We’ll get a first look at iOS 12 on 4 June during Apple’s WWDC. We round up all the rumours about iOS 12: its release date, new features and news.
Things haven’t exactly gone smoothly for Apple with iOS 11. It has issued several updates since September in order to fix bugs with TouchID, FaceID, unresponsive touchscreens and also to address performance issues.
Then, in January 2018 the Spectre and Meltdown flaws were revealed to the public and Apple issued another iOS update which patched the vulnerabilities in its mobile chips.
Worse still, it was found to be deliberately slowing down older iPhones via iOS updates, saying that this prevented shutdowns caused by old batteries.
According to a report by Axios, Apple has now decided to postpone introducing certain new features in iOS 12 in order to improve security and reliability, and it’s focusing on the same things for the next version of macOS, too.
These issues shouldn’t affect when iOS 12 is released, though. So unless Apple does something different in 2018, it will offer a preview of iOS 12 at its developer conference, WWDC, which has now been confirmed for 4 June.
The keynote is being held at 6pm BST/10am PDT, and you can follow the announcements live right here .
Shortly after that, a public beta is likely to be released to anyone that wants to can try out early versions of iOS 12 on their phone or tablet.
And if past years are anything to go by, iOS 12 will get its proper public release in September 2018 around the same time as Apple announces new iPhones. (Will it launch an iPhone 9, though?)
According to the report mentioned above, Apple was planning to refresh the home screen, improve core apps including Mail and also work on the CarPlay interface — the in-car version of iOS. It was also said to be adding features to the camera app, as well as photo editing and sharing.
It seems they may not appear until iOS 13, so what can you expect to see in iOS 12? Besides the behind-the-scenes security improvements, here’s the rumoured list of updates:
That’s the full extent of the rumours, but don’t forget that there were features rumoured ahead of iOS 11 which didn’t make an appearance.
They could be introduced in small updates throughout the year, but equally they could appear in iOS 12. Or not at all. We’ll just have to wait and see.
Also, let us know in the comments below which features you want to see in iOS 12.
Many an iPad owner has wished for the ability — just as you have in Android — to create multiple users and switch between them. This makes sense for lots of reasons, including seeing your own music library, email, calendar, photos, bookmarks and preferences (such as favourite TV shows in iPlayer and channel subscriptions in YouTube).
Currently you can sign out of your Apple ID and sign in with another, but it won’t change the content on the iPad or iPhone.
It was rumoured that Apple will add user profiles to tvOS at some point because this truly is a shared device, and this has led to speculation that it might also (finally) bring them to iOS as well.
But don’t expect to be able to see account switching on an iPhone: if it does arrive, it’ll just be for iPads.
For now, here’s how to lock apps and folders in iOS 11 .
There has been a long-running rumour that Apple will introduce a ‘dark mode’ which will provide a dark theme or background in apps and throughout iOS. This should help reduce brightness when using your phone in total darkness. Currently, the light colours iOS uses are still too bright in some environments even with the brightness slider set to minimum.
However, this could be implemented in iOS 12.
We’ve moaned about this in our iOS reviews for few years now, the frustration that camera settings aren’t in the Camera app. If you want to switch between 1080p at 60fps and 4K at 30fps (for example) you have to spend about 20 seconds doing it through the Settings app.
All we want is a simple cycle through the few modes in the Camera app itself. Is that so much to ask? Alternatively, an auto-switching mode which drops the frame rate in low light would be an acceptable workaround.
Now, in iOS 11, there are new settings, such as whether to save photos as HEIC or JPG and whether or not to enable QR-code scanning and it would make so much more sense to put these in the camera app.
