What’s New In iOS 11? What Are The Best New Features?

Yesterday evening Apple released iOS11 into the wild, and existing iPhone (and iPad) users were able to download and update their devices. If you have an iPhone older that a 5S, an iPad older than 5th generation iPad, or iPad Mini older than a 2 you’re out of luck as you can’t update.

I thought it was worth writing a quick run down of the biggest and most useful changes. Firstly, before you do anything (and I’d say this with any OS update on any device), back up your iPhone before doing the update. It’s always better to be safe rather than sorry.

The actual update isn’t as huge as some previous updates (I think the download was 1.7GB) so on a decent internet connection it can be done quite quickly. Once downloaded the install and update didn’t take too long either. I think the whole process was around 30 minutes on the iPhone 6 I did it on.

So, once updated, what changes do you notice? Initially, not that many to be honest. Everything appears to be that little bit slicker and the styling of some built in Apps have changed with larger titles. Apart from that you don’t really notice much in the first few minutes of use. The biggest worry with any major OS update is that your phone will slow down as the OS has really been developed with newer devices in mind. My initial impression is that this doesn’t seem to be the case. Not on an iPhone 6 at least which is good news.

Once you start digging in though, there are some pretty useful changes. I’ve listed my top 5 below :)

1. Control Centre
   The control centre is still accessed in the same way (swipe up from the bottom edge of the screen) but features are now more compact with simple icons. It’s now customisable so you can decide what to put on there too (from Settings) which is useful.
2. Password Sharing
   This one is super useful. We’ve all had the situation where someone wants to connect to your wifi, but it takes 5 attempts for them to get this right! Now you can share wifi passwords between iOS11 devices so nobody has to try and find or type anything.
3. Screenshots
   It’s great being able to take a screenshot to use on social media or send to people, but often we need to edit it too. Previously you’d have to do this with an external App. With iOS 11 it now has an editor built in :) When you take a screen shot (hold home and press the power button), it now shows it as a thumbnail in the bottom left corner. If you tap this you can edit it directly and very quickly. It has some great features such as cropping, magifying specific areas, hand drawing, and adding text etc.
4. Screen Recording
   This is probably of more use to App developers like me but it still does have some decent uses for others. If you want to quickly show somebody how to do something within an App, rather than trying to explain it, simply record them a video and send that instead. You can add the screen recording button in control panel (as mentioned above) so it’s really quick and easy to use.
5. Automatically Saving Storage Space
   In iOS 11 there are a couple of things designed to save you storage space. This will be very welcome to owners of 16GB devices! The first thing is App offloading. Basically infrequently used Apps are removed but their icons remain. When you use them again they’re downloaded and can be used again. The other big space saver is that photos and videos are saved on the device using a new format. This compresses images so they have the same quality but are about half the size to store. When you send them to anyone else they are the same JPG and MP4 format though so there are no worries about compatibility with other devices.

There are plenty of other changes once you start using it (E.g. The camera automatically recognises QR codes now. Your phone can automatically go into “do not disturb” mode when you’re driving etc) but I think the 5 things above are the major changes that most people will find most useful.

Thanks

Richard