Apple’s next update brings fixes for Apple’s battery snafu, new Animoji, AR upgrades and more.
More floating cartoon puppets for your face: Just one of the new features in iOS 11.3.
And those are just the headline features from a list that’s growing longer as we speak, as Apple dev rip apart the new iOS 11.3 beta to see what the company’s changed. (Did I mention? Apple released iOS 11.3 beta 1 to developers today.)
Here are the features we know about, as of Jan. 24.
iOS 11 came with 12 different Animoji, and iOS 11.3 brings four new creatures into the pen — a lion, bear, dragon, and skull.
With IKEA’s ARKit app, for instance, you could see how a new sofa might look like on the floor of your living room, but you couldn’t mount a virtual cabinet to your real walls.
But iOS 11.3 comes with ARKit 1.5, which recognizes vertical surfaces and « irregularly shaped surfaces like circular tables, » too, according to Apple. That should let AR developers build a variety of new things, and could potentially improve the accuracy of augmented reality ruler apps as well.
It’s not mentioned in Apple’s press release, but savvy developers discovered it anyhow: iOS 11.3 will bring AirPlay 2, which allows Apple to take on Sonos with multiroom audio playback (e.g., you decide which song plays on each of multiple speakers distributed throughout your home). It’s a feature that was announced last June at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) for iOS 11, but apparently wasn’t ready until now.
Apple’s HomePod.
In the meanwhile, it sounds like you’ll be able to cast audio to multiple Apple TVs around your home. That’s something.
It’s one thing to get notifications on your iPhone, iPad and Mac when you get a new message. It’s something else entirely to be able to delete a message on your Apple laptop and have that deletion reflected on your phone and tablet, too.
iCloud Messages Returns to iOS in First Beta of iOS 11.3 https://t.co/BsDBwf9nC2 by @julipuli pic.twitter.com/wQMi4s21J1
Messages on iCloud was supposed to bring that to iOS 11, but the feature didn’t make the cut — until now, apparently, seeing how developers just discovered it exists in the iOS 11.3 beta. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll arrive this spring with the full release of iOS 11.3 either, but perhaps?
Business Chat.
Why call a big company or navigate their website when you can just ping them in your messenger app? Facebook Messenger already offers such a feature, and iOS 11.3 will bring Business Chat to iMessage on your iPhone and iPad, too. Here’s Apple’s pitch:
« With Business Chat, it’s easy to have a conversation with a service representative, schedule an appointment or make purchases using Apple Pay in the Messages app. Business Chat doesn’t share the user’s contact information with businesses and gives users the ability to stop chatting at any time. »
Also in beta, Apple’s new Health Records feature hopes to provide something patients (aka humans) have wanted since the advent of the medical record — a way to easily access all of your medical records, no matter which doctor, clinic or hospital you pick, in one single (and encrypted) place.
Of course, that only works as long as all of your care providers are on board, and so far only these places are part of the beta:
« In the coming months, more medical facilities will connect to Health Records offering their patients access to this feature, » writes Apple.
Here’s a short list of everything else interesting that Apple has announced (or curious developers have found) so far:
In iOS 11.3, iBooks is now just Books. pic.twitter.com/2s6734FovE
The Smartest Stuff: Innovators are thinking up new ways to make you, and the things around you, smarter.
‘Alexa, be more human’: Inside Amazon’s effort to make its voice assistant smarter, chattier and more like you.
