.

These mute options can also be automatically suggested by the system for apps and threads you may want to silence forever or mute for a shorter period of time. iOS was already capable of recommending which notifications to turn off for apps you weren’t engaging with, but now the system can also suggest muting those notifications. I’ve had a few of such suggestions pop up on my Lock Screen over the past few months, and a couple them were spot-on, so I’m happy Apple is taking some proactive measures here.

Notification Summary

In the aforementioned Options menu, you’ll also see a new ‘Send to Summary’ button that lets you switch an app’s notifications from immediate to scheduled delivery. The notification summary is, arguably, the marquee addition to notifications this year, which Apple advertises quite heavily throughout the system and in Settings.

With the notification summary, you can schedule an app’s notifications to be delivered, alongside others, as a bundle at a specific time of day. You can create up to 12 daily summaries and set their schedule in Settings ⇾ Notifications ⇾ Scheduled Summary; from this page, you can also manually assign apps to the summary by picking them from a list sorted in alphabetical order or by the number of notifications sent daily by each app (it’s the same approach used for Screen Time).

This is how iOS 15 will tell you about the Notification Summary for the first time.

Notification Summary settings.

Alternatively, besides the Options menu I covered above, you can easily send an app’s notifications to the scheduled summary in the permission dialog that comes up the first time an app requests the ability to send notifications. This provides a nice middle ground between immediate delivery (the classic mode) and denying permission, allowing you to use the summary option as a staging mode for notifications you don’t fully trust yet.

The new permission dialog for notifications.

The notification summary itself is, visually and functionally speaking, uninspired: it’s a stack of notifications that has a large title (e.g. ‘Your Afternoon Summary’), a badge for the number of notifications inside it, and a couple of featured slots for notifications the system thinks are the most relevant of the ones included in the summary. After those, there’s a ‘More Updates’ button that lets you “unwrap” the summary and turn it into a list of regular notifications.

The Notification Summary, before and after expansion.

Perhaps I’m not the target user for this feature, but after giving the notification summary a solid try for the past three months, my takeaway is that it only helped me ignore notifications more. I don’t like to keep too many notifications enabled on my devices, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this feature ends up being loved by folks who severely struggle to make sense of their Notification Center. But in my experience, I never found myself actively seeking the scheduled summary to see what I missed; instead, I just forgot about it until the next day, when a new scheduled summary rolled in and put the previous day’s notifications into the standard Notification Center.6

My biggest problem is the fact I wish the notification summary was smarter and more customizable. For instance, while you can create multiple scheduled summaries throughout the day, you can’t assign specific apps to a specific summary, nor can you label summaries with unique names. I would have liked to create a ‘News Summary’ with notifications from news apps and a ‘Music Summary’ for music-related updates, but that’s not possible in iOS 15. There’s no way to create manual “categories” of notifications that are delivered to specific scheduled summaries; your summary settings don’t sync across devices either, so you’ll have to recreate summaries separately on the iPhone and iPad if you use the same apps on both platforms. Plus, I find the overall design of the summaries bland and boring; I would have liked to see Apple get a little more creative here, perhaps adding the ability to expand the summary into a larger summary card rather than a basic stack of notifications.

There’s value to the idea behind the notification summary: letting users choose between immediate and scheduled delivery is a good first step to create separate “tracks” of notifications that don’t necessarily interrupt them. However, this first implementation of the summary doesn’t do anything to fundamentally change how notifications are grouped on iOS.

As a result, I expect most people will use this feature as a stopgap measure to hide certain notifications without disabling them completely. The summary could be a lot more than a list of semi-hidden notifications in the future; a good way to achieve that would be to support the same degree of control, personalization, and integrations seen in Focus. Right now, the notification summary feels like an uninspired feature and a problem in search of a solution.

iPadOS

The iPad story in iPadOS 15 is one of consistency and embracing the platform’s modular nature.

With iPadOS 15, Apple is creating a stronger continuum for Mac Catalyst apps by making key multitasking interactions more consistent with macOS and is bringing the widget-laden Home Screen experience from iOS 14 to iPad. At the same time, the company is now keenly aware of the iPad’s role as a modular computer, and they’ve fully embraced keyboard navigation and shortcuts as means to control the entire OS. Amidst all this, iPadOS 15 drastically simplifies multitasking operations for less tech-savvy users, surfacing options such as Split View and Slide Over while tying them to the Home Screen as a universal app launcher.

For these reasons, iPadOS 15 reveals a two-pronged approach: a small revolution for novice users who never fully understood the iPad’s old drag and drop multitasking; and a variety of smaller, yet important, additions for power users combined with a big focus on keyboard control. Let’s take a look at how well this strategy can scale.

Multitasking

Apple’s refreshed approach to multitasking in iPadOS 15 starts with a simple button at the top of the screen.

Click this button…

…to get the new multitasking menu in iPadOS 15.

Called the multitasking menu, this button is a familiar ellipsis that, when clicked, reveals multitasking icons for full-screen, Split View, and Slide Over. The multitasking menu replaces the old ‘pulling indicator’ from iPadOS 14, and it’s now an interactive element that serves as an intuitive control system to switch the state of the active app window. The multitasking menu is always displayed at the top of a window (regardless of whether it’s in full-screen, Split View, or Slide Over), and it lets you manipulate multitasking with two clicks. At a high level, that’s all there is to it.

Using the new multitasking menu in iPadOS 15.

It doesn’t take long when using iPadOS 15 to realize this is a much easier, user-friendly way to expose multitasking controls and let people discover them. As I’ve written on several occasions before, the iPad’s former multitasking system was designed in the iOS 11 era, which predated iPads with USB-C ports, the Magic Keyboard, and system-wide pointer; it was designed for a platform that was only meant to be operated via touch.

The new multitasking menu is both a reflection of how iPadOS has evolved over the years and an indictment of iOS 11’s solution, which required hidden drag and drop gestures and was undiscoverable by people who don’t read reviews like this one. iPadOS 15’s multitasking represents the beauty of a button: you see it because it’s always there, you click it, and it does what you expect.

The multitasking menu reflects the current state of the selected window, whether it’s open in full screen, Split View, or Slide Over.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a modern Apple multitasking control if it also didn’t serve double duties via hidden gestures and other implementation details. For starters, the multitasking button also acts as an active app indicator while in Split View or Slide Over to show you which of the app displayed onscreen is the active one receiving keyboard input. As you can see in the screenshot below, the active app on the left gets an enclosed button with darker dots compared to the inactive one on the right:

Two shades of gray.

If you’re thinking, “Apple tried its hand at this design before, and it’s not obvious enough which of the two apps is the active one” – hey, you’re not alone. The company adopted a similar tactic with the pulling indicator in iPadOS 13, and while it’s true that the shape around the ellipsis button is more visually prominent than the pulling indicator of olde, I still think it’s not clear or accessible enough. I wish the company considered a bigger shape or, for users who want it, the use of colors to differentiate between apps. Maybe next year.7

Additionally, you can use the multitasking button as a grabber to either create a new Split View or replace one of the two apps in Split View. If you’re using an app in full-screen mode, you can grab the button and swipe it down to temporarily dock the app to a side of the screen and pick a second one from the Home Screen; alternatively, you can swipe it down while using an app in Split View to replace the active app with another one from the Home Screen.

You can use the multitasking menu to grab windows and create new Split Views.

In case you’re wondering: yes, your swiping direction changes which side of the screen the app will latch onto. Swipe the button down and to the left, for instance, and the window will hide on the left side of the screen.

This, I believe, is the most important structural change to iPadOS multitasking from an interaction perspective.

In iPadOS 14, if you wanted to create a new Split View or replace one of the two apps in Split View, you were forced to use drag and drop from either Spotlight search or the dock. That limitation often resulted in people filling their docks to the brim with folders full of app icons because it was the easiest way to bring apps into Split View or Slide Over. You can still do this if you want in iPadOS 15 (more on this below), but the new default behavior is a much more obvious one. When you want to pick another app, you’re temporarily returned to the place where you already organize your app icons: the Home Screen. Click the icon of the app you want to use in Split View, and that’s it.

When you tile a window to one side of the screen, iPadOS suggests what you can do to create a Split View.

The Home Screen even tells you if you click an icon for an app that doesn’t support Split View.

Using the Home Screen as an app launcher for multitasking was floated as an idea by Apple commentators and iPad users before, and I’m glad Apple listened. The new system doesn’t require using drag and drop, doesn’t come with a standalone app picker, and it just works with the basic app launcher everyone is already using. Even better, because Home Screen widgets also launch apps, you can tap on a widget while in this mode and you’ll still create a Split View with the app opened via the widget.

As I suggested above, you can still operate multitasking the old-fashioned way using drag and drop gestures if you want. The multitasking menu in iPadOS 15 hasn’t taken anything away from existing gestures to drag app icons around and turn them into Split View or Slide Over windows; in fact, drag and drop is (unfortunately) still required to take an app from Spotlight search results and put it in either of those multitasking states.

Making drag and drop an optional, secondary mode for multitasking power users was the right thing to do: the new default mode doesn’t break muscle memory for people like me, and I still find myself occasionally dragging icons from the dock because I find it faster and I’m used to it. It feels like this interaction should have always been an optional one; I’m glad it is now.

I’m a fan of the new multitasking menu: it does a fantastic job at making Split View and Slide Over discoverable by inviting users to click on it; pairing it with the Home Screen as an app launcher to modify multitasking spaces makes sense as a way to rid iPadOS of its drag and drop-only limitations. I only have a few reservations about the design of the active app state design and the icons displayed in the multitasking menu; they’re shown without labels, and I have to wonder if some people will get confused by the similarities between the Split View and Slide Over glyphs.

As we’ve seen, the multitasking menu fills a variety of roles in iPadOS 15 already, but there’s one more that deserves a closer look: you can use the button to bring up the all-new Shelf for multi-window apps.

The Shelf

I know what you’re thinking: you hear “Shelf”, and your mind goes to the myriad jokes on Connected, the third-party shelf apps we’ve covered on MacStories, and the long-lost dream of a system-wide clipboard manager for iPad. I’m here to tell you that the Shelf is real in iPadOS 15…only it’s not exactly what I wished it could be for the past few years.

What I’m saying is: forget everything you think you know about a “shelf” feature for iPadOS based on old concepts we discussed on MacStories and Connected. The Shelf is a new multi-window functionality of iPadOS 15 that lets you easily switch between multiple windows from the same app. The Shelf is displayed as – how do I put this – a shelf of open windows at the bottom of an app, and it also comes with a + button to create a new window.

Long live the new, official Shelf for iPadOS 15.

From a functional standpoint, there really isn’t much to say about the Shelf: you can click windows to switch between them, create new ones, or alternatively pick up a window and drag it around to open it in full-screen, Split View, or Slide Over via the usual drag and drop interactions.

Using the Shelf in iPadOS 15.

What makes the Shelf interesting is its activation method, its timing, and what it could mean for the future of iPad productivity.

In iPadOS 15, the Shelf is automatically displayed as soon as you open an app that has multiple windows open. If you don’t click any windows, the Shelf automatically disappears after a couple seconds or as soon as you interact with the app (either by touching something or scrolling).

The Shelf goes away automatically when you start interacting with an app.

There are two additional ways to invoke the Shelf in iPadOS 15: there’s a new Globe + ↓ keyboard shortcut to activate it (more on this in Keyboard Shortcuts and Navigation); and if you click the multitasking menu in an app that has multiple windows open already, the Shelf will be displayed at the bottom of the screen.

It took me a while to grasp the utility of the Shelf and why Apple chose to show it automatically, but I get it now: the Shelf was not only designed to simplify moving between windows, but to encourage iPad users to use multi-window more and take their multitasking to the next level.

The Shelf was designed to encourage iPad users to use multi-window more.

Switching between multiple windows from the same app was quite tedious in iPadOS 14: you either had to remember a keyboard shortcut, find them in the app switcher, or long-press an app’s icon in the dock, then click ‘Show All Windows’. These methods are still available (in fact, the old multi-window UI shown in the app picker is unchanged), but because the Shelf is proactively shown to you upon loading an app with multiple windows open, it reduces the friction required to switch between them. As a result, you’re more inclined to taking advantage of multi-window since it’s now easier to manage it. This also makes you appreciate modern iPadOS apps more and, hopefully, will also convince other developers to support multi-window in their apps. The Shelf creates a new kind of virtuous cycle for multi-window in iPadOS that was sorely missing from iPadOS 14.

The Shelf vs. In-App Exposé

Technically, the Shelf replaces the old in-app Exposé view that was displayed when you dropped the icon of an app that had multiple windows. You may remember this odd design Apple rolled out in iPadOS 13:

In iPadOS 14, you had to pick a window before you could use an app you just dropped into Split View.

In iPadOS 15, the last active window is shown by default, but the Shelf is also displayed if you want to switch windows quickly.

There’s a substantial difference between the old window picker and the Shelf: the iPadOS 13 design forced you to pick a window after dropping an icon, thus getting in the way of your work and slowing you down; the Shelf defaults to the last-used window and is displayed as a transient element at the bottom of the screen. I find this overall open-app-switch-windows flow much faster than iPadOS 13.

In my experience over the past three months, the most noticeable impact of the Shelf on my iPad workflow has been the ability to cycle between windows in the same space. For instance, if I’m working with a Split View space, replace the app on the left, and the new app I drop in has multiple windows open, the Shelf lets me instantly switch between them while keeping that app on the left side:

You can use the Shelf to cycle between windows for the active app.

The convenience of the Shelf has worked for me; I appreciate how windows of different sizes are displayed in the Shelf, and I’m using multi-window a lot more because I no longer feel penalized by the system for doing so. Seeing the Shelf pop up when I open an app with multiple windows open doesn’t bother me: the Shelf helps me remember about those windows, which is why I find this feature an ideal fit for the iPad’s current multitasking system. To quote what Apple’s Sebastien Marineau-Mes said earlier this year, the Shelf is one of those features that “[make] the spatial model more explicit in the experience” of using iPadOS 15.

You can invoke the Shelf anywhere, including inside Slide Over windows.

That said, there are a couple of things I wish had been better implemented with the Shelf: as with Split View, I’d like the active window state to be more clear – the thumbnail of the active window is slightly dimmed, and I don’t think that’s enough to recognize it at a glance. Additionally, the Shelf doesn’t have a button to reopen a recently closed window, which was available in the older in-app window picker UI. Hopefully, this feature will be restored in a future update to iPadOS 15.

Center Windows

iPadOS 15 comes with a new type of window that can be opened by apps: prominent-style windows, also referred to as ‘center windows’. As the name suggests, these are modal windows that open in the center of the screen as, effectively, popups when you click a new ‘Open in New Window’ button or perform a particular gesture.

Center windows are meant to be temporary and focused on a particular activity or piece of content; they’re integrated with the Shelf, and they can be turned into “regular” windows (full-screen, Split View, or Slide Over) via the multitasking menu. By default, Apple’s Mail, Notes, and Messages apps use center windows to open individual messages and notes in new prominent windows now.

A center window in Notes.

A center window in Mail.

With the addition of a new window type, Apple is also changing how iPadOS opens new windows by default. Developers of iPad apps can add a button to context menus in iPadOS 15 to let users create new windows when clicking particular UI elements. This context menu button defaults to the prominent style – meaning, most apps will likely open center windows when you click the new ‘Open in New Window’ button of their context menus.

However, developers can override this behavior and fall back to the ‘standard’ window mode, which opens a new window from the same app in Split View. An example of this is the updated Safari for iPad, which offers a new ‘Open in Split View’ button when you right-click a link on a webpage. It would have been interesting to see Safari implement center windows for link previews.

The standard ‘Open in New Window’ button can open center windows in iPadOS 15.

However, developers can override the button’s behavior, just like Safari does.

Since modern Apple likes to support multiple input methods for all new iPadOS functionalities, there’s also a touch-first way to open center windows: a pinch-open gesture. In Notes, Mail, and Messages, you can now pinch to open notes and messages in center windows without invoking a context menu. It’s very easy to do:

In compatible apps, you can pinch-open items to view them with prominent windows.

As I also noted above, center windows are integrated with the iPadOS 15 multitasking menu: they have a special glyph on the right side of the icon tray (once again: I’m not sure how descriptive this glyph is and how many people will confuse it with full-screen) and, at any point, you can tap the other icons to “promote” a center window to a Split View, Slide Over, or full-screen one. If you choose to keep center windows unchanged, they will not show up in the global app switcher, but they’ll be able to live (along with other center or regular windows) in an app’s Shelf.

From the left, you can see two center windows and two regular Mail windows in the Shelf.

You can also add center windows to the Shelf by dragging down the multitasking menu or by clicking/tapping outside of a center window.

You can throw center windows into the Shelf as well as tap anywhere to dismiss them.

However, keep in mind that center windows come up in the middle of the screen when you’re using two apps in Split View, which may make it challenging to use them in specific multitasking scenarios:

Center windows take over Split View.

It took me a couple weeks to understand center windows – initially, I thought they were just a gimmicky way to open content from apps in popup windows. I was wrong: center windows provide a useful solution for all those times when you want to quickly preview something without a) losing the context of what you’re doing in an app and b) adding an additional layer of Split View/Slide Over complexity to your workspace. Center windows let you open something, set it aside temporarily, get back to it, and close it when you’re done with a seamless workflow that is easier to operate than Split View.

I believe that Apple’s winning design choice here is the integration between center windows and the Shelf. Let me give you an example.

I often have to go through a bunch of support emails I receive from Club MacStories members. Before iPadOS 15, I would have to sit down in front of Apple Mail, open the support mailbox, and process those messages one after the other. With iPadOS 15, the same workflow is more streamlined because I can open all messages as standalone center windows, swipe them down into the Shelf, then switch between them with one click. If I’m composing a reply but then decide to look up something else in another message, I can hit Globe + ↓ to open the Shelf and select a different window without losing my place or having to switch to a different app space altogether.8 The whole process is fast, well-integrated with touch and keyboard, and, quite frankly, a boon to iPad productivity.

For these reasons, I think center windows should be considered by developers of document-based, note-taking, and research-intensive apps. The ability to effortlessly open different pieces of content as standalone windows that can be re-summoned at any point is a notable improvement to the average iPad workflow. I expect the adoption of center windows to be widespread among productivity apps for iPad this year; if not, their developers should really check out Apple’s documentation here.

App Switcher

Apple has brought a few additions to the app switcher for the first time in years with iPadOS 15, and I’m happy with the changes I’ve seen so far.

After requesting this feature for years, I got my wish in 2021: in the iPadOS 15 app switcher, you can combine app windows into Split Views or turn existing Split Views back into separate full-screen apps. As I always figured would be the case, you can do this with drag and drop by simply grabbing an app window and placing it somewhere else in the app switcher:

You can now combine windows in the app switcher.

The opposite interaction is also possible: for the first time, you can quit individual apps in a Split View by dragging the window you want to close upwards:

You can now swipe up on individual apps in Split Views displayed in the app switcher to close them.

Alas, it’s still not possible to create “favorite” or “saved” workspaces and give them a unique name, but I’m optimistic we’ll get there. The ability to directly manipulate windows from the app switcher makes sense given their large thumbnails, and it works just as well as I hoped.

The other big change to the app switcher in iPadOS 15 is the inclusion of Slide Over windows on the rightmost side of the gallery. When you open the app switcher, if you have any apps in Slide Over, you’ll see the most recently used one peak through from the right. Swipe left, and you’ll expand the app switcher to show all available Slide Over windows from latest to oldest.

You can now see all Slide Over apps in the app switcher.

Slide Over windows have long been too hidden in iPadOS, but I still believe they have a purpose as a quick way to do something in another app without committing to creating a Split View or switching to a different full-screen window. I regularly use apps such as 1Password, iMessage, and Twitter in Slide Over, and I’m glad to see this mode visually represented in the app switcher too. This way, you’ll be able to turn Slide Over windows into Split Views using drag and drop in the app switcher; ideally, other users will find this an easier way to manage them compared to the (very hidden) swipe-up gesture to open the Slide Over-specific switcher from iPadOS 13.

With the inclusion of Slide Over, the iPadOS 15 app switcher spans the full breadth of window types and workspaces that can be created on iPad. The final addition in this regard is a new multi-window icon displayed next to apps that have multiple windows open across the system. If you see a symbol with two little squares next to a window’s name, that means the associated app has multiple windows open. Even better, you can click that button to instantly filter the app switcher to an app-specific Exposé view that only shows you windows for that app:

Click this button in the app switcher…

…and you’ll see all windows for the selected app.

Again, I’m happy Apple listened here: this feature was technically available before, but we often complained that it was only possible to filter app windows in the switcher if you clicked that app’s icon in the dock. Now, the multi-window state is indicated in the app switcher at all times.

Given the welcome improvements we’ve seen in the app switcher with iPadOS 15, this is where I’m contractually obligated to keep mentioning other features I’d like to see added to the switcher, so they come true in the future.9

I continue to believe it’d be useful to save “presets” of specific windows in Split View, give them a custom name, and recreate them at any time; Apple got halfway there with Shortcuts (as we’ll see later in New Actions), but the app doesn’t let you open specific windows from an app. Additionally, I’d like to be able to search windows by title in the app switcher, and it should be possible to see all center windows from an app as well (right now, they’re only displayed in the Shelf). You’re welcome, Apple.

Keyboard Shortcuts and Navigation

For power users, the most important change to iPadOS 15 isn’t the multitasking menu, the Shelf, or the addition of center windows: it’s the complete revamp of keyboard shortcuts and navigation.

With iPadOS 15’s stack of keyboard technologies, Apple is sending a clear signal: the company is now comfortable with the idea of an iPad as a modular machine; they want to make it easy for developers to make mature iPad apps that can evolve into Mac versions later, and for advanced users to be more efficient when working with an external keyboard. By and large, the effort is a resounding success that leaves very little else to be desired.

Keyboard Shortcuts

It all starts with iPadOS 15’s brand new look for the keyboard shortcuts menu: when you hold down the ⌘ key to view available keyboard shortcuts in an app, you’ll no longer see the paginated, translucent cheat sheet in the middle of the screen; instead, you’ll get a full-blown menu at the bottom of the screen that organizes different commands by category, allowing you to scroll through dozens of commands or click through specific sections. It’s fantastic, and it’s the kind of feature you’re going to learn to love in just a few days after updating to iPadOS 15.

The old keyboard shortcut menu in iPadOS 14.

The new, more powerful keyboard shortcut menu in iPadOS 15.

When I first saw the new keyboard shortcuts menu, it reminded me of another UI element with a similar shape that used to be displayed at the bottom on iPad: the much-maligned paginated Control Center in iOS 10. While the similarities are there, iPadOS 15’s shortcuts menu looks the way it does for another reason: it has to be consistent with the macOS menu bar, especially for developers looking to port their iPad apps to the Mac with Catalyst, which is one of the areas Apple is clearly prioritizing with their iPadOS updates this year. Allow me to explain.

With iPadOS 15, Apple has restructured the ‘main menu’ system available for keyboard shortcuts in Mac Catalyst apps to use categories of commands on iPad too. This approach is consistent with the Mac, so in apps that ship dual iPad-Mac versions (such as Timery, MusicHarbor, or Craft), you’ll now see the familiar File-Edit-View menu on iPad as well, thanks to iPadOS 15.

There are some design and implementation differences between the menu bar on Mac and keyboard shortcuts menu on iPad, of course: on macOS, the menu bar supports nested menus and displays unavailable commands with a grayed-out color; in iPadOS 15, Apple has flattened navigation so that submenus aren’t shown in the menu, and everything is a top-level command. Additionally, unavailable commands are hidden by default on iPad. Besides these small differences, though, the keyboard shortcuts menu for iPadOS 15 is, effectively, Apple’s modern take on the menu bar.

And that, I think, is the key aspect to understand here. As we’ve seen over the past few years, whenever Apple brings a long-standing feature from the Mac to iPad, they like to rejuvenate and modernize it with design choices and interactions that make more sense for the modern era. The keyboard shortcuts menu is no different: while comparable in spirit and core concept, it adds its own flair to the classic menu bar.

For starters, the keyboard shortcuts menu is not a fixed element onscreen but can be contextually invoked by holding down ⌘ in any app; additionally, you can scroll sections of commands to see their associated keyboard shortcuts, and there’s a search button you can press to search for a command by name if you don’t remember whether it exists or how to trigger it. You can tap or click commands to execute them, and if you just start typing when the shortcuts menu comes up, you can instantly filter it by name to find any command in it. The latter is my favorite detail of the shortcuts menu since it lets me quickly find commands by guessing or partially remembering their name.

You can filter keyboard commands by name if you just start typing.

The net result of the refreshed keyboard shortcuts menu in iPadOS 15 is that it’s both more intuitive and powerful than before. And I think this is the case because Apple took the fundamentals of an idea from the Mac and reshaped it for iPad and its multiplicity of input methods.

Developers can, of course, customize the keyboard shortcuts menu with their own categories and commands, which will carry over to Mac Catalyst apps as well. This is done using the UIMenuBuilder API, which lets developers design a single main menu system for keyboard shortcuts that seamlessly translates from iPad to Mac, and vice versa. Good third-party examples of this approach are MusicHarbor and Timery, which have reorganized their keyboard shortcuts in iPadOS 15 around categories. As a result, commands are easier to find, and developers are encouraged to add even richer support for keyboard shortcuts since the experience of learning them isn’t terrible anymore:

Timery’s keyboard shortcuts in iPadOS 14.

Timery in iPadOS 15. Is this what they call a glow up?

While I expect third-party developers – especially those who make Mac Catalyst apps – to fully embrace this new system, it’s nice to see Apple has done the work for their built-in apps too. My favorite examples are Safari and Mail, which now offer a slimmed-down version of their Mac versions’ menu bar with a selection of shortcuts organized by category in iPadOS 15:

Safari’s new keyboard menu in iPadOS 15.

The Globe Key and Global Commands

So far, I’ve only mentioned holding down the ⌘ key to discover keyboard shortcuts in apps using the new shortcuts menu of iPadOS 15. But the truth is, Apple has rolled out a second global modifier key in iPadOS 15 that can be held down to discover, well, global system shortcuts: the Globe key.

Unless you’re a bilingual iPad user, there’s a good chance you’ve often wondered what the Globe key on Apple’s Smart and Magic keyboards stood for. Sure, you could use the Globe key to toggle between the English and Emoji keyboards, but ever since Apple added the ⌘⌃Space shortcut to invoke the emoji popover, it’s likely you stopped using the Globe key trick altogether.

For international and bilingual users like myself, the Globe key has long been an essential complement to the iPhone and iPad keyboard experience, allowing us to quickly toggle between different keyboards. Over the past few years, however, Apple has been rolling out the ability to type in multiple languages using a single keyboard, progressively demoting the role once played by the Globe key. In the last two years, I’ve only manually cycled between international keyboards by mistake.

All of this to say: the Globe key isn’t nearly as important as it used to be, so Apple repurposed it in iPadOS 15 to show you global, system-wide commands for multitasking, the Home Screen, and more. Hold down the Globe key anywhere – even inside apps – and you’ll see a brand new list of system shortcuts for iPad:

Global keyboard commands in iPadOS 15.

No Globe Key On Your Keyboard?

If you use a third-party hardware keyboard that doesn’t have a Globe key, you can always remap another one in Settings ⇾ General ⇾ Keyboard ⇾ Hardware Keyboard ⇾ Modifier Keys. And while the keyboard shortcuts menu can be dismissed by holding the Globe key again or clicking outside of it, you can also press the ⌘. shortcut (which is the equivalent of an Escape button on iPadOS) to instantly close it.

Of course, the significance of the Globe key is only one half of the story here: the juicy part is that Apple has added a selection of new keyboard shortcuts to operate Split View, Slide Over, and other areas of iPad multitasking from the keyboard.

This was one of my long-standing criticisms in all iPad and iPadOS reviews from the past few years: there was a disconnect between the iPad’s modular nature and the fact that multitasking was a touch-only affair that couldn’t be controlled from a keyboard at all. iPadOS 15 fixes this:

Split View can now be entirely managed from the keyboard:

You can cycle between apps in Split View with Globe + `;

You can turn a Split View app into a full-screen window with Globe + F;

Using Globe + ⌃ + ←/→, you can tile a full-screen window to the left or right side of the screen, pick a secondary app from Spotlight, and create a new Split View directly from the keyboard;

If you have a Split View already open, the same command to tile windows to either side of the screen swaps their onscreen placement;

If you want to replace one of the two apps in a Split View, you can use the Globe + ⌃ + ↓ command;

You can show and hide Slide Over, as well as move it to either side of the screen, without using touch input at all:

Globe + \ to toggle Slide Over;

⌥ Globe + ←/→ to move Slide Over;

There are new shortcuts to show the app switcher and move between apps (previously, these actions required multitouch gestures);

You can now invoke Siri, Control Center, and Notification Center with dedicated, Globe-based shortcuts.

It takes a while to learn all the potential permutations of global shortcuts and how to control iPad multitasking with it, but once you do, there’s no going back. iPadOS 15 gives us the deep, system-wide keyboard integration for multitasking we’ve been requesting for years now; while I still wish modifying Split Views via Spotlight was easier10, by and large, iPadOS 15’s global shortcuts feel like the culmination of Apple’s work on modularity. It’s nice to finally check these off my wish list.

Keyboard Navigation

Apple’s work on keyboard integration in iPadOS 15 extends beyond keyboard shortcuts to include another long-requested functionality: keyboard-based navigation across the iPadOS UI.

The idea is simple enough: in any app, you can now press the Tab key to select a specific part of the interface from the keyboard, select items in that region using the arrow keys, or continue to press Tab to select other parts of the interface that support keyboard navigation. You can then press Return to activate specific features from the keyboard, get access to keyboard shortcuts for selected items onscreen, and, generally speaking, navigate apps without ever lifting a finger off the keyboard.

The system is very intuitive: once you’ve tried it, it doesn’t require much of an explanation since the idea of keyboard navigation was explored by Apple on other platforms and implemented by some third-party developers in their apps years ago.

If the idea of highlighting parts of the iPadOS UI and selecting them without touch input sounds familiar, it’s because Apple has brought the Focus selection system, originally launched with tvOS in 2017, to iPadOS 15. Just like on tvOS, the Focus system lets you highlight onscreen UI elements using an indirect input method – the Siri Remote on Apple TV and, now, the keyboard on iPad. By default, Apple has enabled keyboard navigation in text fields, text views, and native sidebars; developers can choose to opt-in for other parts of their apps comprised of collection views, table views, and custom views.

I’ll be honest: I’m a trackpad and pointer user myself; I still prefer to select and click UI elements onscreen, so I haven’t used keyboard navigation much. It’s not for me. At the same time though, I think there are some cool demos for keyboard navigation in iPadOS 15, and I want to mention them.

The first place you can test keyboard navigation in iPadOS 15 is the Home Screen. Hit the Tab key, and you’ll notice that the first icon or widget in the top left corner gets selected with the familiar Focus-style highlight around it. At this point, you can select different items on the Home Screen with the arrow keys, or you can press Return to open the selected app or widget.

You can now launch apps with the keyboard by selecting icons or widgets from the Home Screen.

Then there’s the Shelf. In an app with multiple windows open, hit Globe + ↓ to view the Shelf, press Tab to highlight it, and you can then select windows with the arrow keys and click Return to open one:

The Shelf can also be controlled from the keyboard.

Apple’s support for keyboard navigation is fairly extensive in built-in apps too. In Mail, you can navigate between mailboxes, switch to the search bar, or highlight messages in a mailbox just by switching between these Focus groups with the Tab key. In Photos, you can navigate sections in the sidebar, switch to selecting items in the grid, then hit ⌘C to instantly copy a selected item to the clipboard without ever using the share sheet:

I did all this from the keyboard.

The list of examples goes on, and Apple has done a pretty good job at enabling keyboard navigation throughout several areas of the OS. It’ll be interesting to see how many third-party developers will take advantage of this new technology; my guess is that, as long as their apps use native components such as collection views and sidebars, developers of productivity apps will support navigation as a complement to their keyboard shortcuts experience. Like I said above, I don’t plan on using this often, but I’ve long believed the Focus engine would make sense on iPad too, so I’m glad Apple brought it to iPadOS 15.

Home Screen

The Home Screen upgrade in iPadOS 15 is simultaneously one of the biggest improvements to iPad this year and the most obvious change we were all expecting after iOS 14.

Let’s cut right to the chase here: you can now place widgets on the iPad Home Screen and intermix them with app icons. There are no technical improvements to widgets this year – they still do not support inline interactions, save for a few Apple widgets that use private APIs – and most iPad widgets you’ll see are the same ones you could put in the Today column before. The only things that are really changing this year are the Home Screen’s grid layout and the addition of a new XL widget size on iPad.

Let’s start with the latter. As we saw in the Home Screen and Widgets chapter, a selection of Apple apps, including Calendar, Contacts, and Files, now come with an extra-large widget option for iPad that lets you see a lot of content at once directly on the Home Screen. A good way to think about the XL widget is the following: it’s equivalent in size to two large widgets, four medium widgets, or eight small widgets. On a 12.9” iPad Pro, you can fit up to two XL widgets on the same page in landscape mode.

New XL widgets on the iPadOS 15 Home Screen.

Home Screen widgets are supported on all iPad models, which means the diminutive iPad mini gets access to them as well. On Apple’s smallest tablet, I find small and medium widgets very hard to visually parse at a glance, and I think Large and XL widgets are better optimized for that kind of portable experience.

Big widgets, small iPad.

Some people may find them too big, but I’m a fan of XL widgets. I’ve been using the XL Calendar widget on my Home Screen since June; I find it a great way to keep an eye on my schedule for the week without opening the full Calendar app, and I appreciate how the widget supports different tap targets for events, which you can open in the app by clicking them. I also find the configurable XL Files widget an interesting idea to simulate having a “desktop” on your iPad Home Screen.

You can now drag items out of the Files widget on the Home Screen.

Of course, I’ve also seen some fascinating XL widget implementations by third-party developers. Timery, the excellent time-tracking app by Joe Hribar, is adding an XL widget for saved timers as well as another one that acts as a dashboard for your tracked time. I find the second one especially useful to get a bird’s eye view of my current timer plus how much time I’ve spent on specific projects over the past week.

Timery’s new XL widgets.

WidgetPod, a popular third-party Now Playing widget by Aditya Rajveer (the creator of Marvis Pro), has also added an XL widget for iPad that brings large playback controls to the Home Screen, something Apple itself didn’t do for Music:

WidgetPod (top) brings music playback controls to the Home Screen with a new XL widget.

Fantastical, the powerful calendar and reminder client by Flexibits, is adding a terrific XL widget that combines a monthly calendar with your list of events and tasks, which I’ve immediately put on my first Home Screen:

Fantastical’s new XL widget.

Lire, a highly customizable RSS reader we’ve covered on MacStories before, is also adding an XL widget you can personalize with a variety of filters to show different sets of articles:

Lire’s new XL widget.

Going forward, I expect to see even more interesting variations on the XL widget theme by third-party developers. Unfortunately, however, they’ll have to continue dealing with the limitations of Apple’s WidgetKit framework, which doesn’t support native interactions on the Home Screen still.

I thought that, in bringing widgets to the iPad Home Screen, Apple might consider supporting advanced hover effects for the pointer or perhaps keyboard input; instead, all we got are the same widgets from last year, plus a new size, with the same technical limitations of iOS 14. This is not to say that this feature is bad; it’s just…old at this point. I’m glad we have widgets on the iPad Home Screen; I just wish Apple had something more exciting in store for them by now.

If anything, to add widgets to the iPad Home Screen, Apple actually took something away this year: an entire row of icons. On a 12.9” iPad Pro running iPadOS 14, you could set up a 6x5 grid of icons for a total of 30 icons displayed in a dense grid that never reflowed with device orientation; even if you kept the widget column pinned to the left side of the Home Screen, the icon grid remained fixed at 6x5.

The icon grid on iPadOS 14.

In iPadOS 15, the icon grid is set by default at 6x5 as well in either orientation:

The icon grid on iPadOS 15, without widgets.

As soon as you add a single widget to the Home Screen, though, the grid becomes 6x4 in landscape or 4x6 in portrait, for a total of 24 icons that reflow depending on how you rotate your iPad.

Add a single widget, and the icon grid loses an entire row in iPadOS 15.

Large App Icons

In iPadOS 15, you’ll also find an option in Settings ⇾ Home Screen & Dock to use large app icons.

Large icons on the Home Screen.

With large app icons enabled, you’ll still be able to place widgets anywhere, but icons will be bigger. The same structure of the Home Screen without large icons applies here: the grid is 6x5 without widgets, and it turns to 6x4 (in landscape) as soon as you add a widget.

If you’re the kind of iPad user who cares about precise icon placement and fitting as many apps on a single screen as possible, I understand you’re feeling frustrated by the changes to the iPadOS 15 Home Screen.

Here’s my guess on why this happened: to maintain compatibility with iPadOS 14 widgets and avoid building a freeform Home Screen that doesn’t have a grid structure, Apple preferred to spread out app icons further and return to a non-dense grid that allows for both widgets and icons at the same time. Could Apple have come up with an alternative design for this? Probably, and it would have involved fitting more than four icons in the space taken up by a large widget.

If my theory is correct, I understand the trade-offs Apple had to accept for this design, and, on balance, I’d still take widgets on the Home Screen over the iPadOS 14 widget column. However, I also wish Apple gave power users an optional setting to make the Home Screen denser and fit even more icons and widgets onscreen. My hope is that, by this time next year, we’ll be talking about the great changes to widget interactivity and denser Home Screen grid of iPadOS 16. We can dream.

Dock and App Library

In another entirely unsurprising move, Apple has brought the App Library, introduced with iOS 14 last year, to the iPad with iPadOS 15.

The App Library on iPad.

There are no major functional or visual changes to the App Library this year; if you’re not familiar with this feature, I recommend revisiting this section from the iOS 14 review last year. There are only a couple of differences between the App Library for iPhone and iPad: on iPad, the App Library is also shown as a special icon in the dock, and there’s a system-wide keyboard shortcut to bring it up at any time. When you invoke the App Library, it comes up with a nice animation from the dock, which is one of my favorite visual touches in iPadOS this year:

The App Library’s delightful animation on iPad.

Because the App Library is also available on iPad via a global hotkey and by scrolling after the last page of the Home Screen (like on iPhone), you can disable its dock icon in Settings ⇾ Home Screen & Dock if you don’t want it. And that’s about it, really, for the App Library on iPad.

As I explained last year, I don’t think I’m the target user for the App Library; I like to carefully organize my Home Screens with icons and widgets; on iPad, I have an even faster way to find apps and launch them thanks to system-wide Spotlight access from the keyboard. I don’t care about the App Library’s automatic categorization of apps; I don’t think it’s that smart, and I’ve never found myself congratulating iOS 14 over the past year because it made me think of an app I wanted to use via the App Library. Like most of Apple’s “intelligent” recommendations for iOS, the App Library feels kind of stale and not that personalized.

There are two very specific things I like about the App Library, which is why I’m ultimately glad it arrived on iPad, even if a year late: the automatic categories for TestFlight apps and Apple Arcade games, which make it easier to find those kinds of apps installed on my devices; and the ability to install new apps directly in the App Library without placing their icons on the Home Screen. So I guess what I’m saying is, I like the App Library as a passive filter to stash apps away, and I very rarely seek it out to browse its automatic categories. If you do, then you should be happy you can now do it from iPad too.

In addition to displaying an App Library icon, the dock in iPadOS 15 can also accommodate two additional app icons. On a 12.9” iPad Pro running iPadOS 15, for instance, you can place up to 17 icons in the dock compared to the 15 icons of iPadOS 14.

The dock in iPadOS 14.

The dock in iPadOS 15.

If I had to guess, Apple did this in an effort to mitigate the annoyance caused by the sparse icon grid on the iPadOS 15 Home Screen. I’ve long believed that the dock is, along with Spotlight, the best app launcher on iPadOS; I’m glad to see this change since I can fit useful extra icons in the dock now. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t mind putting up to 20 icons in the dock of a 12.9” iPad Pro.

Other iPadOS Changes

Here are the highlights from other changes worth noting in this year’s iPadOS release.

A new look for the keyboard shortcuts bar. iPadOS 15 introduces a new floating appearance for the keyboard shortcuts bar – the row of QuickType suggestions and additional text editing controls displayed above the keyboard. Specifically, iPadOS changes how the shortcuts bar is displayed when an external keyboard is connected to your iPad: in iPadOS 15, it’s no longer a fixed bar at the bottom of the screen; instead, it’s a floating bar with a smaller footprint, which contains the same options but can also be minimized.

The old keyboard shortcuts bar in iPadOS 14.

The new look for the keyboard shortcuts bar in iPadOS 15.

You can see the new look in action in a variety of Apple apps, including Notes, Mail, and Reminders. All of these apps modify the bar with native ‘input assistant items’ and a tint color, which makes it feel unique to the app you’re using.

The floating appearance forced Apple to come up with a solution for those times when the shortcuts bar gets in the way of UI elements: as of iPadOS 15, you can now minimize the bar into a button by clicking the language label on the left side of the bar and picking the ‘Minimize’ option. Doing this turns the bar into a single button you can move to either side of the screen with drag and drop, kind of like Picture in Picture; at any point, you can tap the button again to show the full shortcuts bar.

Choose the Minimize option…

…and the floating keyboard bar becomes a small button.

I appreciate the inclusion of a minimize option: too often, the shortcuts bar interfered with tab bars and other UI elements from apps, particularly if you were using multiple apps in Split View and one of them switched to a compact layout with tabs at the bottom. With the minimize option, I can now temporarily hide the shortcuts bar until I’m done using an app that doesn’t work well with it.

That said, the new shortcuts bar appearance introduces some new questions for developers, particularly when it comes to dealing with space around it and other UI already displayed at the bottom of the screen. Apple’s own Shortcuts app, which displays a custom ‘variable bar’ above the keyboard, decided not to deal with it all for now.

Yikes.

I’m keen to see if other developers will come up with a nicer design for this.

Select multiple items with the pointer. iPadOS 15 introduces a new multi-selection experience for items displayed in collection views: like on a Mac, you can now use the pointer to click and drag to select multiple items at once. The perfect demo for this is the Files app, where you can now click and drag to select multiple documents at once with a so-called “band selection”.

The new band selection in the Files app.

This behavior works for any existing collection view that supports the two-finger selection system (first added in iOS 13); like on macOS, you can add non-contiguous items to a selection by holding ⇧ or replace selections with the ⌘ key. This selection mechanism was long overdue, and I’m happy to see consistency between Mac and iPad here.

Low power mode. At long last, Apple has brought low power mode to tablets and laptops with iPadOS 15 and macOS Monterey, respectively. There’s really nothing else to say about it: it’s the low power mode you know and (likely) use, and you can now activate it on your iPad to extend your device’s battery life. For more on low power mode, I suggest reading my original coverage from the iOS 9 review.

Customize swipe corners for Apple Pencil. In Settings ⇾ Apple Pencil, you can now choose to customize swipe actions for the left and right corners of the display. Specifically, you can enable/disable taking a screenshot by swiping with the Pencil from the left corner and invoking the Quick Note window when swiping from the right. Alas, you can’t flip the corners assigned to each feature. If you don’t care about these options, just set them to ‘Off’ in Settings and you’ll never see them again.

More RAM available to third-party apps. This isn’t a “feature” of iPadOS 15 as much as it’s an option that creates the potential for more advanced features in third-party apps in the future. Starting with iPadOS 15, developers can request an entitlement for their apps to access a higher amount of memory that exceeds “the default app memory limit on supported devices”. We heard before how advanced apps such as Procreate and LumaFusion ran into the hard 5 GB memory limit; given how the M1 iPad Pro has a whopping 16 GB of RAM, it makes sense for Apple to lift these restrictions and allow third-party apps to implement more memory-intensive features. However, it’s worth keeping in mind that this is an entitlement developers will have to request to Apple. I’m curious to see how many apps will be granted access to this and how frequently.

iPadOS 15: The Details

Let’s round up some of the hidden and interesting details in iPadOS 15:

Show the Shelf for an app inside another app. Here’s an odd Shelf technicality: because it’s only displayed in apps, you can show the Shelf for an app while using a different app by right-clicking its icon in the dock. However, this won’t work on the Home Screen, where you’ll still get the old Exposé UI with large window thumbnails.

I’m using Notes, but I can see the Shelf for Safari because I clicked ‘Show All Windows’ on its dock icon.

You can see an app-specific app switcher by clicking ‘Show All Windows’ on app icons on the Home Screen.

Show the Shelf from an app’s icon in the dock. Even if the app you’re currently using doesn’t have any open windows, you can open its Shelf by clicking its icon in the dock once. This can be useful for those times when you want to create a new window but the app doesn’t have a specific UI element or keyboard shortcut to do that.

A special Shelf button in Mail. At the bottom of Mail’s sidebar on iPad, you’ll find a button that does something special I haven’t seen in any other Apple app for iPad: a Shelf button. Click it, and you’ll invoke the Shelf for Mail so you can see all the open windows you have in the app.

Why does Mail have a Shelf button?

I don’t think there’s an official API for developers to implement the same button in their apps. Why just Mail then? Why not show the same button in, say, Notes or Reminders? The truth is out there, and I’m going to find out.

An easier way to dismiss Slide Over. New in iPadOS 15, you can now dismiss a Slide Over app by quickly swiping it up with three fingers. Doing this will instantly resize Slide Over and tuck it away in the right corner of the screen, where you’ll see a pulling indicator for a few seconds.

Quickly dismissing Slide Over in iPadOS 15.

Hide Slide Over on the left side of the screen. Speaking of Slide Over, for the first time since its introduction, you can now hide the Slide Over window on the left side of the screen. You can do this with a combination of keyboard shortcuts: ⌘⌥← to move the Slide Over window to the left, then ⌘\ to hide it. Alternatively, you can use the three-finger gesture I mentioned above.

It appears iPadOS doesn’t fully like this method, though: when Slide Over is hidden on the left, you’ll see a permanent pull indicator pinned to the left side of the screen that reminds you Slide Over is there and never goes away.

That’s what you see when you hide Slide Over on the left.

A keyboard shortcut to invoke context menus. iPadOS 15 introduces a new keyboard shortcut to invoke context menus without a long press: ⌃Return. You can try this one by selecting a document in Files or an image in Photos and opening the context menu without touching the screen or right-clicking on the trackpad.

Display global keyboard shortcuts without holding down the Globe key. If you want to remember iPadOS 15’s new global keyboard shortcuts without having to wait an extra second by holding down the Globe key, there’s an even faster way to do it: press the new Globe + M keyboard shortcut, and the global shortcuts view will come up instantly.

Access dictation settings in the minimized keyboard shortcuts bar. If you try to dictate something on your iPad, but something isn’t right and want to tweak dictation settings, you can do so by clicking the microphone button in the minimized keyboard shortcuts bar.

Right-click the microphone button to access dictation settings.

Navigate inside apps with a keyboard shortcut. You can now use the ⌘[ keyboard shortcut to “pop” navigation and go back one level in an app’s hierarchy. In Files, for instance, you can use this keyboard shortcut to go back to the previous folder.

Shortcuts

For the first time since the transition from Workflow to Shortcuts in 2018, updates to the iPhone and iPad versions of the app weren’t the priority for Apple in a major release of iOS and iPadOS.

In case you missed it, the big story this year is the long-anticipated arrival of Shortcuts on the Mac with a native app for macOS Monterey. Prioritization of desktop, however, doesn’t mean Apple has foregone improvements to the original Shortcuts app for mobile devices. In fact, the company has turned the need to sketch a vision for the future of automation on macOS into an opportunity to also rethink some of the built-in capabilities of Shortcuts on all platforms.

As a result, development of the Mac app has influenced updates to Shortcuts for iOS and iPadOS 15 with new actions and changes to the editor, which bring consistency to the experience, as well as integrations propelled by the Mac, which have been reimagined, once again, for the unique nature of the iPhone and iPad. There’s no major rethink of Shortcuts for iOS and iPadOS this year; instead, we’re witnessing an expansion of Shortcuts toward more system features and apps – and we have Mac users to thank for it.

Editor Changes

It all starts with the Shortcuts editor, which has undergone a redesign aimed at making actions more compact – thus fitting more onscreen at the same time – while maintaining legibility and clarity.

Building upon the parameter-based design introduced with iOS 13, the Shortcuts editor in iOS 15 features shorter actions, made possible by removing the category label of each action and displaying their icons next to the action’s title and parameters. By eliminating an entire row dedicated to the action icon and category, Apple has reduced the height of actions without sacrificing their descriptions; more actions are also displayed in minimized mode by default, with a chevron that lets you expand the action block to reveal more options. The difference these changes make when looking at the editor is remarkable:

The new, more compact Shortcuts editor.

Where the old Shortcuts app for iPhone could barely fit four actions onscreen at the same time, you can now easily see 6-7 actions in Shortcuts for iOS 15 without having to scroll the page. This is even more apparent on iPad, where the larger screen allows Shortcuts to display a greater number of actions than ever before:

The iPadOS 14 editor (left) could fit 8 action on a 12.9” iPad Pro in portrait mode; the iPadOS 15 one can fit 12.

Along with more compact actions that require less vertical space and revamped iconography for many of them, Apple also revised how ‘Text’ and ‘Comment’ actions are displayed in the editor. Previously, their size was fixed. Even if a Text action only contained a few words, it’d take up as much editor space as a similar action with three sentences inside it. In iOS 15, both Text and Comment actions expand dynamically based on their contents: if they contain a short snippet of text, they’ll be displayed as a small cell within the editor; add a longer string of text, and they’ll grow taller to avoid cutting it off.

Text and Comment actions can now resize depending on content.

I prefer this approach since both actions make better use of the editor, and they play an important role in slimming down shortcuts and fitting more actions onscreen.

On iPad, the sidebar displayed on the right side of the editor has undergone a redesign that, besides visual tweaks, introduces new ways to browse actions and manage a shortcut, which I’ll cover below in Action Library. As I’ll also cover in Shortcuts Settings, Privacy, and Sharing, the sidebar on iPad now lets you switch between actions and shortcut settings without opening a separate window.

The new Shortcuts editor sidebar for iPadOS 15 (right).

In one of the (many) additions for power users this year, Shortcuts for iOS and iPadOS 15 now supports folding for entire blocks of actions. This is especially convenient when you want to scroll long shortcuts that span hundreds of actions: in any block that contains nested actions (such as If, Choose from Menu, Repeat, etc.) you can now press a ‘Collapse’ button that will fold the entire block, saving vertical space in the editor.

Folding in Shortcuts.

As someone who’s created his fair share of shortcuts comprised of hundreds of actions over the years, I’ll let you imagine how happy I am to see block folding (which even persists across app relaunches) come to Shortcuts.

Shortcuts Input

The other big change to the Shortcuts editor in iOS 15 revolves around dealing with input for shortcuts that can receive data from the share sheet, Apple Watch, or, new in iOS 15, what’s displayed onscreen, which I’ll cover later in the New Actions section.

There’s a new look for the input type passed to a shortcut at the top of the editor: rather than a button that can be pressed to open a simple list of input types, the input menu now looks like an action with multiple parameters you can press to configure different aspects of a shortcut’s input.

The list of content types that can be passed to a shortcut has been completely redesigned. Input types are now organized with categories such as media, web, and documents, and they each have an icon that better differentiates them in the list; additionally, there are toggles to enable specific input types, and you can filter the list by name with a search bar. This page feels much more “professional” than the basic design from iOS 14, and I like how similar content types are grouped together.

The redesigned list of input types looks much nicer now.

Furthermore, the ‘Details’ screen that allowed you to configure each shortcut’s settings, import questions, privacy options, and more in iOS 14 has been split into three standalone pages in iOS 15: Details, Privacy, and Setup.

I’m going to cover the Privacy and Setup pages in Shortcuts Settings, Privacy, and Sharing, so let’s focus on the revamped Details screen for now. This is where you can configure how a shortcut can be triggered on iPhone and iPad, whether it should be installed on Apple Watch, and what activation methods you’d like a shortcut to support on macOS Monterey. For iOS and iPadOS, you can now choose between share sheet and what’s onscreen; as we’ll see later, the latter is a new Siri functionality in iOS 15 that is also a standalone action in the updated Shortcuts app to get deeplinks from content displayed onscreen without manually pressing a button in the share sheet.

Unfortunately, it’s still not possible to assign a system-wide hotkey to shortcuts on iPad; I have to believe, however, that whenever Apple gets around to adding that option, it’ll be a new setting on this page. Overall, I’m a fan of the superior organization of shortcut settings and details in iOS 15, which makes the app look and feel like a more mature automation suite for advanced users.

Speaking of power users, Shortcuts for iOS 15 introduced a variety of new ways for dealing with those times when a shortcut that expects input isn’t sent anything.

Previously, this kind of error-checking routine was up to the user to implement, usually by adding a conditional block that said ‘If Shortcut input does not have any value, do this’. In iOS 15, the new shortcut input UI comes with a built-in parameter labeled ‘If there’s no input’ that lets you choose four different actions to perform automatically:

Stop and respond

Ask for

Get clipboard

Continue

Stop and respond.

The first one is an alert you can customize with a message; the third and fourth options are pretty self-explanatory; the second one is interesting. If you choose the ‘Ask for’ option, you can configure a shortcut to prompt you to manually pick one of the following content types in case no input has been passed to a shortcut that requires it:

Files

Text

Date

Photos

Contacts

Email address

Music

Phone number

I like this approach since it makes it much easier to put together shortcuts that dynamically adapt to whether you’ve shared something via the share sheet or not. All of this could be done manually before by constructing a conditional block, picking the right variables, and adding actions to pick content if it was nowhere to be found in the input; with this built-in option, Apple removed the need to assemble those 5-6 actions yourself, making the process easier for novice users and more customizable for experts.

Variable Inspector

Another holdover from the old Workflow app that has been completely redesigned in Shortcuts for iOS 15 is the variable inspector. Available by tapping any variable or magic variable in the editor, this screen used to be displayed as a half-height panel at the bottom of the screen on both iPhone and iPad. It was perfectly functional, but it crammed a lot of features into a compact design, from renaming and clearing variables to changing variable types and details. As with shortcut settings, Apple took the arrival of Shortcuts on the Mac as an opportunity to rethink this panel with a full-page design that makes it easier to navigate and inspect different settings.

The new variable inspector.

On iOS 15, the variable inspector is now a full-screen panel with a standalone field to rename a variable, plus dedicated buttons to clear a variable from a field, reveal the associated action, and hitting Return so you can continue typing next to a variable in a text field. All these options were available before, but they weren’t explained as clearly. The variable type is now a separate button as well, which takes you into a nested page with all the possible types you can coerce a variable into; as before, details you can extract from a variable are displayed at the bottom of the inspector.

Changing types and renaming variables.

On iPad, the inspector has gone from being a panel that filled one third of the screen to a native popover.

The variable inspector in iPadOS 14.

The new variable inspector.

One detail I like: revealing a variable in the editor has a new look in iOS 15. When you hit the ‘Reveal’ button in iOS 14, all it did was slightly dim other actions and highlight the one that generated the variable. In iOS 15, the dimming is a lot more prominent in the editor, and you get a blue bar at the top of the screen, underneath the title bar, that shows you the name of the action along with buttons to close this mode or return to the variable inspector.

Not only is this design easier to understand than before, but the feature itself is also more reliable, allowing for a seamless back and forth between the editor and variable inspector that just wasn’t possible in iOS 14.

Action Library

Not much has changed for the action library in iOS and iPadOS 15. The top section of the library has been redesigned with a more compact look that eschews large colorful icons in favor of smaller, blue-tinted glyphs. I don’t understand why Apple needed to suck all the fun out of this area of the app to replace some nice icons with smaller, duller versions of them. The old design felt more user-friendly and easier to navigate; I consider this one a regression from iOS 14.

Why so boring, iOS 15?

I do like, however, the new separation between Categories and Apps with a segmented control at the top of the library. To make this possible, Apple turned the previous ‘Apps’ category (the one that shows you a grid view of all the apps you have installed) into a separate screen, and they replaced its category with ‘All Actions’. This means that, at long last, there’s now a way to view all Shortcuts actions – including third-party ones – in a single list sorted by category in alphabetical order. I still prefer to find actions by manually searching for them, but I like this change.

Browsing all actions in iPadOS 15.

New Actions

Apple leveraged the opportunity created by bringing Shortcuts to the Mac and, in the process, updated the iPhone and iPad apps with actions previously exclusive to Automator on macOS. The move is classic Apple: the company invested in an iOS app to build the future of automation for the Mac; as they discovered though, the Mac’s existing automation utility had some capabilities Shortcuts was missing; therefore, Apple recreated them in Shortcuts for Mac and, while they were at it, brought them to iOS and iPadOS too.

Most of the new actions in Shortcuts for iOS and iPadOS 15 are the result of the transition from Automator to Shortcuts in macOS Monterey. But there are also other surprises that are entirely new Shortcuts this year. Let’s take a look.

Add New Calendar

This action lets you add a new calendar to your device. This is one of the many actions coming from Automator, and while I don’t think I’ll ever use it, it’s good to have it.

Create Photo Album

I could see myself using this one more often than the action above. This action lets you create a new album in the Photos app, and you can even add some images to it immediately thanks to the ‘Photos’ parameter in the action. Creating new albums in the Photos app is a bit of a chore, so I’m glad there’s now a faster way to do so from Shortcuts.

New Files Actions

Finally. For the past several years, I always complained about one particular aspect of Shortcuts in my iOS and iPadOS reviews: its lackluster integration with the Files app. It took replacing Automator for Apple to figure this one out, but proper integration with any file or folder from the Files app is here, and Shortcuts can, at long last, go beyond the limitations of its iCloud Drive sandbox.

At a high level, deeper Files integration in Shortcuts means you can now pick any file or folder from any file provider in the Files app. Similarly, you can save new files and modify existing ones in any location that is compatible with modern file provider APIs. The path Apple took, however, is different from the solution we saw years ago with bookmarks in apps such as Scriptable and Toolbox Pro: in iOS and iPadOS 15, you just pick a file or folder with a native Files picker in the actions you want to use, and that’s it. No need to manually name bookmarks, no need to keep track of them. You just edit the actions to pick items from a different directory and that’s it.

In iOS 15, you can work with any file or folder in Shortcuts.

This integration extends to all existing Files actions in Shortcuts, but to match Automator’s support for Finder, Apple had to bring some new actions to iPhone and iPad as well. Here are the new Files actions you’ll find this year:

Move file

Open file

Rename file

Select file

Get Contents of Folder

Like I said, the big deal about most of these actions is the fact you can now pick folders outside of iCloud Drive/Shortcuts. But there are some other details worth noting too. The ‘Get Contents of Folder’ – arguably, one of the best additions for power users this year – lets you fetch all files contained in a folder with a single step; it even comes with a ‘Recursive’ toggle that returns all files from a folder including its sub-folders, which opens up some fantastic possibilities for file automation.

You can get the contents of any folder with the updated Shortcuts app.

Automation Academy Lesson: Files Actions in iOS 15

In the first lesson of the Automation Academy for Club MacStories+ and Club Premier members, I covered all the details of the new Files actions for iOS and iPadOS 15. I explained how Shortcuts integrates with folders, the different ways to pick files in the app, and covered advanced techniques such as accessing hidden files and searching all files contained in a specific folder. I also shared a few shortcut examples to get members started.

You can find the Automation Academy lesson here. To become a Club MacStories+ or Club Premier member and get access to a variety of other perks, check out our Plans page.

The ‘Select File’ action is also interesting. Despite its name, you can configure this action to either pick a file, multiple files, or an entire folder. This always takes place in a native Files picker inside Shortcuts, but the picker switches modes according to the parameter you’ve set. As with other Files actions, the parameter you configure can be permanent – meaning, you can pick a specific document or folder from any location in Files, and that item will always be processed whenever the shortcut runs.

As we’ll see later in Shortcut Examples, and as we’ve explained in the Automation Academy lesson about Files for Club MacStories+ members, Files actions are the most important addition for Shortcuts power users this year. I’m glad Apple finally listened to users’ requests, and I’m currently in the process of rethinking all my Files shortcuts around them.

New PDF Actions

Also inspired by Automator, Shortcuts for iOS and iPadOS 15 comes with some great new PDF actions to process documents and extract data from them. The actions are:

Get Text from PDF

Make Image from PDF Page

Split PDF Into Pages

All of these are longstanding Automator features that Shortcuts users have been requesting for years. Impressively, the ‘Get Text from PDF’ action can return either plain or rich text from documents, and its performance is outstanding. Thanks to the Neural Engine and OCR powered by the Vision framework, Shortcuts can extract text from PDFs spanning hundreds of pages in just a few seconds. For context, the action was able to extract 70,000 words from a PDF version of my iOS 14 review in just 4 seconds on a 2021 iPad Pro. I think these actions will be a hit among Shortcuts users.

Make Spoken Audio from Text

This is a fun one: using this action, you can let Shortcuts speak any text variable passed as input to the action. You change the rate and pitch for voices available in Shortcuts, which vary depending on the language you select in the action; for U.S. English, you can choose between the usual Aaron, Fred, Nicky, and Samantha voices.

You can now make spoken audio from text using Shortcuts.

Unfortunately, these voices do not include the new, more human Siri voices Apple rolled out earlier this year in iOS 14.5. Regardless, I have some fun ideas for this action that I’m going to explore later in Shortcut Examples.

Split Screen Apps

This is another action we’ve been waiting to see in Shortcuts for a while: starting with iPadOS 15, you can create Split Views from Shortcuts by using this action and choosing the two apps you want to open in split screen mode. You can select apps from a built-in app picker, and you can even choose whether you want to use the 50/50 Split View layout or the 70/30 one.

The new action to create Split Views via Shortcuts.

While I’m happy Apple is moving the first steps toward bridging Shortcuts and iPad multitasking, I’m disappointed this action doesn’t go further and allow you to pick specific windows from apps. When I first saw this action, I hoped it would let me easily recreate “workspaces” with specific windows from specific apps such as, say, the MacStories website in Safari on one side and my ‘Interesting Links’ note on the other. Alas, the Split Screen Apps action is entirely disconnected from multiwindow and doesn’t have any knowledge of which windows the apps you pick already have open in iPadOS. If you pick an app that has multiple windows, the most recently used one will be launched by Shortcuts. So, I’m happy Apple added this action, but it needs more work to better fit iPad multitasking.

Return to Home Screen

You can now use this action to instantly return to the Home Screen. People have been using workarounds from third-party apps to accomplish this for years now, so it’s cool that Apple is now providing a native action for it.

Stop Shortcut

In a move aimed at pleasing power users, Apple added an action to stop running a shortcut at a specific point. Before, this could only be achieved with the ‘Exit Shortcut’ action, which wasn’t the best approach since it always kicked you back to the root view of the Shortcuts app. Now, you can just stop running a shortcut without exiting the editor.

Stop and Output

In another and surprising action for power users, Apple added a lightweight debugging tool to Shortcuts with this action. As its name implies, this action lets you stop the execution of the current shortcut and output some text. Apple explains that this action is mostly useful on the Mac to receive output in apps or features that invoke shortcuts remotely: for example, the output of this action can replace selected text when the shortcut is run as a Service, or it can be saved as a text file if run as a Quick Action in Finder.

However, this action can also be useful on iOS: Stop and Output can be used to properly terminate a shortcut and pass some output when the shortcut gets called via the ‘Run Shortcut’ action or the URL scheme, for instance. Remarkably, you can even choose to copy the output of this action to the clipboard if there’s nowhere else to output. The Stop and Output action will be ideal for some of my more advanced shortcuts, such as MusicBot, which I plan on updating soon.

Dismiss Siri and Continue

This is another meta-utility action that advanced users can leverage to customize the behavior of their shortcuts running inside Siri. Specifically, this action will dismiss Siri and continue with the next action in the Shortcuts app. Handy for all those times when you want to trigger a shortcut with Siri but finish it in the main app.

Background Sounds

As part of the new Background Sounds feature for Accessibility in iOS and iPadOS 15, Apple has introduced a suite of related actions to trigger and control those sounds from Shortcuts without navigating into the Settings app. The actions are:

Set Background Sounds

Set Background Sound Track

See Background Sounds Volume

Set Background Sounds When Media Is Playing

Set Background Sounds Volume When Media Is Playing

As you can imagine, you can pick the sound you want (e.g. ocean, rain, dark noise, etc.) from a parameter, and you can also set a specific volume level. I expect these actions to be used in conjunction with automations and Focus modes by people who want to leave white noise playing before sleep or while focusing on specific work tasks.

Get On-Screen Content

One of the many Siri updates this year includes the ability to share onscreen content with people by simply saying, ‘Share this with [person name]’. I’m fascinated by this feature since, as I suspected, it’s yet another functionality that piggybacks on the NSUserActivity API, which we know Apple loves to use for all kinds of deep-linking on iOS. If you ask Siri to share content displayed onscreen while using an app that donates deep links to the system, Siri will prepare a message containing the link and confirm you want to send the message. I’ll talk about this more in depth later in the Siri section.

The ability for the system to “see” links to content displayed on-screen has been brought to Shortcuts as a new input type (see Editor Changes ⇾ Shortcuts Input) as well as a standalone action that can pass deep links of on-screen items to the following action.

I’m intrigued by this action for a reason: besides its potential use cases in iOS 15 as a share sheet replacement or action to combine with Back Tap, I think this action will become a must-have once Apple adds the ability to trigger shortcuts with system-wide hotkeys on iPad. If my theory is correct, this action could be leveraged to share what’s on-screen (such as URLs, files, selected text, Mail messages, and more) without having to trigger a shortcut from the share sheet. My use for this action right now is pretty limited, but it’s one I’m keeping an eye on for future updates to Shortcuts.

Action and Automation Updates

In addition to new actions and changes to the editor, there are also a few updates to existing actions and automation features in iOS and iPadOS 15.

On iPad, the ‘Open App’ action has received a new ‘Slide Over’ toggle. This allows you to open an app in Slide Over mode rather than full-screen, which can be useful if you’re looking to recreate a specific setup.

You can now open specific apps in Slide Over.

One of my most used actions in Shortcuts, the ‘Choose from Menu’ one, has received a welcome improvement in iOS and iPadOS 15: you can now assign synonyms to entries displayed in the menu, which you can use with Siri. This is a terrific addition since it now allows you to, say, use longer text labels and emoji when you’re running a shortcut via touch or keyboard input, but speak a shorter synonym to select the same menu item when you’re executing the shortcut via Siri.

Creating synonyms for menu items.

To add synonyms, you can tap the ‘i’ button next to each item in a menu, which opens a page that lets you assign as many synonyms as you want to the selected item. I’ve long struggled to design menus that were both pretty and worked well with Siri, so I love this change – which also means there’s now a strong reason to use Apple’s native menu system in Shortcuts instead of custom ones.

As originally noticed by Dark Noise developer Charlie Chapman, iOS 15 also enables parameter-based actions that play audio to start an audio playback session in the background, without launching the associated app. As a side technical note, this appears to be based on the in-app intent handling technology Apple rolled out last year, which is now capable of kicking off long background audio sessions. I hope to see this adopted in several podcast clients soon.

Lastly, as I noted in the Automating Focus and Home Screens section, you can now use specific Focus modes as triggers for personal automations. As I described earlier, I’ve been using this approach to switch to a specific Home Screen and run Shortcuts actions to start time tracking with Timery whenever I activate my iOS Review focus from Control Center.

Given that Focus is likely going to be one of the most popular iOS features this year, I also feel like its automation triggers in Shortcuts will see a lot of use among people seeking to automate specific areas of their lives.

There’s also a new ‘Sound Recognition’ trigger in Personal Automations for iOS 15 based on the same Accessibility feature Apple rolled out in iOS 14. This will allow you to run actions when, say, your iPhone detects that water is running, the fire alarm is on, or a baby is crying. I don’t have any particular uses for these triggers, but I think it’s great Apple added them for the Accessibility community.

Shortcuts Settings, Privacy, and Sharing

As I mentioned before, Apple redesigned Shortcuts’s Details screen for individual shortcuts. What used to be a barebones, single-page design has been split across three sections that encompass all the various configuration options for your shortcuts: Details, Privacy, and Setup. I already covered the Details page in Editor Changes ⇾ Shortcuts Input, so let’s turn our attention to the other two pages now.

Privacy

Shortcuts’ privacy permissions have been revamped in iOS and iPadOS 15 with greater emphasis on individual actions requesting to do something on your device, plus more fine-grained controls for running actions that require a permission prompt.

The first notable change is the addition of a dedicated Privacy page in settings that shows all the data types or third-party apps a shortcut has requested access to. This comprehensive list of permissions is split into sections (I don’t fully understand their order) that include permission privileges such as notifications, file access, contacts and calendar, and so forth. You can revoke or change individual permissions at any time from the Privacy screen, and you can also outright reset a shortcut’s full privacy privileges with a ‘Reset Privacy’ button at the bottom of the page.

The new Privacy screen in iOS 15.

The additional level of detail in the Privacy screen goes hand-in-hand with a redesigned permission prompt when running a shortcut that requests access to sharing data with web services or apps. Whenever applicable, Shortcuts in iOS and iPadOS 15 will present a rich permission dialog with a new option to ‘Allow Once’ and a visual preview of the data you’re sharing with, say, a website or an app. In the examples below, what happens the first time I try to start one of my saved timers in Timery, play albums with MusicBot, or access a contact with Shortcuts:

New permission requests in iOS 15.

It’s not entirely clear when Shortcuts decides to display this “fancier” permission prompt with thumbnail previews, but I think it looks nice, and I’m glad Apple added options to allow execution of a shortcut once and set privileges on an action-by-action basis in some instances.

In using Shortcuts for iOS and iPadOS 15, I get the sense that Apple is seriously concerned about the privacy and data security aspect of Shortcuts, particularly when it comes to installing shortcuts shared by other people on the Internet and running them on your device. That would explain the stricter approach to granting privileges just once and the ability to review individual permissions on the Privacy page. For this reason, while I would still love to see an “expert mode” in Shortcuts to skip this constant barrage of permission prompts (Apple, I know what I’m doing!), I don’t think it’s ever going to happen any this point.

Sharing and Installing Shortcuts

Apple has taken the arrival of Shortcuts on the Mac as an opportunity to rethink the distribution methods for shortcuts you want to share with other people.

After it was removed years ago, the option to share shortcuts as files is back, and it’s now powered by an all-new notarization system that “signs” shortcuts you export as files with your identity. There are several reasons why you may want to save and distribute shortcuts outside of iCloud: perhaps you want to share some shortcuts privately with friends and family without uploading them to iCloud; perhaps you want to create some offline backups of your shortcuts or use the file-based delivery mechanism for a third-party Shortcuts gallery. Broadly speaking, it’s always been a good idea to not rely on iCloud alone as a “backup” system for your shortcuts because we’ve seen how iCloud.com links to shortcuts can break.

According to Apple, the new notarization system for Shortcuts (which also works on the Mac) will offer the ability to embed shortcuts as files in apps and websites without having to use iCloud.com links. Before you get started with this option, however, there are a few details you should know.

First, you can enable receiving privately-shared shortcuts directly from people in your contacts list by enabling the ‘Private Sharing’ option in Settings ⇾ Shortcuts (it’s disabled by default). If you enable this option and share a shortcut as file with someone on iMessage, you’ll be able to install the shortcut directly from the Messages app. What’s even nicer is that Apple built a special Quick Look preview mode for shortcuts shared as files in iOS and iPadOS 15, which you can see in the screenshots below.

You can export shortcuts privately as files and share them with your friends on iMessage.

Additionally, you can now export shortcuts as files directly from the share sheet by selecting the ‘Options’ menu underneath the shortcut’s name in the sheet. In this screen, you can choose to share a shortcut as an iCloud link or file; select the File option, and you can pick whether you want anyone to be able to install the shortcut or only people who know you. In the first case, your personal information will not be included in the shortcut, and Apple will sign it on its servers. If you enable the ‘People Who Know Me’ option, only people who have you in their contacts will be able to preview and use the shortcut, which will use your personal information for verification in the signing process. Apple also recommends using this method if you want to create personal backups of your shortcuts.

Receiving a shortcut shared by someone in your contacts (left) vs. having private sharing disabled. (Image courtesy of Myke Hurley.)

As we’ll see later in the Shortcut Examples section, it’s even possible to automate the process of exporting shortcuts as files in iOS and iPadOS 15.

There are also some differences worth pointing out when it comes to installing shortcuts coming from iCloud.com or shared as files in iOS 15. When you open an iCloud.com link to a shortcut in iOS or iPadOS 15, the preview screen in the Shortcuts app no longer defaults to showing you all the actions contained in the shortcut before you can install it. Instead, you’ll see the shortcut name and icon along with details on its activation methods (Siri, share sheet, etc.), plus a button to optionally see all its actions. This is vastly better than iOS 14, where installing long shortcuts such as Apple Frames or MusicBot required scrolling all the way to the end of those shortcuts spanning hundreds of actions.

iOS 15 makes it easier to install shortcuts shared as links.

Conversely, if you try to install a shortcut shared as file, the Shortcuts app will default to showing you all the actions contained in it up front, which I think is the right approach. Overall, I applaud Apple’s decision to not only maintain the ability to share shortcuts but improve sharing considerably this year with notarization and the ability to share shortcuts as local files again. I’m glad the company listened to feedback here.

Shortcut Setup

The process of setting up a shortcut with import questions has been improved in iOS and iPadOS 15 too. Import questions can now be configured in the ‘Setup’ tab of a shortcut’s settings.

Furthermore, you can now change your answers to import questions without deleting a shortcut and reinstalling it from scratch. This is great for all those shortcuts that need you to answer a bunch of questions (again, like MusicBot); if you want to change the answer you provided initially, you can now do so easily from the Setup tab.

Shortcut Examples

Like every year, I’ve put together a series of shortcuts that showcase the new capabilities of the app in the latest version of iOS and iPadOS. This year, I’ve come up with five different shortcuts that take advantage of the new actions in Shortcuts. For some of these shortcuts, a more advanced “pro” version will be available exclusively via a Club MacStories subscription later this week.

Safari Speaker

The first shortcut I created for this year’s review takes advantage of the Make Spoken Audio from Text action to do something pretty useful and fun: it converts any article from Safari into a spoken version Siri reads back to you. Watch the shortcut in action below:

Safari Speaker for iOS 15.

To build this shortcut, I integrated Shortcuts’ existing support for turning URLs into parsed articles with the ability to fetch the text of those articles and convert it to audio. The ‘Make Spoken Audio from Text’ action is pretty flexible, and it allows you to change the rate, pitch, language, and type of Siri voice you want the system to use.

I tried to make this shortcut work for international users, but, unfortunately, a bug in the Shortcuts app prevents automatic language detection from being correctly applied to the ‘Language’ parameter of the action. By default, this shortcut will work in U.S. English, but you can manually change it to any language you want. Due to another performance-related issue in the current version of Shortcuts, the Make Spoken Audio from Text is also very slow; I hope this will be improved in a future update.

You can download Safari Speaker here.

For Club Members: Safari Speaker Pro

For Club MacStories members, I created Safari Speaker Pro – an advanced version of the same shortcut with more features. With Safari Speaker Pro, you can save the spoken audio file anywhere in the Files app, open it in a specific app, and even embed it in Obsidian. The latter use case is particularly interesting since it allows you to listen to an article in Obsidian while taking notes, as you can see below.

Safari Speaker Pro features more options and integrations.

Safari Speaker Pro will be released for Club MacStories members later this week.

PDF to Markdown

This shortcut is based on one of the new PDF actions – Get Text from PDF, which can extract plain or rich text from PDF documents opened in Shortcuts. By using that action as a starting point, I was able to create a shortcut that takes a document’s rich text, converts it to Markdown, and gives you the ability to perform different actions with it.

Watch the shortcut in action below:

Converting PDF documents to Markdown text files.

If you’ve ever needed to convert a PDF document back to a text file you can edit as Markdown, this shortcut is for you. You can download it here.

Select Folder, Compress, and Share

I built this shortcut to speed up something I do on a regular basis: taking a folder from the Files app, compressing it to .zip, and sharing it with someone on iMessage. With this shortcut, the process is a bit faster since I can pick and share in the same integrated workflow. Here’s how it works:

Select and compress folders.

As you can imagine, the shortcut was made possible by the new Files actions in Shortcuts for iOS and iPadOS 15, which I explained in depth in the Automation Academy. The shortcut takes care of picking a folder (using the new ‘Folder’ mode of the ‘Select File’ action), getting its contents, and compressing them into an archive of the same name. The contents of the folder are fetched with recursive mode, which means any sub-folders included in the folder you pick become part of the final archive too.

You can download the shortcut here.

Export Shortcut as File

As I mentioned in Sharing and Installing Shortcuts, Apple restored the ability to export shortcuts as files this year. As I noted, you can also automate this process using Shortcuts itself. So that’s what I did: I created a shortcut that lets you pick a shortcut (yes), save it as a .shortcut file, and immediately share it with other people and apps via the share sheet. As you can see, it’s a very simple process:

Exporting shortcuts as files.

Because Apple’s signing process for Shortcuts appears to require saving a shortcut to the Files app first, you’ll have to answer an import question upon installing Shortcut Exporter to choose a folder where your exported .shortcut files will be stored. Once that’s done, you can run the shortcut without having to choose a destination folder every single time. I’ve been using Shortcut Exporter to back up individual shortcuts I’m working on, and I like its simplicity and reliability a lot.

You can download Shortcut Exporter here.

For Club Members: Shortcut Exporter Pro

For Club members, I’ve created Shortcut Exporter Pro, an advanced version of the shortcut with more features for batch exporting of your shortcuts as files. With Shortcut Exporter Pro, you’ll be able to select an alternative location for your shortcut backups; additionally, you’ll have the option to export all shortcuts at once, back them up by folder, filter specific shortcuts by name, and even create backups for shortcuts that were recently modified. Shortcut Exporter Pro is the ultimate Shortcuts backup utility, and it was made possible by the new Files actions in iOS and iPadOS 15.

Shortcut Exporter Pro features more options for your shortcut backups.

Shortcut Exporter Pro will be released for Club MacStories members later this week.

Technical Issues

Unfortunately, the Shortcuts experience in iOS and iPadOS 15 is hindered by a variety of severe UI and performance bugs that have made this update the least stable and reliable one in recent memory. I believe Apple is aware of these bugs and is actively working on fixing them, but that doesn’t change the core problem: the Shortcuts app shipping with iOS and iPadOS 15.0 is buggy, crashes often, and gets in the way of power users with SwiftUI-related issues that prevent interactions with the editor.

I don’t want this section to read like a feedback report, so I’ll keep it short, but I also think it’s important to point out that the Shortcuts team should have done a better job with app performance and stability this year. For instance, due to a widely reported SwiftUI bug, it’s often impossible to click UI elements in the editor unless you close and reopen it. This bug is so bad, it has made it extremely challenging for me to work on long shortcuts this summer since I’d have to close and reopen the editor (thus losing my position in it) every 30 seconds. I’m astounded this bug shipped to customers.

Alas, there’s a lot more. Sometimes, drag and drop for actions just refuses to work or drops an action in an entirely different spot in the editor. The ‘Run Shortcut’ action – a fantastic tool for power users that lets you use shortcuts as functions – is somewhat broken at the moment and doesn’t always recognize input. The magic variable output of Choose from Menu blocks no longer works. Sometimes, the share sheet sees no input passed from other apps. When I run shortcuts that contain Files actions with the editor open on my iPad, the app crashes.

I could, unfortunately, go on and on with these issues. I’m optimistic that Apple will fix some of them soon, but I’m also disappointed Shortcuts for iOS and iPadOS 15 shipped in this state despite the three months of beta testing and feedback filed by Shortcuts users. These technical issues ruin an otherwise solid update, and I hope this will be a lesson for the Shortcuts team in the future to also prioritize quality assurance in their annual updates.

Shortcuts: The Details

Let’s round up some of the hidden and interesting details in Shortcuts for iOS and iPadOS 15:

Next action suggestions. At the bottom of the editor on iPhone, or in a standalone section in the new editor sidebar on iPad, you’ll find new ‘next action suggestions’ provided automatically by the system. This isn’t the first time Apple has attempted a similar feature to help users easily find the next action to add to a shortcut; as before, results tend to be hit or miss for power users.

I have occasionally saved time by tapping one of the action suggestions because I did, in fact, want to add one of them, but I find them useless most of the time. I think these are meant for less experienced users of the app, so I’m glad they exist, but I don’t take advantage of them since they’re not that smart.

Next action suggestions are contextual to the current shortcut in the editor.

A few SiriKit intents have been removed. As confirmed by Apple earlier this summer, SiriKit intents for ride booking, configuration of vehicles via Siri over CarPlay, and third-party Photo Search, initially launched in iOS 10, have been removed in iOS and iPadOS 15. It’s unclear why the company abruptly cut off support for these domains in iOS 15, but it’s easy to imagine that adoption among developers was very low. Unfortunately, this also means that triggering actions based on those SiriKit intents will result in an error in iOS and iPadOS 15.

New glyphs for the Home Screen. Lastly, Apple added a variety of new built-in glyphs for shortcuts this year. There are new symbols for objects, people, and more, which increase the options you have when adding a shortcut to the Home Screen. The most important one? Finally, MusicBot can be installed with a native robot glyph on the Home Screen:

That’s a cute robot.

Apps

Like every year, new versions of iOS and iPadOS aren’t just about big, flashy new system features and redesigns; with an ever-growing collection of built-in software, the most interesting updates are often found in the individual apps we use every day. This year, one of them, in particular, took a few attempts to get right.

Even More Apps Coverage

As in previous years, we shared some initial coverage of new apps and system features in iOS and iPadOS 15 earlier this summer in our OS Preview 2021 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: Apple Maps for iOS and iPadOS 15 and macOS Monterey: The MacStories Overview

Reminders: Reminders’ Smart Lists Put Unprecedented Control in the Hands of Users

Home and TV: Apple’s Fall OS Updates Promise Deeper HomeKit and Entertainment Integration

FaceTime: FaceTime’s Audio and Video Take a Leap Forward with Apple’s Upcoming iPhone, iPad, and Mac OS Updates

Notes

Updates to one of Apple’s most popular built-in apps revolve around three key areas in iOS and iPadOS 15: the addition of tags and Smart Folders; improvements to sharing and collaboration within notes; and the launch of a new Notes feature that is my favorite update to iPad multitasking in years.

Let’s start with Quick Note.

Quick Note

With iPadOS 15, Apple is adding a system-wide capturing tool for the Notes app called Quick Note. At a surface level, it’s easy to describe Quick Note as “Picture in Picture, but for Notes”: Quick Note is a small, floating Notes window you can invoke anywhere to, well, quickly save a note. Quick Note lets you save anything to a new note via a floating panel that supports typing with the keyboard, drawing with the Pencil, or appending links from Safari, as well as compatible apps that use the NSUserActivity API.

Quick Note on iPadOS 15.

You can fling the Quick Note window around the four corners of the screen and resize it with pinch gestures (just like Picture in Picture for videos), and you can use it alongside other apps and spaces (including Split View and Slide Over) to take notes while multitasking. What makes Quick Note fascinating from a reviewer’s standpoint is how it’s clear Apple put a lot of thought into this feature, which I think is the first one to be truly designed for a modern iPad ecosystem made of multiple input methods. Quick Note has the potential to dramatically improve how people are productive on iPad, and it’s my favorite addition to iPadOS this year.

Like Picture in Picture, you can drag Quick Note around the screen.

Quick Note is exclusive to Apple’s Notes app; unfortunately, you can’t replace it with your favorite third-party note-taking app.11 It’s also exclusive12 to iPad: although you can view, edit, and manage notes saved via Quick Note in the ‘Quick Notes’ folder of the Notes app for iPhone, you can only create quick notes via the floating window method on iPad. You can create a new note in the ‘Quick Notes’ folder on your iPhone, and it’ll sync over to the iPad, but you’ll have to do so inside the Notes app.

You can view Quick Notes on iPhone, and you can edit them or create new ones, but only inside the Notes app.

I consider Quick Note the first truly post-Magic Keyboard feature of iPadOS: it can be triggered via any of the iPad’s supported input methods, and Apple left nothing to chance here.

Keyboard: press Globe + Q

Touch: tap a new toggle in Control Center

Touch and Pencil: swipe from the bottom right corner of the screen with your finger or Pencil

Once the Quick Note window is shown, you can type, draw, and drop things in it, such as links, documents, and images. It’s important to remember this aspect of Quick Note: notes created via this feature are regular notes that support iCloud sync, sharing, and all the formatting options and keyboard shortcuts you already use in the Notes app. The activation method is what’s different; the editor is the same one you already use in the Notes app, and you can do all the things you do with regular notes when you open a quick note.

Only notes stored in the new Quick Notes folder appear in the floating Quick Note window. You can tell you have multiple notes available in the window by the page indicators at the bottom of it. You can navigate your quick notes by swiping across the window, and you can create a new one within the window by pressing the compose button.

If you want to always see specific notes first when opening Quick Note, you can pin them to the top of the Quick Notes folder, just like you’d do in any other folder of the Notes app. I’ve been doing this with a ‘Scratchpad’ note where I drop in random bits of text and links on a daily basis: the note is pinned in the Quick Notes folder, so when I invoke Quick Note, it’s always the first one that comes up.

The Quick Note window doesn’t just look like Picture in Picture for Notes: it behaves like Picture in Picture too. You can resize the floating Notes window with a pinch gesture and fling it across the screen until you’ve found a size and position that works for you. You can hide the window in a corner and, when you don’t need it anymore, click ‘Done’ to close it.

Using Quick Note on iPad.

I suspect that most iPad users will rely on Quick Note as a way to swiftly jot down thoughts, save images from the web, and drag in the occasional block of text from Mail, Messages, or other apps. But there’s another intriguing side to Quick Note worth exploring here: with Quick Note, you can save links from all kinds of apps that support Apple’s existing deeplinking technology. If you’ve been reading my annual iOS reviews long enough, you know where this is going: Quick Note is yet another feature that piggybacks on Apple’s existing, widely used NSUserActivity technology to capture deeplinks to app content.

Quick Note can capture all sorts of deeplinks from compatible apps.

Previously, the ability to save deeplinks from apps was exclusive to Siri and its “remind me about this” command; now, you can capture them with Quick Note and intermix them with your notes. When you’re using an app that has implemented the proper markup for these so-called “user activities” and open Quick Note, you’ll see an ‘Add Link’ button at the top of Quick Note window. Click it, and the deeplink will be saved immediately as a rich link in the note’s body. An obvious place to try this is Safari, where you can capture the link to the current webpage via this method:

Capturing links for Quick Note.

What’s powerful about this aspect of Quick Note is how it opens up the ability to save deeplinks that were previously exclusive to Siri and Reminders. Viewing an important message in Mail and want to save it for future reference? Deeplink it in Quick Note:

I promise, I haven’t read this newsletter about new emoji.

Perhaps you’re reading an article in NetNewsWire and want to save a link to the story for later? Same deal:

How about browsing saved words in LookUp or viewing incoming packages with the latest version of Parcel? Because all these apps have added support for user activities, you can save deeplinks to their content with Quick Note in iPadOS 15:

Along with saving deeplinks, Apple also built a system to rediscover links you previously saved via Quick Note and surface them again as you use apps. If you open an app that has a deeplink already saved in Notes, you’ll see a small Quick Note thumbnail pop in from the bottom right corner of the screen. That thumbnail indicates that you have an existing quick note containing a link to the page or app you’re currently viewing. Tap it, and the related quick note will appear, allowing you to resume editing it.

The thumbnail indicates a deeplink for this page has already been saved with Quick Note.

Of course, the utility of this Quick Note functionality is predicated upon adoption by third-party developers. Given how both iOS and iPadOS 15 are somewhat light on “must-implement” developer features this year, I expect many will reconsider the good old NSUserActivity API for its Quick Note integration now.

There’s one last special kind of deeplink I want to cover: saving webpage selections from Safari. I will explain my workflow for this later in the Quick Note ⇾ The Many Uses for Quick Note section, but here’s the gist: when you select something in Safari for iPadOS 15, you’ll find a ‘New Quick Note’ button in the copy and paste menu. Click it, and you’ll save a special rich link for the page in Notes that, in addition to the URL, also contains information about the highlighted text.

Highlight text in Safari to create a new Quick Note…

…which will be saved as a special deeplink in Notes.

In a nice touch, webpage selections saved via Quick Note are highlighted in yellow in Safari, which is reminiscent of highlights in the Books app.

Furthermore, if you want to continue saving more highlights from the same webpage, you’ll notice that the ‘New Quick Note’ button in the copy and paste menu becomes ‘Add to Quick Note’. That lets you append more highlights at the bottom of an existing quick note, which is something I’ve been leveraging myself with great results.

Click the ‘Add to Quick Note’ button to append Safari selections to an existing Quick Note.

The same Quick Note can contain as many Safari deeplinks as you want.

Quick Note Issues

Quick Note is great, but when it doesn’t work in a place you’d expect it to, it stings even more.

Allow me to raise a few very specific complaints about Quick Note here. With the only exception being the TV app, none of Apple’s media apps support Quick Note. You can’t save links to albums from Apple Music, for instance, nor can you save apps and games from the App Store. I don’t get it. Quick Note would be perfect for building up your own wishlist or “up next” queue in the Notes app, but, sadly, no ‘Add Link’ button is displayed when you open Quick Note from those apps.

I’m also surprised Apple didn’t think of integrating Quick Note and its support for saving deeplinked highlights in the one app where most people highlight text all the time: Books. When you invoke Quick Note while reading a book, all you get is the ability to save a link to reopen the book. And if you try to get clever around this limitation by using drag and drop from Books into the Quick Note window, you also save Books’ useless marketing text along with the highlight:

This is just sad.

Sigh. Hopefully, someone on the Books team has seen my tweet about this. If so, please consider it the public version of filing a radar for this feature.

The Many Uses for Quick Note

In the months I’ve spent testing and using iPadOS 15 on my M1 iPad Pro and iPad mini, I’ve come up with some (at least in my opinion) pretty fascinating uses for Quick Note, which highlight the flexibility and open-ended nature of this feature. I’d like to share them here since I don’t think Apple necessarily imagined people would end up using Quick Note like this, further confirming my theory that Quick Note is one of the most versatile iPad functionalities the company ever devised.

The first interesting application I discovered for Quick Note is to use it as a bucket to save trailers from movies and shows on Apple TV+. Since we launched a Discord server for Club MacStories members, I’ve received a lot of recommendations for releases on Apple’s streaming service I previously missed; this isn’t surprising since I tend to fall behind my TV queue in the summer when I’m working on the iOS review. But here’s where Quick Note comes in: whenever a Discord member shares a link to a movie or series on Apple TV+, I can click to open it in the TV app; once in the TV app, I hit Globe + Q to invoke Quick Note, which features an ‘Add Link’ button to save a deeplink to the selected item. All I have to do is swipe over to my ‘TV to Check Out’ note that’s permanently stored in the Quick Notes folder, click the ‘+’ button to save the link, and I’m done. The movie or TV show is saved in the Notes app, so I can find it again later.

Here’s what I love about this approach: when you save a deeplink from the TV app into Quick Note, you’re usually saving a link to the trailer of the selected item. On multiple occasions when I was in the mood for something new to watch, this meant I could open my note and click the ‘Play’ button displayed on the link’s thumbnail to watch trailers in full-screen directly inside the Notes app.

I’ve also been using Quick Note as a Safari Reading List companion utility to build an archive of interesting highlights from articles I read on the web. This, I think, is a fascinating use of Quick Note that Apple likely didn’t foresee when they were building this feature.

I’ve been using Reading List in Safari for years now; despite the lack of support from Apple (when’s the last time you saw a new Reading List feature?), I still find it the easiest, most convenient way to save articles for later on Apple platforms. Among other things, I’ve always wanted Apple to add a native highlighting feature to Reading List and have been consistently disappointed when it didn’t show up in a new version of iOS. Now I don’t care as much anymore because I built it myself using Quick Note.

When I’m reading an article in Safari for iPadOS 15 and find a passage of text I want to save for future reference, I can select it on the page, right-click the text, and click the ‘New Quick Note’ button in the copy and paste menu. Doing this causes the Quick Note window to appear with a special deeplink for the selected text already attached to the newly created note. If this is the first link I’m saving for a story, I edit the note by copying the title of the article from Safari, pasting it at the top of the note, and formatting it as the note title using ⌘⇧T.

Two things happen once you’ve saved a highlight from Safari into Quick Note:

The saved text gets highlighted in yellow on the original webpage;

If you continue selecting more passages of text, the button in the copy and paste menu becomes ‘Add to Quick Note’, allowing you to append new special deeplinks to the bottom of the existing note.

So this is how I’ve been using Quick Note as a read-later companion: after saving the first highlight from a new story, I continue selecting text and creating more highlights, which I append to the bottom of the same note. When I’m done with an article, I open the Quick Notes folder of the Notes app, grab the note, and move it to my ‘Read Later Archive’ folder, where it’ll be permanently stored.

Here’s the best part: if, weeks after I originally read a story, I recall something from an article, I can search for it in the Notes app; if I created a highlight for that specific bit of text, the app would find it. This is possible because text displayed inside the special deeplinks captured from Quick Note is actually indexed and searchable. In the Notes app, all I have to do is select the ‘All iCloud’ section, search for a keyword or bit of text I remember, and the Notes will display matching notes in search results. If I click on a note from the ‘Read Later Archive’ folder, the keyword I searched for will be selected in yellow inside the deeplink:

You can search for keywords contained inside special deeplinks saved from Safari.

My third use case for Quick Note builds upon the same Safari-Notes workflow but adds a collaborative spin to it. For the past few weeks, I’ve been using Quick Note as a collaborative tool for proofreading articles we publish on MacStories and Club MacStories. I realized this was possible a few weeks ago when John sent me a link to his first Macintosh Desktop Experience column on the Club website: as I was reading the story, I highlighted a typo I wanted John to fix, and it dawned on me that I could probably adapt my Reading List setup to article edits as well. After all, it’s a similar concept: I need to save highlights from a webpage, which have to be deeplinked to a specific part of the page. The only complication: all this has to work on another person’s iPad too.

Edits saved as deeplinks.

Highlights are perfect to check out suggested edits.

Much to my surprise, it all worked flawlessly on John’s end. Because, as I said above, quick notes are regular notes, I can highlight bits of text I’d like to see reworked or fixed and create special deeplinks for them using Quick Note. In the same note, I can intermix my own comments and suggestions. Then, I can share the note with John using Notes’ standard iCloud collaboration feature. When John joins the note and clicks a deeplink in it, he’s taken to the same spot I highlighted on the page, so he can preview the suggested edit in the context of the story.

I wasn’t expecting Quick Note to work so well for this kind of task, but we’ve been collaborating on articles with this system for the past several weeks, and we both think it’s the best collaborative environment we’ve ever used for edits at MacStories. That Quick Note made it possible is icing on the cake.

As time goes on, I’m sure I’ll find other interesting uses for Quick Note. The combination of its system-wide access, integration with deeplinks powered by NSUserActivity, and access to all other Notes features make it an ideal candidate for a diverse mix of use cases. It’ll be interesting to see how many third-party apps will add proper support for Quick Note in the future (we covered a preliminary list here). In the meantime, I’m thoroughly enjoying the ability to plug Quick Note into all the default iPadOS apps and workflows I can think of.

Besides providing an incredible first-party advantage for Apple’s Notes app since no other note-taking app can match this kind of system-wide capturing method in iPadOS 15, Quick Note may be a promising sign of additional flexibility coming to iPad multitasking in the future.

I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to imagine how Quick Note could be Apple’s testbed for a modern take on freeform windowing for iPadOS – one that’s inspired by the Mac but simplified and rethought for iPad, offering the basic advantages of the Mac’s resizable windows in a more streamlined environment.

Maybe I’m reading too much into Quick Note and this is just a universal capturing system for Notes that Apple will (hopefully) bring to iPhone too or open up to third-party apps in the future. But: I want to believe.

Tags and Smart Folders

With iOS and iPadOS 15, Apple is carrying Notes into the modern age of note-taking by supporting two features that have become commonplace among third-party options: you can now tag notes, and you can create Smart Folders – a first on iOS – based on tag filters. Neither option is particularly groundbreaking, but I suspect both will be positively received by Notes power-users.

In adding support for tagging to the Notes app, Apple didn’t follow the approach often employed by third-party apps that require you to add tags into a dedicated inspector panel that holds all kinds of metadata. Instead, you just type your tags anywhere in the body text of a note. Whether you’re typing into a heading, paragraph of text, checklist, or any other section of a note (except its title), anything you type after a #hashtag will be highlighted with a different text color and parsed by the app as a tag. You’ve probably seen this kind of inline tagging before in apps like Craft and Obsidian, and it works well in Notes too.

Tags in Notes.

If you have existing tags and start typing something after the # symbol, Notes will even auto-suggest tags in the QuickType bar.

There’s something else you may have seen in third-party note-taking apps that is not available in Notes: the ability to click tags inside notes and navigate to other notes matching that tag. Tags in the body text of a note aren’t clickable items, so when you click one, you’ll only start editing it. I can live with this compromise since, like others, I wasn’t expecting Apple to build a PKM-style app with Notes this year.

The approach chosen by the company is a reasonable one: your tags are displayed in the new tag browser of the Notes sidebar, which is a section at the bottom (underneath your folders) that displays all tags currently in the app. You can click tags to view notes that contain the selected tag, and you can even select multiple tags to show notes that match all of them.

The tag browser.

As we’ve covered in a separate story, and as we’ll see later in the Reminders section, it took the addition of native tagging to convince Apple that bringing smart folder functionality to iOS and iPadOS was a good idea. In Notes, you can now create smart folders (or convert existing folders into smart ones) that only show you notes that include one or multiple tags. You can do so by clicking the new folder button at the bottom of the Notes sidebar and selecting ‘New Smart Folder’. Pick tags, give it a name, and you’ve created a smart folder you can place anywhere in the app’s sidebar.

Creating smart folders in iOS 15.

Sadly, unlike what we’ve seen in Reminders, tags are the only filtering criteria for smart folders in Notes. While Reminders (surprisingly, perhaps) lets you create smart folders with a bevy of nested conditions (tags, dates, relative time ranges, location, and more), Notes’ smart folders are, effectively, glorified tag filters. I would have liked to see Apple include filtering criteria such as keywords, note titles, attachments, mentions (see Sharing and Collaboration), and creation/modified dates; none of these filters are available for Notes smart folders in iOS 15. Maybe next year.

Now that Notes has added tags and smart folders, it feels like Apple has crossed the proverbial functionality Rubicon and they’re ready to admit that, yes, power users can also take advantage of the Notes app for more elaborate workflows.

What I like about Apple’s approach is that you’re not forced to use tagging – in fact, you can ignore it entirely if you don’t need it. But if you’re the kind of person who always wanted to tag their notes, Apple’s app is now ready for you, although it doesn’t quite match the options offered by the competition. But at this point, it’s safe to assume Apple will be going after those apps, too, eventually. It’s just a matter of time.

Sharing and Collaboration

Since the addition of iCloud-based sharing in iOS 10, Notes’ collaborative features have steadily grown and turned into one of the app’s strongest advantages over third-party competitors. In iOS 15, Notes collaboration is getting its biggest expansion yet with the addition of mentions, highlights, and a full-fledged Activity view.

Mentions are easy to explain if you’ve ever used iMessage or, perhaps more aptly, tools like Craft. If you share a note with someone and want to draw their attention to a particular spot in the note, you can @mention them, and they’ll be (optionally) notified on their device. As with tags, usernames are automatically suggested in the QuickType bar as you type, and they stand out in the body text of a note with a different color.

You can now mention collaborators in a note.

Notes is also gaining a brand new Activity view in iOS and iPadOS 15, which I think will come in handy for people sharing complex documents spanning several sections with multiple people making changes to them. The Activity view, which is displayed as a special sidebar on the right side of the screen on iPad, is a complete log of everything that happened inside a note visualized in reverse-chronological order. The information displayed in the Activity view is useful on its own, but here’s the best part: each item in Activity is tappable, so you can tap it to highlight, say, the portion of the note that another person edited or the part where someone mentioned you.

The new Activity view.

You can also go about this another way: instead of checking changes to a shared note by opening the Activity view, swipe right with two fingers in a note to reveal the new Highlights mode. In this view, you can see details on who made changes to a shared note with color-coded edits to match collaborators in the note. Changes are time-stamped and, in a nice touch, you can tap individual entries in the Highlights view to focus on other changes made around the same time by the same person, dimming everything else. I find this a great way to quickly see what’s new in a note and keep track of who made changes to what.

The new Highlights view.

All of Notes’ new sharing features are fairly common in competing note-taking apps with a collaborative component. In my opinion, this shows, once again, how Apple monitors the marketplace and gradually folds features people have come to expect in their favorite apps into its own, free, built-in system ones.

Handwriting Updates

Let me be honest here: you’re not looking at the best person to review handwriting updates in the Notes app. My handwriting is – how can I put this – barely readable. I only need to hold a pen in my life when the cashier at the bank wants me to sign something. I’ve lost the ability to properly handwrite, but I also recognize that millions of users rely on the Apple Pencil and iPad Pro to take all kinds of handwritten notes on a daily basis. So, for the sake of this review, I have to cover what’s new in Notes and handwriting.

First, a remarkable technical detail: both tags and mentions work in handwritten text in Notes. I guess this isn’t totally surprising given how data detectors work in handwritten text as well, but it’s still pretty neat to see that you can handwrite a tag with the Pencil, and it’ll be instantly indexed by the app.

Look at my incredible handwriting.

Second, Apple has taken a page from third-party note-taking apps such as Notability and GoodNotes and now lets you combine images and handwritten notes. The way you do this is a fascinating custom implementation of drag and drop: when dragging an image onto a handwriting area in Notes with the trackpad, you’ll see a translucent ‘drop target’ appear underneath the drag item. That indicates where the image will be dropped and how large it’ll be by default. Once an image has been dropped, you can draw over it and annotate parts of it, but you can also exit handwriting mode, select the image, and either resize or reposition it in the document.

Images and handwriting can coexist in iPadOS 15.

Like I said above, it’s very likely I’m never going to take advantage of this feature. But it’s well done, and I think students are going to use it a lot, so it makes sense to incorporate it into Notes.

Having used a variety of third-party note-taking apps over the past year (I’m firmly in Team Obsidian now, but I also appreciate Craft, Bear, and NotePlan), something stands out about Notes now: Apple’s app lends itself to creating more and more notes on a daily basis, but navigating the app is too cumbersome at this point. You have to manually navigate the sidebar, choose folders, and find notes. Every alternative at this point has implemented a ‘quick switcher’ feature at this point; I expect Apple to follow suit next year.

Similarly, I feel like the ability to link to other internal notes and reference them with backlinks has taken off so much in the note-taking space, Apple won’t be able to ignore these features (which are genuinely useful!) much longer.

I’d be very surprised if iOS 16’s Notes app doesn’t offer the ability to inter-link notes with a simplified, inline syntax.

Notes: The Details

Let’s round up some of the hidden and interesting details in Notes for iOS and iPadOS 15:

Converting folders to smart folders. If you want to turn a regular folder into a smart one, iOS 15 lets you do that: open the folder, press the ‘More’ (ellipsis) button next to the folder’s name, then choose ‘Convert to Smart Folder’. As explained by the system, the folder’s name will be applied as a tag to all notes contained in the folder, and the operation can’t be undone. All notes in the newly created smart folder are moved back into the standard ‘Notes’ folder; you can’t convert folders that contain sub-folders, locked notes, or shared notes, and you can’t convert shared folders either.

If you create a note when viewing a tag, the tag is automatically applied to the new note. If you’re browsing by tag in the tag browser and create a new note (press the compose button or hit ⌘N), the new note is automatically created with the selected tag as the first line of text.

You can create a smart folder when viewing a tag. Similarly, if you’re viewing a tag and want to quickly create a smart folder for it, hit More ⇾ Create Smart Folder, and you’ll be able to save a smart folder with the correct tag filter already applied.

Tag settings. In Settings ⇾ Notes, you can choose to disable the ability to automatically create tags when you enter a space after #text. If you turn this off, you’ll have to select that text and manually convert it into a tag from the copy and paste menu.

Manually converting text into a tag.

Quick Note settings. Also in Settings, you can choose to disable the ability to resume the last Quick Note instead of creating a new one every time; you can also turn off the deeplinks suggested by the system with the ‘Add Link’ button and disable the ability for Notes to suggest related notes that contain deeplinks when you’re using your iPad.

Safari

I’m guessing you may have heard that Safari for iOS and iPadOS 15 has gone through a…complicated development period this summer.

Well, I don’t want to talk about any of that. Criticisms of past beta versions no longer apply to the public release of iOS and iPadOS 15; all that matters is the Safari app shipping to iPhone and iPad users today.

And here’s the thing: the way I see it, this year’s Safari is an excellent upgrade over iOS 14, with desktop-class features that are finally making their way to mobile devices and a design direction that paves a new path for Apple to follow over the coming years. I have some reservations, particularly regarding the iPad version of Safari. But overall, I feel like the struggles with Safari’s design earlier this summer were necessary for Apple to end up in a much better place than iOS 14’s Safari.

The new Safari, especially on iPhone, may take a while to get used to, but I’m a convert, and I wouldn’t want to go back to Safari’s older look on iPhone now. Let’s take a look.

Safari for iPhone and the Bottom Tab Bar

If you upgrade to iOS 15 today and haven’t seen screenshots of the new Safari for iPhone before, you’re in for quite the visual and functional shock the first time you open the app.

With iOS 15, Apple has moved the Safari address bar to the bottom of the screen: the address bar contains the same visual elements from before (the aA button, the domain name, and a reload button), but it is, by default, docked above the standard bottom toolbar. In the comparison screenshot below, you can see how it looks like the bottom toolbar in iOS 15’s Safari has expanded in height to make room for the address bar above it.

By default, the new Safari for iOS 15 uses a bottom tab bar.

This design is what Apple refers to as the new ‘tab bar’ in Safari for iPhone, which is different from the previous ‘single tab’ design where a single address bar was displayed at the top of the screen. As I’ll explain shortly, it’s a tab bar because, in reality, you swipe across multiple tabs with this new design.

The bottom-oriented approach taken with Safari for iOS 15 is a first for the platform, and it was motivated by Apple as a solution to make browsing the web more convenient on iPhone since key controls are within thumb’s reach now. Despite the many redesigns of Safari during the beta season, this hasn’t changed. Whether you’re using an iPhone 12 or a much larger 12 Pro Max, it’s undeniable that reaching for the address bar to navigate elsewhere or opening the ‘aA’ menu with your thumb is much, much easier than before.

Controls at the bottom are easier to reach on a large iPhone.

From a mere usability perspective, I feel like Apple succeeded in their mission here. What I think a lot of Apple commentators, myself included, have struggled with is reconciling this specific app design with the company’s broader goal of a unified design language and the HIG. There is no other app like Safari on iOS now. But we’ll get to that later.

In another first for the platform, you are not forced to use this new design. If you don’t like Safari’s new default look, you can revert to the old ‘single tab’ mode, which is a setting that sticks across app relaunches and device reboots. You can change Safari for iPhone’s design anytime in a couple different ways:

In Settings ⇾ Safari, pick the single tab option under the ‘Tabs’ section;

In Safari itself, tap the ‘aA’ menu, then tap ‘Show Top Address Bar’.

If you want, you can revert to the old Safari design with a setting (right).

Some people may balk at the idea of Apple offering users the option to customize the look of Safari by choosing from a thoughtfully-presented set of two designs. I say: Apple should do this more often.

In the age of customizable Home Screens with widgets and custom icons, hundreds of Watch bands, and computers that come in different colors, how is providing users with a limited number of options a bad thing? As long as Apple doesn’t overdo it (and, based on how these settings are laid out, they really aren’t), I believe customization is a healthy new direction for iOS, which is now a mature platform that is well into its second decade and used by hundreds of millions of people every day.

Personally, I love this new Apple that’s allowing users to customize Safari, change up their Home Screens, make smart lists in Reminders, or set a different Siri voice. Providing users with limited settings isn’t an act of “design cowardice” (some have used such an expression!): it’s the responsible thing to do now that iOS’ userbase has outgrown Apple’s monolithic design process. To sum up: you won’t hear a single complaint about “more customization” from me.

The thing to understand about the new bottom tab bar is that it fundamentally changes the browsing experience on iPhone in fairly substantial ways. For starters, you’re no longer focusing your attention on two separate areas of the screen (domain at the top, toolbar actions at the bottom) because everything has been unified at the bottom of the UI. Second, the tab bar doesn’t interfere with webpage content (unlike early betas) and auto-minimizes upon scrolling. Third, and perhaps most importantly, I find the new Safari vastly more comfortable to use one-handed on my iPhone 12 Pro Max. When I want to select the address bar, reload the page, or view additional browser actions, I don’t have to stretch my thumb all the way to the top of the screen; every action is conveniently clustered above the Home indicator, where I can easily tap without feeling like my phone is about to slide out of my hands.

The new tab bar is Safari’s equivalent of the Home indicator for multitasking.

It’s not just the physical comfort aspect of the bottom tab bar that makes it a winner in my opinion, though. Along with changing the placement of the address bar, as I noted above, Apple made it a tab bar that supports new interactions in iOS 15. The easiest way to think about it: the new tab bar is Safari’s equivalent of the Home indicator for multitasking. Just like you can swipe up on the iPhone’s Home indicator to open the app switcher, so you can swipe up on the address bar to open the new tab view (more on this in Tab View) with a grid of open tabs; and just like you can swipe horizontally on the Home indicator, you can now navigate between them by swiping across the current tab.

Gestures in the new Safari for iPhone. As you can see, you can also create a new tab from the tab bar: if you’re on the last tab, pull to the left until a ‘+’ button appears, then let go to instantly open a new tab.

On principle, the new gestures create a conflict with the iPhone’s gestural multitasking system and could potentially confuse users. In practice, I think they’ve been implemented well and, after a few weeks of usage, I rarely trigger the app switcher by accident.

When you consider all these aspects together, the new bottom tab bar offers a compelling package for Safari users on iOS 15: it’s more comfortable to use, lets you quickly open the tab view, and because it’s not a single tab but a tab bar, you can switch between tabs quickly by swiping between them.

Bookmarks and Reading List are now displayed with a half-sheet too when using the bottom tab bar, matching the share sheet.

There is one downside about the new default Safari design on iPhone: it makes me wonder if this is an isolated case, or if we’re looking at a new potential design direction for Apple in iOS 16. This isn’t clear yet, and it somewhat muddles the design story of iOS 15. Did Safari receive special treatment in iOS 15 because Apple thinks web browsing is the only activity that could benefit from bottom-oriented navigation, or is this a public test until more apps undergo a similar redesign next year? Will more Apple apps become customizable with different layout options?

Apple listened to feedback and produced the best version of the browser to date.

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but because it’s my job to remember these things, I’ll point to history as an example: years before iPad multi-window became a system feature, Safari rolled its own custom split-screen solution to open multiple “windows” at once. I want to believe we’re looking at a similar public experimentation that, if successful, may become an official API in iOS 16 or 17.

In the meantime, I think Safari for iPhone’s combination of comfort and new gestures have made Apple’s efforts to get to this stage well worth the beta troubles. Apple listened to feedback, polished Safari’s design, and produced the best version of the browser to date that marks an excellent new beginning for one of the platform’s essentials apps. I’m keeping the new design enabled, and I’m not turning back now.

Safari for iPad: Compact or Separate Tab Bar

I wish I could also be this effusive about Safari for iPadOS 15, where the one good idea Apple had about iPad UI this year is unfortunately overshadowed by an incoherent, faux-minimalistic design that I consider a regression from iPadOS 14.

Let’s dispense with the good news first: Safari for iPad now comes with a native sidebar. In keeping with the trend of letting iPad apps take advantage of the iPad’s large canvas, the browser has adopted a sidebar that lets you easily navigate between tabs, tab groups, links shared with you (see Shared with You), plus the usual bookmarks, Reading List, and history. As in other iPad apps, the sidebar can be invoked/dismissed with a button or, alternatively, by using the ⌘⇧L keyboard shortcut.

For more on sidebar behaviors, check out this section from my iPadOS 14 review.

The new sidebar in Safari for iPadOS 15.

Besides bringing Safari up to speed with the rest of the iPad app ecosystem, the addition of a sidebar has allowed Apple to provide dedicated space to features that were previously tucked away in submenus or hidden behind multiple layers of navigation. Switching between your regular tabs and private mode, for instance, now requires a single tap in the sidebar and the browser instantly cycles between different sets of open tabs on the right. Same with your bookmarks, history, and Reading List: in iPadOS 14, you had to tap the Bookmarks button in the top toolbar first, then select each item from a custom sidebar; now, you can open each item directly in a native sidebar. The end result is a much faster, intuitive iPad browser that feels like a miniaturized version of Safari for Mac rather than an enlarged version of Safari for iPhone.

The old custom sidebar in iPadOS 14.

The new sidebar for Reading List in iPadOS 15.

The sidebar was also necessary to bring new functionality into Safari: all the tab groups you create on iOS, iPadOS, or macOS are listed in the sidebar, and you can switch between the different sets of tabs contained within them with one click. As we’ll explore later in Tab Groups, you can also right-click a group in the sidebar to view a context menu with additional options.

Even though the sidebar is not customizable (I would have loved to rearrange the order of elements and pin some of my favorite websites there, too), I find it a solid addition to Safari and a great match for the browser.

Alas, I cannot say the same about either of the two new modes in Safari for iPad: compact and separate tab bar.

The compact tab bar mode is an attempt to shoehorn iOS 15’s tab bar mode into Safari for iPad, but it entirely misses the point of understanding what people seek from a desktop-class web browser. If you enable the compact tab bar mode (it’s disabled by default), the tab and address bars will merge into a single row of “tabs” you can horizontally scroll that is reminiscent of the iPhone’s new tab bar.

The iPad’s new compact tab bar mode.

I write “tabs” deliberately. Because the separate address bar disappears and tabs have to serve double duty of address bar for the current page and UI elements to switch between open pages, tabs lose most of their utility and become overloaded with functionality. Even on a 12.9” iPad Pro in landscape, as soon as you open more than five tabs, other tabs considerably shrink in size because the current tab has to be larger to show you its active state and controls for reload, extensions, and a contextual menu for other options. The standalone aA button gets hidden, so these buttons overlaid on top of the active tab are very close to each other, making it challenging to click a specific one. Due to the compact nature of this mode, with enough open tabs, these controls almost completely hide the domain of the page you’re on:

Have fun clicking those buttons in the current “tab”.

If you run into a similar scenario, the only way to see the title of the current tab (which is normally displayed on a standalone tab) is to hover with the pointer over the active tab. To my knowledge, this is the first instance of an iPadOS interface element that can only be activated with the pointer; if you’re using the iPad in touch mode, the only way to quickly see the full title of the current page is to click the contextual menu to see it at the top of a custom share sheet that also contains other buttons on top of extensions:

In compact mode, you can view full webpage titles either by hovering with a pointer over a tab…

…or by opening the ‘More’ menu.

But the problems go on. When you start opening more tabs in compact mode, as I mentioned before, other tabs get smaller than they would otherwise be in separate tab bar mode. You have to scroll more to view your open tabs; sometimes, if you don’t pay enough attention and click another tab to open it, you may accidentally close it instead because the pointer automatically snaps to the ‘x’ button. Touch targets are smaller, so there’s a small difference between tapping the ‘x’ button and clicking just outside of it to switch to a different tab. This happened to me on several occasions over the past few weeks whenever I tried compact mode, forcing me to go find the tab I accidentally closed in the history view.

Using the new compact mode in Safari for iPad means you always have to be extra precise when clicking around tabs. Also: they move around a lot.

Furthermore, the accordion-like animation used to scroll and animate tabs is spatially disorienting and oftentimes downright user-hostile. If you manage to find the tab you’re looking for and click it, it enlarges and pushes adjacent tabs further to the left or right. This animation is cute at first but quickly starts feeling like something is constantly moving at the top of the browser, distracting you. The worst offender, however, is the animation that happens when you select the current tab/address bar by clicking or pressing ⌘L: the entire tab expands into a full address bar, pushing all other tabs out of view. In this scenario, you no longer see your other tabs, and when you exit out of it, it’s harder to find your place again in the tab bar if you’re the kind of person who opens a lot of tabs on a regular basis. There’s no spatial sense to any of this; it feels like Safari is doing its own dance at the top of the screen, confusing you with its fancy animations to resize tabs while you just want to browse and keep track of your open tabs.

Where did my tabs go?

The problems with compact tab bar mode are endemic to the design itself, and they pose a threat to accessibility in the app. Try telling me, at a glance, which one is the active tab here:

Yeah, this design is not good at all.

Apple is using a subtle selection state to tell the active tab apart from others by changing its color in the top toolbar. I don’t think this is good enough. I’m not a visually impaired user, and I always struggle to quickly identify the current page by its selected state alone. I often understand which one it is because it’s the one with the buttons all close to each other. I can only imagine how users with varying degrees of visual impairment may deal with this design. For a company that prides itself upon the (genuinely amazing) work they do for the Accessibility community, this is not a good look.

Let’s not even begin to discuss how difficult this compact tab bar is to operate if you also show the sidebar in Safari:

Look at what happens to the tab and the buttons inside it. How did this even ship?

Or if you try to use it on an iPad mini:

On the 5th generation iPad mini, the situation gets even worse. Additionally, because the reload button in tabs is only shown on hover, unless you’re using a pointer with an iPad mini, you won’t have one in the tab.

In case I haven’t been clear enough above, I’ll be blunt: I don’t understand why the compact tab bar exists on iPad, and I think this design shouldn’t have shipped to customers.

My understanding is that Apple thought the benefit of removing a separate address bar, therefore saving a few vertical pixels on the page, would have made all the compromises we’ve seen so far worth the trade-offs in usability. I think that’s a wrong and mismanaged decision driven by an unmotivated pursuit of an iPhone-like design that has no place on iPad. If slightly increasing vertical space on webpages is Apple’s only argument here in favor of the compact tab bar, you tell me if it’s worth the trouble by judging from the screenshots below. Here’s Safari in compact mode:

And here’s Safari with a separate tab bar instead:

Was it worth shipping this, frankly, unusable design for an extra line of text and a whole bag of design and interaction problems? The answer, in my opinion, is a resounding no. Compact tab bar mode pleases no one, and, fortunately, Apple reversed course over the summer and made it an optional setting. But going forward, I think it should be entirely scrapped since it does nothing to make Safari a better browser for iPad users.

Alas, Safari in iPadOS 15 doesn’t fare much better with its default separate tab bar mode either. Thankfully, it’s not as bad as compact mode, but it carries many of the same interface problems, which ultimately lie in the perplexing design direction Apple chose for tabs in its browser this year.

Separate tab bar mode in Safari for iPad.

In separate tab bar mode, the standalone address bar returns along with webpage titles always displayed in tabs and the aA menu to access website settings and other Safari features. That’s good, but all the other issues with tabs persist. Tabs keep their button-like appearance and are smaller than before. You have to be extra precise to open a tab instead of closing it when you have multiple tabs open; you see less of a tab’s title than before, and while the accordion-like animation goes away because you have a proper address bar, selection state for the current tab is still hard to parse at a glance. Even in this mode, you often end up with Safari looking like this:

All the small tabs.

Here’s a good test to tell this new design doesn’t cut it: compare the new Safari’s tab UI to Safari on iPadOS 14, and the old version looks like a breath of fresh usability air. It’s also a lot nicer.

Can you please come back?

I’m not typically one to reminisce about “the good old days” and wax poetic about old iOS and iPadOS versions, but, at this point, I think I know a poorly thought-out design when I see one, and these new tabs are it.

There’s another change in Safari for iPad I don’t understand: the Favorites bar has been moved under tabs. For years now, Safari and other browsers have adhered to a predictable, common-sense structure: there’s your address bar with the URL of the page you’re on at the top, followed by a row of favorites to navigate to a different, bookmarked URL, followed by a row of tabs, in which one represents the current page you’re viewing. Now, for reasons I don’t comprehend, tabs sit underneath the address bar, and your favorites are floating above the current page.

I understand that comparisons with “tabs” in physical notebooks can only go so far since we’re talking about a web browser, which isn’t a concept that exists in the real world. But, at least for me (and I think for lots of other people too), the ‘tab’ always acted as an indicator for the page you’re currently on or other pages you may want to open. There was a direct connection between the tab and the page it represented. Just like you pull a tab in a notebook to open the page connected to the tab, so you can click a tab and see the webpage directly below it. Now that visual connection is gone, and although it’s not a catastrophe, it feels like an unmotivated decision that will only confuse users’ muscle memory and habits. It feels like change for change’s sake, and it doesn’t bring anything useful or more reasonable to the table.

I feel like changes to the Safari UI on iPad are an unfortunate blemish on an updated browser that is otherwise packed with other useful features, which I’m going to cover in the next sections. I think Apple should entirely abandon the idea of a compact tab bar on iPad, scrap the new design for tabs, and reverse course on the placement of the Favorites bar. Essentially, I’d love to have the same design as Safari for iPadOS 14, but with the added functionalities I’m going to detail on the next page.

The new tab design of Safari for iPad isn’t superior to the old one in any way.

The new tab design of Safari for iPad isn’t superior to the old one in any way, and I hope Apple understands that making things look “simpler” and “more minimalistic” doesn’t equate with making them better. The changes in Safari for iPhone have a practical use you may choose to rely on or not; in Safari for iPad, it just feels like they rearranged the deck chairs for no good reason other than to say “it looks different now”.

Tab View

Alright, let’s get to more good Safari stuff now. On iPhone, Apple finally got rid of the 3D carousel view for tabs and replaced it with something other browsers have been doing for a while, which I’ve also been requesting for years: a simple grid view.

The new tab view.

Screenshots should suffice in showing the advantages of a grid over the old tab view. With a grid view, your open tabs are displayed as large thumbnails that do a much better job at letting you preview each page and see where you left off. No more squinting at a tiny portion of a page to tell what it is. You can swipe a tab offscreen to close it, just like before, but there’s also a close button on each tab, and you can also long-press tabs to open a context menu to copy the link to the current tab, rearrange tabs by title or website, or move the selected tab to a tab group (more on Tab Groups in the next section).

Grid view for tabs was available on iPad before, but it’s been refreshed there too, so it now uses a blurred version of the start page’s wallpaper as its background color:

Grid view has been refreshed on iPad too.

Furthermore, the iPhone’s tab view has a new button at the bottom of the screen that shows you the number of open tabs you have. This button can be pressed to open a new menu (which uses the half-sheet presentation style) to switch between regular tabs and private mode as well as your existing tab groups; it also has buttons to create a new empty tab group or quickly move all of your open tabs into a new tab group. The latter shortcut is particularly handy if, for instance, you’ve been researching a specific topic in Safari and realize you want to “save” your session into a persistent tab group synced across devices. I’ve been doing this when researching vacation ideas this summer, and it’s a terrific way to turn a collection of open tabs into a topical group without having to add each tab manually to a group. I guess the only downside of this design is that switching to private mode now requires one more tap than before, but I can live with it.

The new menu to switch between tab groups and private mode.

You can also pick up multiple tabs in the grid view by using drag and drop, which lets you share links to those tabs by exiting Safari and dropping them into other apps, which has been made possible by the addition of iPhone Drag and Drop in iOS 15. To do this, just hold down a tab until it lifts, drag away, then optionally tap other tabs to add them to your drag stack. If you don’t need to drop them into other apps, you can also drop them on the top of the ‘+’ button to duplicate them.

You can drag and drop tabs, even between apps.

Lastly, I want to call out the beautiful transition Apple designed for a tab snapping back and docking above the toolbar when in tab bar mode on iPhone. I love how the tab morphs into an address bar and attaches to the bottom toolbar, which is one of my favorite visual touches in the new Safari for iPhone:

Bravo, Safari engineer who did this.

Tab Groups

If you’re the kind of Safari user who regularly deals with multiple open tabs for different purposes, Apple added just the feature for you in the new Safari: tab groups.

Think of tab groups as a mix of bookmark folders and tabs: a tab group can contain multiple open tabs, and it syncs across devices so you can find those tabs everywhere; like bookmark folders, you can give each group a unique name, but the tabs contained within it aren’t permanent links that are always reopened and recreated whenever you open the group. Instead, tab groups are a way to organize your open tabs so they don’t clutter up the default Tabs view of Safari.

Tabs from different tab groups in iOS 15.

The idea behind tab groups is easy enough: if you find yourself constantly opening a lot of tabs, and if some of those tabs are related by topic or domain, rather than storing all of them in the regular tab bar, you can send them off to a tab group, where they’ll live (and sync) separately from your other, ungrouped tabs. Therefore, tab groups are, effectively, standalone “filters” for your open tabs that help you make better sense of all the tabs you have in Safari.

As I mentioned before, tab groups can be created from the new ‘Tab Groups’ menu in Safari for iPhone, and they live in sidebar of Safari for iPad. Apple created multiple ways to manage tabs and send one or multiple tabs to a group: you can long-press or right-click the current tab to move it to an existing group, with the option of creating a new one on the fly if it doesn’t exist yet; alternatively, you can select multiple tabs and add all of them to a tab group.

Tab group management.

When you switch to a tab group, its name is displayed at the bottom of the tab overview on iPhone. On iPad, if you’re into a tab group and the sidebar isn’t shown onscreen, its name is displayed in the toolbar.

The active tab group on iPad.

Tab groups are a well thought-out feature, and it shows in the number of options you have when it comes to managing tabs inside a group. On all platforms, you can long-press a group to view all tabs inside it and click one to switch to it; you can rename groups, and you can even click a ‘Copy Links’ button to copy all of the tabs’ URLs to the clipboard, so you can paste them in other apps such as Notes and Messages.

Context menus for tab groups.

I struggled to understand the utility of tab groups initially, and although I don’t think I’m going to be a heavy user of this feature, I’ve found a use for them that has simplified my typical Safari workflow for opening frequently visited websites and researching specific topics.

I use tab groups in two different ways. The first one is treating tab groups as “launchers” for groups of related websites I check on a regular basis. I created tab groups named ‘Italian News’ and ‘Music’, which store open tabs for the homepages of Italian news websites and music blogs, respectively. Every morning when I do my usual ‘news checking’ routine, I switch to one of those tab groups, refresh each website so I don’t get an old version of those tabs, read the news, and exit out of it. Then I open the other tab group and do the same. With this method, I always have the same open tabs for those websites collected together, so I can check them contextually to the topic I want to read about without a) having to create permanent bookmarks in my Favorites bar or b) opening them alongside my other random tabs.

My tab group for Italian news.

My other use case for tab groups is research. Whenever I find myself going down the rabbit hole of researching a particular subject or purchase, I take all those tabs and move them to a tab group so they’re separate and I can continue my research at a later stage if I need to go back and do something else in Safari. For instance, I did this when I was researching the purchase of Audeze’s LCDi4 IEMs (I love them, by the way): as I kept finding reviews and articles about them, I added them to a dedicated tab group, which allowed me to revisit them over time until I was sure I wanted to buy them. When I was done reading, I closed tabs I no longer needed in the tab group, and that was it. This kind of research-intensive workflow is fairly common for me between preparing topics for podcasts, researching audiophile gear, or reading about videogames; tab groups are an ideal fit for it.

There are aspects of tab groups I would have liked to see more refined or fleshed out for power users: for instance, you cannot assign hotkeys to specific tab groups in Safari; you can’t set default preferences for tab behavior in a group (such as always reload tabs when opening the group or always opening specific domains in a particular tab group); there’s also no integration between tab groups and Shortcuts whatsoever, so you can’t automate the process of batch-opening links in a tab group. But these are minor nitpicks in the grand scheme of tab groups. For a 1.0 feature, I find tab groups to have been thoughtfully implemented in Safari, especially with their placement in the iPad sidebar. If dealing with hundreds of open tabs has always nagged you, I highly recommend giving tab groups a try.

Start Page and Smart Search Field

With iOS and iPadOS 15, Apple has taken the customizable start page introduced with Safari for macOS Big Sur last year and brought it over to iPhone and iPad. I find this a fantastic addition to Safari that has helped me tailor my browsing experience to my needs.

You can now customize the Safari start page.

In the start page for iOS and iPadOS 15, you’ll find a new ‘Edit’ button at the bottom that lets you configure the following sections:

Favorites

Reading List

Siri Suggestions

iCloud Tabs

Shared with You

Frequently Visited

Privacy Report

Each of these features can be turned off or on, and you can also rearrange them vertically if you want to tweak the default order of sections. Additionally, you can choose to sync the start page across all devices with iCloud, and you can enable a custom background image choosing from a selection of built-in wallpapers (they’re very tasteful), but you can also upload your background photo for a more personal touch.

With all these options at your disposal, the result is a highly customizable start page experience you can customize to your needs thanks to a variety of building blocks. You decide what you see when you create a new tab. For instance, I dragged Reading List towards the top, right underneath Favorites, so I can easily see what’s in my reading queue; I also turned off everything else except for iCloud Tabs since I don’t care about the Privacy Report or links from iMessage in the Shared with You section. I’m a big fan of the customizable start page, which I consider one of the best “small features” of Safari this year.

The custom start page on iPad.

The new Safari also features a refreshed smart search field with a new look for top hits and a voice search option. The latter consists of a microphone button that’s shown on the far right edge of the search field (if you have dictation enabled on your device); tap it, and you can enter voice input mode so you can dictate a search query.

I have never used this option, I’m not sure why it exists, and I wish I could turn off the microphone button so I don’t accidentally tap it. I never found myself thinking, “oh, let me dictate this Google search with my voice” instead of just typing it, but I guess Apple has data on users’ habits that suggested this could be a welcome addition to Safari. In any case, I hope an option to disable the microphone gets added to Safari’s settings eventually.

Top hits (the results you see when you start typing into the search field) have been visually updated in iOS 15: they’re now using a modern table view appearance with smaller section headers, inset-grouped tables, and new glyphs to indicate the kind of top hit they are. The new design looks fresh, and I like it.

The new design for Safari’s top hits.

Extensions

We now get to my favorite addition to Safari for iPhone and iPad this year: native Safari app extensions. Apple is bringing the same app extension technology that debuted on macOS to iOS and iPadOS 15; based on what I’ve seen from developers so far, Safari extensions will be the new “hot” category on the App Store this year, and they have the potential to dramatically improve your browsing experience – especially because Safari for iPhone and iPad never supported extensions before.

Extensions can customize the way Safari works or looks by installing visual customizations (including buttons) or enabling new browsing behaviors. Extensions for iOS and iPadOS are based on the same web technologies used to make extensions on the Mac: they’re written with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; they are installed, just like other extensions on iOS, by downloading their respective apps from the App Store; any developer of an existing browser extension for Chrome or Firefox can use Apple’s command-line tool to get started with porting the extension to Safari.

The new, native 1Password extension in Safari.

Even the permission model is the same one we’ve seen on the Mac before: when you enable an extension, you can choose to give it access to all websites or opt into the current website alone; you can also allow the extension to run “always” in Safari or restrict it to a single day of usage.

A typical permission flow for an extension running on iPhone.

Extensions cannot be automatically installed and enabled in Safari on your behalf: you’re always in control and the only way to turn on an extension is to manually go through multiple layers of permissions. It’s also important to note that setting permissions for extensions is a one-time affair: once you’ve granted an extension access to Safari, the permission will stick for as long as you keep using the extension and until you manually turn it off.

There are two different ways to enable and manage extensions in the new Safari. In Settings ⇾ Safari, you’ll find a new Extensions page that lists your content blockers (now also considered extensions) and new Safari extensions.

You can enable extensions in Settings ⇾ Safari ⇾ Extensions.

If you want, you can enable extensions and review permissions for each in Settings. Alternatively, you can enable extensions in the aA menu of Safari under ‘Manage Extensions’, which lists all the extensions you have currently available on your device. Once you’ve enabled at least one extension and gone through the process of granting it the permissions it requires, you’ll see a new puzzle icon appear next to the ‘aA’ button in Safari.

Enabling extensions inside Safari itself.

The puzzle icon signals you have at least one extension enabled in Safari. On iPhone, all the extensions you’ve enabled will be shown (in blue, if they’re active and they’ve been granted the correct permissions) in the aA menu:

The puzzle icon indicates you have extensions enabled, which you can find in this menu.

It’s slightly different on iPad. Extensions can install custom buttons in the Safari address bar on iPad, but only up to two extension buttons can be displayed simultaneously next to other icons in the address bar.

With two extensions enabled, you’ll see extension buttons in the address bar.

As soon as you enable a third extension that has a custom icon, the other buttons will disappear and the puzzle icon will gain a numeric badge that shows you the number of active extensions.

You can tap the puzzle button to see a popover with all your enabled extensions and click one from there.

The important aspect to understand about Safari extensions is that, like on macOS, they can modify all sorts of Safari behaviors in ways that were never possible before with extensions in the share sheet.

There are extensions that can access the full contents of webpages and modify those inline. There are extensions that can display custom UI with dialogs and popups inside Safari. There are extensions that can inject their own UI into the current page, such as 1Password’s new extension, which brings native auto-fill and password generation for login fields to iPhone and iPad. Other extensions can override Safari’s default start page and allow you to install a third-party start page. You can install extensions that automatically redirect URLs you click to another domain, such as those that remove AMP links from Google search results.

This is uncharted territory for iPhone and iPad users: we’ve gotten used to thinking of Safari as a “static” experience: what Apple provides is all we can get from Safari. Extensions change that equation, and it can be overwhelming at first if you dive right in and install all kinds of extensions from the App Store. This is why I think it can be useful to mention a few examples of extensions I’ve been using over the past couple of months so you can get an idea of just how big a deal these will be for heavy Safari users.

Let me start with a custom extension we built just for my review and the MacStories team. A few months ago, I teamed up with Finn Voorhees to create Highlights, a native web clipper for Safari that can be installed as a Safari extension. With Highlights, you can highlight text on webpages, click the extension button, and save your selection as a clipping in the app via the extension in Safari. When you click the extension, you’ll be presented with a popover on iPad and a half-sheet on iPhone: this is one of the system limitations imposed by Apple on extensions for iOS. While extensions running on iPad can get more “creative” in terms of popups they can display on top of Safari, on iPhone they’ll always be shown as sheets covering half the screen. You’re going to see this kind of extension UI every time on iPhone.

Our Highlights extension running on iPhone.

Highlights on iPad.

Once you’ve collected a bunch of text highlights using the extension, you can launch the full Highlights app to copy them as Markdown-formatted text to the clipboard or, alternatively, export them as a single Markdown text file. While Highlights is a proof-of-concept (albeit a useful one for me!), it should give you an idea of what to expect: prepare to see all kinds of note-taking apps for iPhone and iPad add native web clippers as Safari extensions since developers will be able to show custom save dialogs and access the full contents of a webpage.

Want to Beta Test Highlights?

If you want to help beta test Highlights and get early access to the extension, join Club MacStories+ or Club Premier.

In our Discord server, you’ll find a special ‘Beta Beat’ channel for Highlights, where you’ll be able to submit feedback and feature requests to its developer, Finn. You’ll also join a passionate community of fellow Club members who talk about the latest Apple news, participate in our community events, exchange useful tips, and more.

You can find out more about the Club MacStories+ Discord server here, and check out our Plans page to sign up or upgrade to Club MacStories+ or Club Premier.

I’ve also been testing Overamped, an amazing extension that does something I wish Apple did itself: with this extension, AMP links will be automatically blocked in Google search results; when you click a result, even if the page defaults to loading the AMP version, Overamped will force it to open with its canonical URL instead. In a nice touch, Overamped even tells you how many links it replaced on the current search results page. I expect this category of extensions to quickly become a popular one on the App Store.

No more AMP results thanks to Overamped. Good riddance.

Extensions that automatically modify the appearance of webpages will also turn out to be quite popular in my opinion. An example of this category is Noir: this extension automatically applies a dark mode color scheme to websites that don’t offer one out of the box, and it does so by analyzing a website’s light appearance and inverting it in a way that is pleasing to eyes and consistent with the original page’s aesthetic. Once enabled and set to ‘Auto’ mode, Noir works in the background at all times, altering the appearance of websites that don’t have a native dark mode by changing colors on the fly as soon you load the page.

Your favorite website doesn’t have a dark mode? Not a problem with Noir.

You will also find more specialized extensions that are designed for particular websites. Tweaks for Twitter by Jeff Johnson, for example, comes loaded with a set of options for the twitter.com website, such as removing promoted tweets, changing fonts and colors, or hiding parts of content on the main timeline. This is nothing new if you’ve ever used custom stylesheets or Greasemonkey scripts in desktop browsers before; now, however, you can get the same customization in Safari for iPhone and iPad by installing extensions natively and securely from the App Store.

Tweaks for Twitter may not have the best settings popup you’ve ever seen, but it gets the job done.

Before (left) and after Tweaks for Twitter.

Third-party password managers will also greatly benefit from Safari app extensions: for the first time, the folks at AgileBits have been able to create a full-blown 1Password extension for Safari that supports rich interactions inside the browser, can display a 1Password icon inside username and password fields, and even lets you save or update logins without opening the main app. This is especially impressive on iPad, where the 1Password extension looks exactly like its powerful macOS counterpart:

The 1Password extension supports suggestions in login fields, auto-fill, and a full-blown popup to browse your entire vault while in Safari.

You’ll come across extensions that take over the default Safari start page, too: with Beautiful New Tabs, for instance, you’ll see good-looking photos from Unsplash or Instagram as the background of a custom start page that shows you the weather for any location around the world. You cannot mix and match elements from Apple’s start page with third-party start pages, which is a downside of this type of extension, but I have a feeling developers will come up with all sorts of interesting ideas for alternative start pages that will offer functionality we could only dream of in iOS 14. Imagine, for instance, an interactive start page offered by your favorite task manager with a summary of your schedule, or a start page filled with the latest headlines from an RSS reader.

A custom start page.

In my tests with dozens of different Safari extensions for iPhone and iPad, a common thread quickly surfaced: as with share sheet extensions and custom keyboards before, Apple didn’t provide developers with a built-in solution to explain to users how to enable extensions. For this reason, every developer is doing a different flavor of “extension onboarding” that details the necessary steps to enable their extension. This is not an elegant solution, and I hope Apple can design a unified, intuitive flow for this process in the future.

Every developer has to do these instructions differently. There should be a better way.

Given the user base of Safari for iPhone and iPad, I have a strong feeling that extensions will be the App Store category to keep an eye on for the foreseeable future. Thousands of them will be released in a relatively short amount of time. Some of those extensions will be genuinely useful and will radically change how we use Safari; others will be fun but ultimately useless gimmicks that will be quickly forgotten.

I’ve been lucky enough to be able to test dozens of extensions lately, but I know I’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg here. I wasn’t expecting Apple to unlock this kind of desktop-class functionality in Safari this year, but now that I’ve experienced firsthand what extensions can do, I can’t wait to see what third-party developers will offer on the App Store. We’re going to highlight the best ones we’ve found on MacStories soon.

Safari: The Details

Let’s round up some of the hidden and interesting details in Safari for iOS and iPadOS 15:

The new download flow. When you download a file in Safari for iOS 15, a download indicator appears in the address bar next to the aA menu, showing your download progress. When the download is finished, the button turns blue. You can then tap the menu to find a ‘Downloads’ button that shows you ongoing and completed downloads from the web; as before, these get automatically saved to Files in a location of your choosing, which you can configure in Settings ⇾ Safari ⇾ Downloads.

The new Safari download flow in iOS 15.

Website tinting. If you want to give Safari a bit more personality, you can enable a ‘Show Color in Tab Bar’ option in Settings that lets the browser use the key color of each website’s header as the background color for the top toolbar on both iPhone and iPad. This visual effect is particularly prominent on iPad, where custom website colors actually take over the entire top toolbar, including the tab bar:

Somehow, I don’t think a green Safari is a good idea.

While I thought this UI mode was fun and different at first, I’ve since disabled it as I found it made it harder for me to read text, tell tabs apart, and see the blue icons of active extensions. Some website colors just do not work well as background colors for a toolbar, and they negatively impact the legibility of an iPad app that is already struggling with visual clarity. Give it a try in Settings ⇾ Safari if you want to, but I do not recommend it.

Pull to refresh. On both the iPhone and iPad, the new Safari supports pull to refresh. I don’t use this often since I prefer to refresh with ⌘R or via the dedicated refresh button in the address bar, but I guess it’s a nice option to have if you’re accustomed to reloading apps this way and have been wishing for a similar gesture in the browser.

The landscape tab bar on iPhone. If you’re one of the few people using Safari in landscape mode on iPhone, I think you’ll be extremely pleased to know that Apple added a setting to disable the tab bar in landscape. This is where I think the argument in favor of saving precious vertical pixels actually makes some sense. However, because I never use Safari in landscape except once a year for these reviews, I don’t really have a strong opinion about this.

No tab bar in landscape for this iPhone.

Reminders

We covered the most important change to Apple’s Reminders app – the ability to tag reminders and create powerful smart lists – in a standalone story you can read here. In addition to smart lists, there are other smaller improvements to Reminders worth pointing out this year.

External keyboard support has been extended with new commands for navigation and handy shortcuts such as ‘Mark All Overdue to Today’. Thanks to iPadOS’ new keyboard shortcut menu, commands are also easier to discover.

The app’s natural language parsing engine for dates and times has also been greatly improved in iOS 15 with a better understanding of more complex dates and repeating times. To give you a sense of the new dates you can type in Reminders when creating a new task, these are all valid strings the app will recognize:

“end of November”

“second Monday of the month”

“Sunday night”

“every other weekend”

“every two mondays”

Reminders’ updated natural language parsing. Autocorrect doesn’t seem much smarter though.

There are surely more permutations of these commands you can try, but you get the idea. Of course, these natural language dates also work when adding reminders via voice in Siri.

Speaking of Siri, as part of the assistant’s new Announce Notifications feature in iOS 15, you can choose to have Siri announce reminders that are due when you’re wearing headphones. The mere thought of Siri announcing notifications in my AirPods gives me anxiety, so I turned it off immediately, but I understand if some of you out there may find it useful.

Lastly, Apple added a native solution to clear completed reminders from the app without having to use a custom shortcut. When you show completed reminders in a list (More ⇾ Show Completed), you’ll find a new ‘Clear’ button that lets you clear completed items older than a month, six months, or a year, as well as all completed reminders at once.

Calendar

The only change to the Calendar app in iOS and iPadOS 15 relates to the pandemic and how frequently we’ve been working remotely from home for the past 18 months.

When adding a new event in the Calendar app now, you’ll see a new ‘Video Call’ option underneath the Location field. The FaceTime app is a default choice for scheduling events that will take place as video calls, but the Calendar app can also recognize links for scheduled calls from popular services such as Zoom and WebEx. The event inspector already displayed a phone icon for events that had an associated call URL before; in iOS 15, you’ll find a new camera icon, a dedicated ‘Join’ button for the call, and a share button to quickly copy the call’s link or share it with other people.

WebEx is among the supported services in the updated Calendar app.

This kind of feature isn’t new – Fantastical added a similar option in 2020 – but it makes sense for Apple to add web call detection to the built-in Calendar app given our current reality. I like the addition of a proper ‘Join’ button and the fact that raw Zoom or WebEx URLs are no longer displayed in the ‘Notes’ field of an event.

Mail

Speaking of the pandemic and working remotely, if you were hoping that would convince Apple to finally update the Mail app for iPhone and iPad with more modern features and integrations…well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but it didn’t.

There is one addition to Mail worth noting this year: Mail Privacy Protection. Once this setting is enabled (you can find it in Settings ⇾ Mail ⇾ Privacy Protection ⇾ Protect Mail Activity), Mail will hide your IP address and load remote content privately in the background, even if you don’t open a message. I don’t want to get into the technicalities of this feature (which are explained in Settings anyway), but long story short: Apple wants to protect your privacy by thwarting common industry technologies such as invisible tracking pixels, which can collect information about you and your Mail behavior such as whether you opened a message, where and when, and if you forward your message to someone else. If Mail Privacy Protection is enabled, remote content downloaded by Mail will be routed through multiple proxy servers, so the sender won’t be able to know your exact IP address, but they’ll only be able to collect generic information about a particular email message.

Enabling Mail Privacy Protection.

I say this as someone who runs a weekly newsletter powered by Mailchimp for which it can be genuinely useful to know whether a specific user received an opened a message or not: I welcome this move, and it’s why we’ve been investing on the open web with Club MacStories rather than rely solely on newsletters. The newsletter and advertising industries has gone overboard with invasive tracking measures that don’t respect user privacy and collect too much data that is, quite frankly, not necessary. I applaud Apple’s decision to go after these shady practices, and I hope more email clients will follow a similar approach in the future.

That said, I can’t help but feel Apple could have a done a lot more to upgrade Mail for iPhone and iPad users this year. The company seems to recognize that Mail can’t continue to be the same app forever, and they’re introducing the ability for third-party developers to enhance its functionality with native extensions…but only on macOS this year. I assume that the company will follow a similar pattern to Safari extensions with this feature, so I hope we’ll be talking about Mail extensions for iPhone and iPad in this review next year.

Voice Memos

I’ve been highlighting this point for the past few years, and I still believe Voice Memos continues to be a fascinating playground for audio technologies Apple will eventually roll into the Podcasts app. Following last year’s addition of an option to enhance the quality of voice recordings, Voice Memos for iOS 15 is gaining a redesigned ‘Options’ screen with a brand new audio effect: skip silence.

You know where these controls would be nice? In a podcast app.

With skip silence enabled, Voice Memos will analyze your recordings and automatically skip over playback of any long gaps in the audio. You may have seen this feature before in podcast clients such as Overcast and Castro; Apple’s implementation is similar to those apps, if only a tad more aggressive in cutting out silent parts of recordings to speed them up. Overall though, the effect sounds pretty natural and I’d recommend leaving it enabled to save a bit of time when listening back to recordings.

Additionally, you can manually control playback speed now using a slider with seven different levels of audio playback speed.

I don’t use Voice Memos often, but I think the app offers a compelling package for students and anyone else who needs to record and transcribe lectures or meeting notes. Between the app’s excellent support for multi-column on iPad, folders, and extended audio effects, I could see Voice Memos become just as popular as Notes for a certain category of users.

But really, I’m just waiting for these audio options to become available in the Podcasts app too.

Translate

It’s a big year for Apple’s newest built-in app: after its debut in iOS 14, Translate has arrived on iPad, gained a new conversation view and support for automatic translations, and, more importantly, also turned into a system-wide feature accessible from anywhere on iOS or iPad without launching the standalone app at all.

Let’s start from the latter, which is a remarkable example of Apple’s cross-pollination between apps and services throughout the operating system. Any time you select text in any text field, webpage, or message in the Messages app, you’ll find a new Translate button to perform instant, contextual translations for the text you just highlighted. The translation popup offers options to change languages inline, copy the translated text, add it to your favorites, or continue viewing the translation in the main Translate app. This works from anywhere, for any language supported by Apple’s Translate app.

Transate anywhere in iOS 15.

For multilingual speakers, system-wide translation is an incredible addition to iOS 15 that makes text accessible as much as Live Text in the Camera does. It’s the kind of functionality that I find empowering for a lot of people, and it will also make for a fantastic learning tool if you often find yourself dealing with content in a foreign language and would like a way to quickly translate it.

Translate is also available on iPad now, and it’s pretty much what you’d expect from a larger version of the iPhone app. There’s a sidebar to navigate different views of the app, and you can see more text onscreen without scrolling. It’s not groundbreaking, but it gets the job done.

Translate for iPad.

I’m more intrigued by the new face to face view that’s been added to Translate and the app’s new auto translate option. In iOS 15, Apple added a new tab called Conversations to the app that lets you choose between two distinct views for when you want to communicate with another person in a different language: side by side and face to face. In side by side mode, conversations happen in a message-like UI where you can see speech bubbles for dictated text and their inline translation; thanks to language detection, when the other person says something, their dictated text will sit on the opposite end of the transcript, just like an iMessage thread, which is a fun way to visualize a conversation happening in two different languages.

The new side by side view in Translate.

The face to face view is even more interesting: if you’re chatting face to face with someone else and you don’t speak the same language, you can now enable this new split screen mode so that each person can see the conversation from their own side on your iPhone. I can imagine this view being especially handy if you’re a tourist in a different country and wanting to ask someone for information or help. I’m honestly surprised Apple didn’t think of this mode last year since it makes total sense for the app.

The new face to face view.

Also in the Conversations view, you’ll find a new Auto Translate toggle under the More menu. When this option is enabled, you won’t have to tap a microphone button to start translating speech; instead, Translate will detect when you start speaking and when you stop, so the other person can just follow up and respond in the conversation.

Weather

Apple’s purchase of Dark Sky is starting to pay off: although the shutdown of the Dark Sky API has been delayed to 2022, we’re starting to see how the acquisition of the popular weather service is making the built-in Weather app richer and more useful around the world.

The first thing you’ll notice about the Weather app is its striking new design. Apple completely redesigned the Weather app with beautifully animated backgrounds (available for iPhones with the A12 chip and later) that support thousands of variations between different weather conditions.

The updated Weather app.

Weather was already a pretty and “fun” app to look at before, and it inspired a whole generation of realistic weather utilities on the App Store, but Apple was able to step up their game considerably with the iOS 15 redesign. More than the realistic animations, it’s the details that make the new Weather app stand out: rain droplets bounce off the top section of the weather forecast as if it was a windowsill; snow accumulates on it until it falls off the edges of the forecast; stars in the night sky glow with greater intensity than before against a more realistic and pleasant dark blue background. If you thought the Weather app looked nice before, wait until you see how Apple redesigned it for iOS 15.

It’s not just about looks, though: Apple extended the Weather app with new data points and smart layouts that change throughout the day based on weather conditions. The daily forecast at the top of the screen now features a contextual summary of what you should expect for the rest of the day; the 10-day forecast below it is more spaced out and features redesigned weather symbols along with colored bars to indicate low and high temperatures for each day, both of which I like.

More data points in Weather for iOS 15.

If you keep scrolling past the 10-day forecast, you’ll see that additional data points have been turned from a simple text list into nicer, more visual tiles that present more details than iOS 14. Notably, Apple added support for full-screen, high-resolution weather maps showing precipitation, air quality13, and temperature in iOS 15. I never use these myself, but I appreciate their design and how the precipitation one has an animated 12-hour timeline to see how the forecast will evolve for the selected area. These maps are featured in large tiles underneath the 10-day forecast, which will only be presented if the current weather conditions for a particular location demand it – i.e. if it’s raining in the location you opened, you’ll see a precipitation map featured prominently under the forecast.

Maps in the new Weather app.

There’s also support for notifications, another staple of Dark Sky that has found its way to Apple’s Weather app. Unfortunately, as was the case with Dark Sky before, notifications are only available in Ireland, UK, and US, so I haven’t been able to test them myself.

I’m impressed with the new design of the Weather app for iOS 15, but I’m also surprised by two aspects Apple didn’t deliver on this year. The widget-like data points displayed in the app (for things like humidity, sunrise, sunset, etc.) would be perfect as actual Home Screen widgets, but they’re nowhere to be found there. I’d like Weather to offer a richer selection of widgets in iOS 16 to go beyond the standard forecast.

And then, of course, there’s the iPad app. Or lack thereof. If you want to check the weather on your iPad without getting a third-party app, Apple still wants you to use a website. It really is true what they say – you can’t get real weather done on an iPad. I’m sure they’ll fix it with the next iPad Pro, though.

Music

Unfortunately, I find myself writing a smaller section than I would have liked to for the Music app in iOS 15. While Spotify is still innovating on all fronts with new ways to find music you’ve recently listened to, better and more personalized algorithmic playlists, and blazing fast performance for search, Apple added a total of two new features to the Music app this year.

First, when you long-press a song in your Up Next queue, you’ll now find a new ‘Move to Top’ button in the context menu that lets you quickly put a song at the top of the queue.

Second, there’s a new Shared with You section in the Listen Now tab that aggregates Apple Music links shared with you in the Messages app and lets you jump back to the original message with one tap. This is my favorite implementation of Shared with You since my friends and I tend to share a lot of music links on a weekly basis, so I almost see this as “Reading List, but for music”, which totally works for me.

Shared with You in Music.

Now, I refuse to believe that Apple thinks these two features are everything the Music app needed this year in order to compete with Spotify. I’m willing to forgive the Music team given the rollout of lossless playback and Spatial Audio earlier this year and the work they’ve been putting on the Classical Music category with the acquisition of Primephonic. I expect, however, to see more substantial updates to Music over the next several months and in iOS 16, particularly when it comes to playlist management and sorting, smart playlists, faster search, and a slimmed-down, more efficient Listen Now tab.

Files

Strap in, because this is a big one, too: there are two new features worth noting in Files this year.

The first one is “band selection” with the pointer on iPad, which I’ve already covered in Other iPadOS Changes.

Then, in theory, you should be able to search for documents contents by typing a keyword in the search field and selecting the ‘Contains…’ filter. I say “in theory” because, as of the latest version of iOS and iPadOS 15, I see this filter in Files search, but it’s not working for me.

Searching for file contents isn’t working for me.

Sadly, this is it for Files. Apple didn’t add support for Smart Folders, despite their presence in Notes and Reminders; they didn’t add support for shortcuts as Quick Actions, despite their availability in the Finder for macOS Monterey; they didn’t add support for versions, despite the fact they’ve existed for years on the Mac.

There’s always iOS 16, I suppose.

Podcasts

Very little has changed in Apple’s heavily criticized new version of the Podcasts app that launched earlier this year alongside Apple Podcasts Subscriptions. In fact, the “changes” in iOS 15 seemingly revolve around an updated recommendation engine that should provide you with more personalized suggestions for podcasts and channels.

Yeah, I guess I might like these shows.

Podcasts featured show recommendations before, so I’m not sure what, exactly, should make this updated version more accurate than iOS 14. In my experience with the app, I got a handful of podcast recommendations based on my listening activity that were pretty accurate but not spot-on, plus a bunch of channel recommendations that just felt like a way to showcase random creators who have channels and subscriptions. If I were Apple, I’d focus on simplifying library and queue management for users as well as bringing audio effects from Voice Memos to Podcasts.

Passwords

Okay, I know what you’re thinking: we’re all surprised by this, but the Passwords feature of Settings on iOS and iPadOS isn’t technically an app. But that’s the thing: as I’ve been writing for the past few years, it really should become a standalone Passwords app given its feature set and importance to the Apple ecosystem. Passwords’ potential remains largely untapped as a simple section of the Settings app. So, for this reason, I’ve decided I’m going to start covering the Passwords feature in the Apps chapter of my review until my wish comes true.

This year, Passwords has received support for what was, arguably, its last big missing feature compared to third-party password managers: support for two-factor verification codes. Setting up codes in Passwords couldn’t be easier: under a new ‘Account Options’ section for a login you’ve saved, you’ll find a new ‘Set Up Verification Code’ button. Tap it, and you’ll be presented with the ability to either manually enter a setup key or scan a QR code.

If you’ve ever set up two-factor authentication codes for your logins in 1Password, you know how this works. Apple also says that if a website offers a QR code, you should be able to long-press it in Safari and start the verification code setup from there, but that didn’t work for me when I added two-factor authentication to my Twitter account. Once a code is set up, you’ll find it in Passwords, and it’ll auto-fill in Safari and compatible apps via the QuickType bar, just like usernames and passwords.

You can now set up verification codes in Passwords.

I’m glad Apple added native support for verification codes to Passwords since more people will be able to use it as their only password manager now. I don’t plan on moving away from 1Password anytime soon because I use it with my family and team, but I continue to be impressed by the system integration of Passwords, and I hope it finally graduates to a full app in the near future. The time feels right for Password to leave its Settings nest and try something bolder.

Find My

There are two features worth noting in the Find My app for iOS 15.

First, Apple added separation alerts for when you’re leaving a specific device or item behind. Literally labeled ‘Notify When Left Behind’, this option is available for devices running the latest OS update or firmware, and you can turn it on to be notified if you’re leaving a particular location without taking a device or Find My-compatible item with you. For instance, you may want to rely on these alerts if you’re leaving your iPhone or keys behind; as soon as you exit a geofence around your current location, you’ll get a notification that you left an item behind.

You can now be notified when you leave a device behind.

In a nice touch, you can exclude locations from being considered by Find My. Maybe you don’t want to be notified if you leave your laptop at home or at the office; in that case, you can manually enter an address or choose from a list of suggested locations (based on your history) and exclude it.

The second addition to Find My this year is the ability to leave an iPhone in a “findable” state even after it’s powered off. You can read more about this, and optionally disable it, in the shutdown screen before powering off an iPhone.

My understanding of this feature is that Apple primarily added it for all those times when your iPhone’s battery is about to give out. Before the iPhone shuts down, iOS 15 will leave just a tiny bit of battery available to keep the device in an ultra low-power state that will make it findable on the Find My network for days, not hours, as some people initially suspected. This should also come in handy if an iPhone gets stolen and quickly powered off to take it offline; with iOS 15, unless the option is manually disengaged, the iPhone will continue to show up on the Find My network by default.

Camera

In addition to Focus and Notifications, the other new iOS 15 feature that will likely push millions of people to upgrade is found in the Camera app, and it’s called Live Text.

With Live Text, your iPhone’s camera turns into a real-time scanner that can recognize text anywhere, in multiple languages, as you’re holding your iPhone’s camera up to a page, sign, book, or whatever may contain some text. Live Text works offline with on-device processing, and it’s been integrated system-wide in the Photos app, Quick Look previews, Safari, and more. Live Text is, in my opinion, the most technically remarkable feature of iOS 15; once you see it in action, you’ll want to have it on your phone too.

Live Text is the most technically remarkable feature of iOS 15.

Here’s how Live Text works: every time you’re taking a picture of something that has text in it (we’ve all done this with receipts, documents, business cards, etc.), and if you have an iPhone XS or later, you’ll see the viewfinder focus on recognized text – in real-time – and a document button appear in the lower-right corner of the Camera UI. Press the button, and you’ll freeze the frame for the recognized text.

Live Text in the Camera.

This would be cool enough as a way to freeze-frame documents and inspect them more carefully, but Apple went far beyond that with Live Text. The text recognized by the Camera is actual text you can select, copy, share, and even translate inline with the system-wide translation offered by the Translate app. Imagine this common scenario: you take a picture of a sign or menu in a foreign country, and you need to understand what it means. Previously, you would have had to go find a third-party for this on the App Store, or maybe run a manual Google Translate query.

With iOS 15 and Live Text, here’s what you do: hold up the menu in front of you, tap the document button, then tap Translate in the Live Text preview. Done.

Inline translation powered by Live Text.

Because Live Text returns plain, selectable text in an instant, consider all the potential variations of the workflow I described above. You can use Live Text as built-in OCR in the Camera app to take a picture of a full document, select all its text, and copy it to the clipboard. You no longer need a scanner app for that. You could scan the page of a book you’re reading, highlight a specific word, and find out its meaning with the Look Up button. You don’t need a third-party dictionary app for that anymore, either. And the best part is: when you freeze-frame with Live Text, you don’t have to save the picture to your photo library: you can just select text, do what you need to do with it, and dismiss Live Text without saving anything.

You can use Live Text to select text, copy it, translate it, look it up, and even share it with extensions.

The integration of Live Text with the live Camera preview is outstanding, but it doesn’t stop there. Live Text has been integrated throughout iOS as a way to find, select, and share text in multiple places and apps.

First, there’s the Photos app. In any photo that contains text, you can just hold down your finger (or pointer, since this part also works on iPad) to select text and display the copy and paste menu with additional options. This used to require dedicated OCR apps; now, you can do just do in Photos by dragging your finger across an image. If you want to see all the text recognized in a photo, you can tap the Live Text button in the lower-right corner, which will highlight all text found in the image.

In Photos, you can highlight text found in images and perform the same actions supported in the Camera app.

What’s even more impressive here is that data detectors, a long-standing iOS feature that was most recently adopted by Notes handwriting, are fully supported by Live Text too. This means that if a phone number, URL, street address, flight number, date, or other “special” bits of text are found by Live Text, they will also be underlined so you can tap on them and take action immediately. You see where this is going? If you’ve taken a picture of a business card, you can tap the phone number and call it from Photos thanks to Live Text. Taken a screenshot of a date? Tap it in Photos, and you can create a calendar event for it. You can even long-press URLs you have photographed to preview them with a Safari view inside Photos.

With data detectors, underlined text found by Live Text becomes a tappable item that integrates with other iOS features. In this case, I was able to preview an address and a URL inside Photos.

You don’t have to save an image to the Photos app to access these data detectors. By far, the easiest way to use Live Text in iOS and iPadOS 15 is to take a screenshot of something, open the Markup screenshot UI, then tap Live Text. All data detectors will work here, and when you’re done, you can just delete the screenshot.

Live Text integration in the screenshot markup UI.

This kind of seamless integration between hardware and software – the on-device processing, data detectors, text selection, translations – is where Apple’s ecosystem strategy shines.

But I’m not done. Text found by Live Text in Photos can be searched from Spotlight. If you remember having taken a picture of something a while back, you can just pull down on your Home Screen, search, and find the matching image in Photos in a couple seconds. It’s pretty amazing.

Live Text results in Spotlight.

What if you need to transcribe the text at which you’re looking, but don’t want to do so manually using the iPhone’s keyboard? Apple thought of this aspect too for iOS 15. Tap your finger once in any editable text field in any app, and you’ll see a new Live Text button in the copy and paste menu (it’s also labeled ‘Scan Text’). Press it, and the keyboard will turn into a camera view that scans for text in real-time and updates it inside the text field as you move the camera around. You can tap an ‘Insert’ button to confirm scanned text, or you can freeze-frame it and select text manually. This is a fantastic time-saving tool that is best appreciated in action:

Inserting text into a text field using the camera and Live Text. Magic.

Live Text has even been integrated with Quick Look previews in apps and images embedded in webpages open in Safari. In the browser, you can just swipe your finger over any image that contains text, and you’ll be able to select it; data detectors work for Safari images too. Alternatively, you can long-press an image and hit ‘Show Text’ to open a standalone Quick Look preview for the image featuring a standard Live Text button.

You can select text directly in images embedded on webpages.

Alternatively, you can tap ‘Show Text’ in Safari…

…which will open a preview with highlighted text.

If you don’t want to use Live Text, you can disable it in Settings ⇾ General ⇾ Language and Region.

In case it’s not clear by now, I think Live Text is an incredible feature that Apple engineers should be proud of. Live Text isn’t just “cool” (although it is!) – it’s a genuinely useful, empowering feature that will help a lot of people who, for a variety of reasons, need an easier way to scan, type, or paste text.

I love Live Text. If you need help convincing a relative to update to iOS 15, run a demo of Live Text for them.

Other Camera Changes

There are some other changes to the Camera app in iOS 15 I want to point out:

Zoom during QuickTake video. When you’re shooting a QuickTake video by holding down the shutter button, you can now swipe up and down to zoom. You’ve probably been doing this for years now with Instagram and Snapchat. Now you can do it with the Camera app too. Which means this kind of video is now possible:

Ginger would probably be upset if she knew about this video.

New UI for scanning QR codes. There’s a brand new, more powerful interface for scanning QR codes in the Camera app that lets you preview the content of a code without opening it in the associated app. Apple did this by adding a badge that, for instance, shows you the domain of a URL-based code or the name of a contact embedded in the code. There’s also a new QR button in the lower-right corner that appears when codes are recognized by the Camera, which you can press to access a context menu with different options. These new features make the Camera the best QR code scanner you can use on iOS – even better than Apple’s own, built-in Code Scanner app.

Scanning QR codes in iOS 15.

Preserve settings for exposure, night mode, and portrait zoom. If you want to keep your exposure adjustment, night mode, or portrait zoom permanently set to a specific mode, you can now do so from the Preserve Settings screen of Settings ⇾ Camera. Notably, this lets you keep night mode persistently disabled if you never want to use it.

Photos

Besides Live Text, the most relevant changes to Photos this year involve integration with Look Up and, at long last, the ability to view rich metadata for images inside the app.

Tap the new ‘i’ button or swipe up on a photo, and you’ll see the new metadata panel. This feature has long been available on macOS, and it’s now on iPhone and iPad too.14 You can view the filename of an image, its timestamp, file format, location, and even camera model and lens used to capture it. For the first time, Apple is exposing EXIF metadata natively in the Photos app, and I’ve enjoyed being able to easily double-check whether a great photo in my library was taken with the wide or telephoto camera, for example.

The new info panel in Photos for iOS 15.

On iPadOS 15, the panel is floating and resizable (see the pulling indicator). Could this kind of floating accessory become an API for developers next year?

The Info panel also lets you manually adjust dates and locations: this is particularly useful for old photos that may not have metadata attached or pictures that don’t have GPS data embedded inside them. Now you can add, remove, and modify dates and locations with a native ‘Adjust’ button in Photos

Adjusting photo metadata.

Notably, the metadata panel even tells you if an image was saved from a particular app on your device. This is part of a broader initiative in Photos for iOS 15, which can now identify the “source app” used to save a photo in your library and allow you to search for them. Type ‘Safari’ in Photos’ search field, for instance, and you’ll find all images saved from the web; type ‘Discord’, and you’ll find all the silly memes your friends sent you that you also saved.

You can view the source app behind a photo in your library with iOS 15.

The same feature also works for camera names: type ‘iPhone’ in search, and Photos will let you browse images captured from specific iPhone models. I like this option as a way to quickly compare photos across multiple generations of iPhones.

Searching photos by camera model.

The other noteworthy addition is the integration between Photos and Look Up. According to Apple, the system’s Look Up engine can now find information such as popular art, books, landmarks around the world, flowers, and breeds of pets in your photos. Results are, as you’d expect, fairly hit or miss, but when Look Up works, it’s quite impressive. I was able to find the names of paintings I photographed at the Louvre museum years ago, confirm that my friends’ dog Wendy is, indeed, a Golden Retriever, and read Wikipedia’s entry for the Colosseum, which was featured in some of my photos.

Look Up results tend to be either spot-on or hilariously wrong.

When Look Up – which is powered by Siri knowledge – doesn’t know what’s in an image, results tend to be pretty generic and not that useful. My dog Ginger, for example, isn’t of any particular breed, but Look Up insists on showing my entries for Vizsla and Dachsund, neither of which looks anything like Ginger. There are also similar images from the web, which are…somewhat random, to be honest, so I’m not sure why they’re there. Still, it’s fun to play around with Look Up and see what it discovers in the Photos app.

Other Photos Changes

There are some other changes to the Photos app in iOS 15 worth covering:

Shared with You. By integrating with Messages’s Shared with You functionality, the app can show you photos shared with you alongside other images in your library. In theory, Shared with You should surface photos you care about, such as the ones where you’re also the subject, but I turned this off immediately: the way I see it, my photo library is mine, and I don’t want photos sent by my contacts to end up in it. You can turn off Shared with You for Photos from Settings ⇾ Messages ⇾ Shared with You; alternatively, you can keep it enabled but filter what you see in Photos by tapping More ⇾ Your Photos Only in the app.

You can view images Shared with You in the Photos app, but you can also filter those out.

Updates to the photo picker. In iOS 15, apps that request access to the native photo picker can now configure it for ordered selection with numeric badges. This can be especially useful for those times when you want to upload photos to a service in a specific order. The Photos picker in the Messages app now uses this method in iOS 15.

Improved people recognition. According to Apple, the Photos app can now detect people in extreme poses, wearing accessories, or with a partially-occluded face. Maybe I’m not cool enough to have photos of people in extreme poses on my iPhone, but I haven’t been able to tell the difference from iOS 14 here.

Open photos from Spotlight. You can now search for photos that match specific metadata (or text found via Live Text) from Spotlight. When you click an image from search results, it opens inline with a full-screen preview, and there’s a button to reopen it directly in the Photos app.

Photo results in Spotlight.

Updates to Memories. Apple continues to invest a lot of engineering and marketing resources on Memories, the feature of the For You page that lets you generate animated slideshows from your photos and videos. I’ve never seen a single person in real life use this functionality, but it has to be popular, otherwise I don’t know why Apple would care about it so much.

In iOS 15, a new option called Memory Mixes lets you try out different soundtracks for a memory video, and you can even change the appearance of the memory with effects called Memory Looks. For the first time, you can also choose any song from Apple Music as the soundtrack for a memory, but the system won’t allow you to share a video with Apple Music songs in them due to copyright reasons.

Memory Mixes and Looks.

The company also claims “expert film and TV music curators” selected a set of default songs for Memories, which are combined with your music tastes, the contents of your photos, their original date, and their location to recommend songs that where popular when and where you captured an image or video.

I don’t know how to put this: either these curators need a crash course in music industry news, or the algorithm is way off on my iPhone. For a memory video created for WWDC 2019, the Memory Mixes feature suggested Lenny Kravitz’s 1991 song Always on the Run and Eurythmics’ 1983 hit Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This). Let’s just say that my iPhone’s Neural Engine was feeling nostalgic and wrap it up here.

Messages

Much to my surprise, changes to the Messages app this year do not improve upon the confusing thread interface launched last year, performance of search, or the way iMessage deals with group chats and voice messages. Instead, we’re only getting some Memoji updates and a system-wide feature Apple is heavily pushing as an iMessage-exclusive perk this year: Shared with You.

Shared with You

Think of Shared with You as an inbox for things your friends send you on iMessage that is scattered throughout the system and split up across multiple apps. Your spouse sent you a link to a TV show on Apple TV+? That link ends up in the Shared with You section of the TV app. Your roommate discovered a cool new band and sent you a link to their EP on iMessage? That link will be featured in the Shared with You section of the Music app. And so forth for all the apps that support Shared with You in iOS 15, which are:

Music

TV

Safari

Photos

Podcasts

News

The idea behind Shared with You is ingenious, and it fits with Apple’s broader vision for its ecosystem in that iMessage serves as an aggregator for links to different media services all managed by Apple. I think it’s a clever idea; I’m just not sure how useful it’ll be in practice.

I’ve already covered how Shared with You appears in other apps, so I don’t want to repeat that here, but I want to point out a few implementation details worth your attention. First, the advantage of Shared with You over, say, saving links to read-later or bookmarking services is that you have a two-way integration between the ‘media’ app and iMessage. In every Shared with You section, you’ll see the item that was shared with you and a ‘From’ label that indicates who sent it to you. This label is a button you can tap to reopen an iMessage popup that shows you the item in the original context of the message that was shared with you.

Shared with You in Music and TV.

This is my favorite aspect of Shared with You since it allows me to “catch up” with items shared with me at my own pace and follow up with my friends about them days later. I do this in the only app where I keep Shared with You enabled, which is Music: once I’ve had the time to listen to something John sent me, I can re-surface the original message, even days after it was sent to me, and reply to it. No other bookmarking service has this kind of integration, which only Apple can offer thanks to its lock-in effect between services.

The other detail of Shared with You I appreciate is how you can choose to make it work automatically for all links, enable it for some apps only, or set it to manual mode. In Settings ⇾ Messages ⇾ Shared with You, you’ll find an Automatic Sharing toggle that is tuned on by default. This means that Shared with You is always active and enabled for all compatible apps. If you want, you can disable Shared with You for specific apps if you’re not interested in them, but the automatic content sharing will continue to work.

Alternatively, you can turn off Automatic Sharing and Shared with You will be off by default. But – and here’s the feature I like – you can still take advantage of Shared with You by manually pinning items you want to save for later. To do this, you have to long-press a link in an iMessage conversation and select the new ‘Pin’ option. Pins are, effectively, manual overrides for when Shared with You is disabled, which is how I like to use this feature. I keep it always turned off, but when my friends send me something I want to see later in Apple’s media apps, I manually pin it so it can be saved in Shared with You until I’m done with it.

Manually pinning items for Shared with You.

There are two more details I want to mention. You can view all your pins by selecting the Search field at the top of the Messages app:

And you can also override Shared with You for individual conversations and group threads by hitting the profile photo at the top of the app and unchecking ‘Show in Shared with You’:

Turning off Shared with You for specific conversations.

Other Messages Changes

There are some other changes to the Messages app in iOS 15 worth covering:

Memoji updates. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Apple’s annual updates to Memoji. For the first time, you can select an outfit for your Memoji character: there are over 40 clothing options to choose from, which will be reflected when your character is displayed in stickers. You can select up to three different colors for your outfit; the multi-color option has been extended to headwear as well this year.

I think I can pull off this look.

There are new glasses to choose from (heart, star, and retro-shaped options), new accessibility options we previously detailed (cochlear implants, oxygen tubes, and soft helmets), and you can select a different color for your left eye and right eye.

You’ll also find nine new iMessage stickers featuring your Memoji in some…interesting poses:

Voice messages and updated previews. I shared my appreciation for voice messages earlier this year, and although Apple’s implementation in iMessage still isn’t as good as WhatsApp’s, it’s getting better. In iOS 15, you can long-press a voice message and open it with an audio player in full-screen. The player is a native Quick Look preview, so you can play, pause, and scrub through audio as always.

Also new in iOS 15: Quick Look previews in iMessage have been updated with the ability to reply to the original message or add a Tapback reaction from the full-screen view, which I find very convenient.

Improved Quick Look previews in iOS 15 even support Live Text (which can find text in all sorts of orientations, as seen here).

Photo stacks. Lastly, Apple has introduced a new way to preview multiple photos sent by someone as a single message. Instead of taking over the entire iMessage transcript, multiple photos will be collected in a single “deck of cards” that only takes up the space of a single photo in the conversation.

New photo stacks in Messages.

You can quickly swipe through these large thumbnails – just like cards – to preview them, which results in a lovely animation I want everyone to appreciate:

There’s also a download button that lets you add all photos to your library with one tap and label you can tap to view all photos as a grid.

I feel like this is the kind of feature that wants to solve a very specific problem (friends and family sending you all the photos of you they have from a particular event), and it’s well done.

Everything Else

As is often the case with new versions of iOS and iPadOS, there tend to be dozens of other features and smaller details to be discovered in the nooks and crannies of both OSes. iOS and iPadOS 15 are no different, so let’s take a look.

PDFs and Printing

Whether you still print paper documents or, like most people these days, just want to generate PDFs, iOS 15 has a great addition in store for you: a completely redesigned Print menu.

Available in Safari and other apps that can print content, the new ‘Print Options’ screen lets you choose a paper size (including popular options such as A3 and A4) as well as the orientation of your document between portrait and landscape without having to physically rotate your device. As before, you can pinch-open the document preview in the Print screen to view the PDF version of it and export it to Files or other apps, which makes this revamped Print functionality a fantastic way to create PDF documents from Safari.

The new Print menu.

Speaking of PDFs, if you ever find yourself having to password-protect sensitive documents you need to share with other people, iOS 15 now lets you do this with a new ‘Lock PDF’ action. To lock a document, open any PDF document in a native Quick Look preview (in Files, for instance, just tap a PDF to preview it), then tap the Share button and scroll until you see the new ‘Lock PDF’ button. Tap it, and you’ll be presented with a screen that lets you enter a password for the document, which you’ll have to verify a second time.

Locking PDFs.

Once a document is locked, you’ll have to enter a password in the Quick Look preview every time you open it.

Control Center

Control Center hasn’t undergone a major update in a while, and this year’s updates continue to refine a formula that has been working for the past few years.

As part of iOS 15’s per-app Accessibility settings (which will let you customize Accessibility options for specific apps instead of the whole OS), Control Center has gained a new ‘Text Size’ toggle that lets you quickly modify the text size of the app you’re currently using without applying any changes to other apps. To do this, install the new Text Size control in Control Center, open the app you want to customize, and tap the item in Control Center. You’ll see a text size slider for ‘All Apps’ as the default view, but there’s also an ‘[App] Only’ tab you can select to open a secondary slider that changes text size just for the current app.

Changing text size for an individual app.

I like to keep text size on my devices relatively small (thankfully, I wear eyeglasses), but I’ve found that my preferred setting is a little too small for apps like Calendar. In iOS 15, I can change that app’s text size in just a few seconds by opening Control Center, which is terrific.

The TV remote in Control Center has also been slightly redesigned in iOS 15. The large ‘Menu’ button has been replaced by a ‘Back’ button inspired by the latest Siri remote; in the upper section of the virtual remote, you’ll also find buttons to mute and either power on or shut down an Apple TV.

The redesigned TV remote.

Lastly, the music recognition toggle powered by Shazam, originally introduced in iOS 14.2, has been updated with the ability to view a log of songs you’ve recognized in Control Center by long-pressing it. This history, sadly, still doesn’t sync with the ‘My Shazam Tracks’ playlist on Apple Music that’s managed by the main Shazam app.

Long-press the music recognition control to view previously scanned songs.

You can tap songs in this History panel to reopen them in the Shazam app or swipe to remove them.

Siri

The most important addition to Apple’s assistant this year is that, starting with iOS and iPadOS 15, Siri will work offline by default. As announced by Apple at WWDC, the Neural Engine can now process your requests locally, on-device, with the same quality of server-based speech recognition.

In practice, since the switch to offline processing, I haven’t noticed a degradation of quality in terms of how Siri interprets my requests, but it hasn’t gotten smarter than before either. I suppose this is good for Apple since, at the very least, moving away from server-based processing hasn’t made Siri worse.

Obviously, only some types of requests will work offline. These include:

Timers

Alarms

Launching apps

Music and audio controls15

Switching settings

Offline Siri in iOS 15.

You can try these requests offline by putting your device in Airplane mode and switching off all data connections. Before, Siri would immediately throw an error upon activating it; now, Siri starts listening locally, then decides whether it can complete your request based on what you’re asking. I’ll admit I’m not a huge Siri user myself, but with the switch to offline requests, I’ve at least noticed that Siri no longer randomly refuses to activate because of server issues.

According to Apple, Siri should also be better now at maintaining context between requests; some of these improvements have been rolled out server-side, so they also work on iOS 14 right now, but others are exclusive to iOS 15. For instance, if you’re looking at a contact in the Contacts app or a conversation in Messages for iOS 15, you can say, “Message them I’m almost there”, and Siri will understand how to route your request. This also works for notifications of messages and missed calls.

Siri for iOS 15 also features the ability to share onscreen content with people by simply saying, ‘Share this with [person name]’.

I’m fascinated by this feature since, as I originally suspected, it’s yet another functionality that piggybacks on the NSUserActivity API, which we know Apple loves to use for all kinds of deep-linking on iOS (see: Quick Note). If you ask Siri to share content displayed onscreen while using an app that donates deep links to the system, Siri will prepare a message containing the link and confirm you want to send the message.

Sharing onscreen content in iOS 15 via Siri.

You can test this when reading an article in Safari, and Siri will turn the “this” into a link you can send to someone. Interestingly, if the app you’re using while invoking Siri doesn’t support deep-linking, a screenshot will be taken as a fallback method instead. So if you want to share an Instagram DM (we’ve all done this) or something you wrote in Notes with a friend, say “Share this…” to Siri, which will capture a screenshot of what’s onscreen for you and offer to send it as an image.

Lastly, Siri comes with extended HomeKit integration, which allows you to set up temporary automations for commands to execute in the future. You can read more details in John’s standalone story on HomeKit here.

Spotlight

In addition to support for searching your Photos library, displaying Live Text results captured with the Camera, and showing rich results for contacts (the same details we’ve covered with the Contacts widget in Home Screen and Widgets), Spotlight for iOS 15 has been enhanced with richer results for actors, musicians, TV shows, and more. According to Apple, when you’re searching for famous people, Spotlight will now show you key facts and links, recent News, their music or filmography, relevant websites, web images, and links to their social media profiles. For TV shows and movies, you get key facts, cast and crew, trailers, relevant news, and quick access to watch with your favorite apps. The difference from iOS 14 is substantial, and it makes Siri Knowledge feel more like an actual web search engine available anywhere on your iPhone.

Richer Siri Knowledge results in iOS 15.

If you’re anything like John and me (but, honestly, more like John) and have too many apps installed on your iPhone, you’ll be relieved to know iOS 15 brings a much easier way to delete them: Spotlight search. On a device running iOS 15, simply search for an app you want to delete, long-press the icon, and tap the Delete button.

You can now delete apps from Spotlight.

This new option joins the existing methods for deleting apps on iOS (which also include the App Store’s update screen and the App Library), and I think it’s my favorite one of the bunch since it’s, by far, the fastest way to delete unnecessary apps.

You can also drag apps from Spotlight to the Home Screen, which is a nice way to customize your pages using drag and drop without opening the App Library, and you can finally access Spotlight from anywhere on iPhone or iPad by pulling down on Notification Center or the Lock Screen.

Accessing Spotlight via touch. This also works on iPhone.

I often complained about how there wasn’t a way to open Spotlight search inside apps without having to rely on ⌘Space from an external keyboard. While Apple’s solution requires two swipes (open Notification Center, then swipe down again), it’s something, and I’ll take it.

Game Controllers

There are some sweet improvements to game controller integration in iOS and iPadOS 15.

For the first time, you can fully navigate the Home Screen, select apps, open the App Library, and switch pages with a game controller, without having to touch the screen. This is one of those small things that has always annoyed me: I was playing a game, and if I wanted to quickly return to the Home Screen and do something else, I had to put the controller down.

Navigation via a DualSense controller.

That’s no longer the case. The same system Apple created for Keyboard Shortcuts and Navigation ⇾ Keyboard Navigation in iPadOS 15 has been adapted to work with game controllers: you can select app icons or widgets on the Home Screen with the d-pad or thumbstick, then press A or X (depending on your game controller’s design) to launch them. You can navigate lists, move between pages with the shoulder buttons, and more. When using the DualSense controller, clicking the PS button will open the App Library and default to the Apple Arcade category for launching games, which I thought was a clever move.

Speaking of the DualSense, game developers can now integrate with its adaptive trigger technology, and I’m looking forward to seeing how iPad and iPhone games will take advantage of it. But that’s not all: with the DualSense and Xbox Series S/X controllers, you can also double-tap the share button to quickly save a screenshot to the Photos app or long-press it to start a screen recording. These were also features that required touching the screen before, and I’m glad Apple found ways to support them with physical controllers.

Lastly, as announced by Apple at WWDC, the company is rolling out an API for developers to integrate native, virtual game controllers in their games without having to design one from scratch. I haven’t tested any games that use the virtual gamepad yet, but I can say that I’m very happy to hear Apple is bringing some consistency to this space with a framework all game developers can use now.

iPhone Drag and Drop

Four years after its debut in iOS 11 for iPad, Apple is bringing inter-app drag and drop to iPhone with iOS 15.

Drag and drop between iPhone apps works exactly as it does on iPad, which is a good thing since you don’t have to learn anything new. In any app or text field, you can now select the item you want to put elsewhere, long-press, and drag it away. Just like on iPad, if an app allows it, you can add multiple items to your drag stack by tapping them. If you want to exit out of an app while dragging something, you can do so by swiping the Home indicator with one finger while continuing to drag the item with another.

Drag and drop between apps works just like on iPad.

There’s nothing else to explain here because, as we saw back in 2017, drag and drop was already supported on iPhone – but only within the same app. Now drag and drop has been extended to work system-wide on iPhone, and I’ve already taken advantage of this feature dozens of times to quickly move text and files between apps without using the clipboard or share sheet.

5G

I still feel like 5G – at least the flavor of it we have here in Rome, Italy – hasn’t had any sort of meaningful impact on my iPhone lifestyle. In fact, out of curiosity, I disabled 5G for a few weeks a couple months back and switched to 4G, and I didn’t notice any difference in the things I typically do with my iPhone. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

Still, at least 5G seems to be an excuse for Apple to start allowing more system features to work over the cellular network, so I’ll take the improvements.

Starting with iOS 15, the following features will work over 5G if you have the ‘Allow More Data on 5G’ option enabled in Settings ⇾ Cellular ⇾ Cellular Data Options:

iCloud backup and restoring from a backup

Higher-quality Apple TV+ downloads

Download new machine learning models

Prefer 5G over Wi-Fi

The latter option is noteworthy: according to Apple, starting with the iPhone 12 line, your device will automatically prioritize 5G when “Wi-Fi connectivity on networks you visit is slow, or when you are connected to captive or insecure networks”.

Even More Changes

The text magnification loupe is back. Following its unceremonious (and unnecessary) removal in iOS 13, the text magnification loupe is back, and although it looks slightly different from before, it’s as good as ever. iOS 15’s magnification loupe is smaller than it used to be in iOS 12, but it still shows you a zoomed-in version of the text you’re scrubbing through so you can more precisely place the cursor. As I argued two years ago, the loupe coexists with text selection gestures without issues, and it makes text selection intuitive and accessible again.

The loupe is back.

Continuous dictation. If you dictate text on iPhone and iPad, you should be happy to know Apple removed the 60-second limit that was previously in place for dictation, which now listens continuously and can keep going for as long as you’d like.

Multiple messaging options for contacts. If one of your contacts is available on multiple messaging apps, tapping the ‘Message’ button in their contact card on iOS 15 will reveal a menu with multiple app options to get in touch with them.

Tweaked video player. The system-wide video player has been redesigned in iOS 15 with a new menu to access playback speed, subtitles, and languages. The menu is a nice example of the nested options for context menus we previously covered in More Design Changes, and I find it easier to use than its predecessor in iOS 14.

DRM won’t let me take a screenshot of the video player and Ted Lasso? There, I took a picture instead. Am I right, Coach?

App Store events and TestFlight versions. Apple is adding the ability for developers to run special events on the App Store – an initiative that was likely inspired by the recent trend of running time-limited in-app events popularized by the likes of Fortnite (remember that game?) and other games with a social component. I’m not particularly interested in App Store events (which get their special promo section on app product pages), but I recommend reading this story by Casey Newton about them if you want to learn more. I have a feeling I’m now too old for this stuff, but I also understand why Apple added them to the App Store.

Events on the App Store.

Something else App Store-related that is more up my alley: the App Store now tells you if you have the TestFlight version of an app already installed and which version number it is. It’s a small thing, but I’m glad Apple added this so I’ll no longer confuse App Store and TestFlight builds of the same app.

TestFlight versions are now shown on the App Store.

Redesigned Apple Pay. The Apple Pay payment sheet has been redesigned with the ability to add new cards inline without leaving the payment process, support for coupon codes, and an enhanced summary view that lets you view more details such as payment items, subtotals, and discounts. It looks nicer than before.

Magnifier becomes a default app on iPad. Magnifier, the standalone utility to use your iPhone as a powerful zooming lens with support for filters and people detection, is now a default app on iPad too, which you can find with Spotlight search and the App Library.

Use iPhone apps in landscape. I saved this as the very last item in my review:

Finally. If you want to use Instagram – or any other iPhone app – on your iPad, you can now do so in landscape. After 11 years of tilting my head sideways to look at iPhone apps on iPad while in landscape, I struggled to believe this at first, but this “major” change is real, and I’m sure it’ll make quite a few people happy to upgrade to iPadOS 15.

At long last, you can now use iPhone apps in landscape on iPad, and even put iPad apps in Slide Over next to them. (Pictured above: His Royal Highness, and a Safari webpage.)

Sometimes, it’s the small things that are worth waiting for.

Conclusion

I typically like to conclude my annual iOS and iPadOS reviews by analyzing the overarching themes that permeate the latest operating systems for iPhone and iPad. It’s my job to understand what they could mean for the future, evaluating their impact on consumers, what they bring to power users, and what path they trace for Apple to follow in the coming years.

But I can’t do it this year. As we’ve seen in this review, both iOS and iPadOS 15 are quality-of-life updates that bring a ton of enhancements and app-related additions, but very little in terms of bold, all-encompassing visions for what’s next. There are exceptions, arguably, such as Live Text in the Camera; after three months, however, I don’t think iOS 15 will be remembered like iOS 13 and 14 were.

iOS 15 can be described as a collection of updates to popular built-in apps such as Safari, Photos, Weather, Shortcuts, Notes, and Reminders. And although I argued last year that the modern Apple needs to have a little bit of something for everyone in major iOS revisions these days, it’s the lack of a bold, flashy addition that makes iOS 15 feel more similar to iOS 12 and iOS 10. A welcome update, and more polished than the last version, carrying dozens of handy but less memorable tweaks.

It’s a similar story with iPadOS, which continues to feel like it’s on the precipice of something bigger that is always getting closer to us, but never quite within reach. For the first time since the iPad Pro’s debut, Apple is providing a cohesive story with iPadOS 15 in terms of supporting its multiplicity of inputs, which we’ve seen with Quick Note, multitasking, and keyboard navigation. The company is no longer afraid to admit that an iPad can be both a tablet and laptop computer at the same time, and that’s a great step for the platform. However, on balance, all these features largely amount to foundational work to prepare for the next big leap in iPad productivity, which we haven’t seen yet.

iPadOS continues to feel like it’s on the precipice of something bigger.

Widgets can be placed on the Home Screen now, but they’re still not interactive; Split View is easier to use via touch and keyboard, but it’s still limited to two apps at once. Long-standing power user wishes such as proper external display support, pro apps, or background utilities still haven’t been addressed. That’s not to say iPadOS 15 is a disappointing update: the new foundation is solid and long overdue, but it doesn’t alter the narrative surrounding the M1 iPad Pro.

While iPadOS 15’s revised multitasking is superior to the system Apple originally designed for iOS 11, and while I’m sure power users will appreciate the addition of keyboard commands, it still doesn’t explain why the all-powerful M1 iPad Pro was necessary. For the most part, iPadOS 15 doesn’t create new ways to get work done on iPad: it just makes your existing workflow better than before. Maybe that’s enough for you. But, ultimately, it also begs the question:

How many more years of foundational iPadOS updates do we have to endure?

The pandemic and adjusting to working from home hit everyone, including Apple engineers, and I think we’re seeing its effects with a one-year delay: iOS and iPadOS 15 are Apple’s “pandemic releases”, not last year’s iOS and iPadOS 14. Whether by choice or as the natural consequence of events from the past year, the latest iOS and iPadOS aren’t groundbreaking updates that rethink the iPhone Home and Lock Screen or iPad multitasking.

And, ultimately, that’s okay: we can all use a break. We – writers, engineers, app developers, podcasters – all deserve it. I don’t begrudge Apple for shipping OS updates that are smaller in scope and focused on quality-of-life improvements.

The time for big, bold new versions of iOS and iPadOS will come again. Until then, let’s cherish what we have; iOS and iPadOS 15 are solid, stable updates I recommend installing today.

Credits

This review wouldn’t have been possible without the help, feedback, and existence of the following people, animals, beverages, and apps:

My girlfriend Silvia, for her patience, love, incredible design skills, wisdom, and supporting me this summer

John Voorhees, a friend and amazing colleague. I couldn’t have chosen to run MacStories with a better person.

Alex Guyot, for working his magic dev skills with MacStories, Club MacStories, and Calliope

Zelda and Ginger, for putting a smile on my face every day

Finn Voorhees, who listened to my Obsidian ideas and made them all happen

Brian King, for bringing this review to life once again with his amazing animations and 3D graphics

Myke Hurley

Stephen Hackett

Obsidian, Working Copy, Timery, Shortcuts, and Todoist – essential apps that helped me create this story

Every app developer who sent me betas during the summer

Every engineer at Apple who always makes reviewing iOS and iPadOS each summer fun

@TiccisEspresso – this summer more than ever

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

Our Discord members, for encouraging me in the final stretch of the review

And finally, every MacStories reader, for allowing me to keep doing what I love and pushing me to do my best every summer. Thank you.

My guess: developers will no longer be required to submit new apps to the App Store only if they're built for the latest major version of iOS and iPadOS (which usually happens in the spring) and Apple will continue to "sign" iOS and iPadOS 14, allowing customers to downgrade their devices for a longer period of time. Plus, without major changes to widgets pushing adoption of the new OSes in September, we all know most people are going to update once new emoji are released in a few months anyway. ↩︎

What's next, accent colors in the UI inspired by the iMac? Yes please! ↩︎

Why do I need to enter all my passwords in every single app every time I restore from a backup? This should be easier. ↩︎

This is another former Do Not Disturb option that is now part of Focus' general settings. ↩︎

Myke calls these 'The Ticci Trilogy'. ↩︎

There's a toggle in Settings ⇾ Notifications ⇾ Scheduled Summary to show the next summary before its scheduled time. I turned it off since I felt like it defeated the purpose of the scheduled summary altogether. ↩︎

Here's another idea: maybe the name of the active app could also be displayed in the extra row of keyboard controls, next to QuickType suggestions? ↩︎

I would have liked to see a keyboard shortcut to navigate to the next window from the same app. Basically, I'm looking for a way to cycle through center windows saved in the Shelf without having to manually invoke the Shelf every time. ↩︎

This is basically how filing radars works. But in public. I think some people call it "blogging". ↩︎

Ideally, I would like to open Spotlight, search for an app, and hit a keyboard command to put the highlighted result on the left or right side of the screen immediately. Instead, you have to use drag and drop to grab the app icon from Spotlight and place it somewhere onscreen. This remaining touch-only interaction needs to go. ↩︎

Don't even get me started on how incredible it'd be to use Obsidian with Quick Note. ↩︎

Quick Note will also be available on macOS Monterey, but, for now, it can only be used on iPadOS 15. ↩︎

Air quality maps are available in Canada, China mainland, Germany, France, India, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, South Korea, Spain, UK, and US. ↩︎

This is a floating 'Info' panel on iPadOS. Interesting design decision! ↩︎

If offline music playback doesn't work for you, apparently the trick seems to be to add "my music" to the Siri request. ↩︎