iOS 12 first impressions: 10 specific ways iOS 12 can change your daily life

Apple’s iOS 12 public beta has just launched and, believe it or not, there are a bunch of changes behind the familiar iPhone and iPad interface.

It only looks as if things haven’t changed at first blush. New iOS 12 features are full of better integration, faster performance, and, most important, genuine reliability.

In fact, we’ve found the iOS 12 public beta more component than iOS 11.4, which is still rife with known iOS 11 problems. We do heard from you about them – everyday.

But what makes iOS 12 better? Why is it worth the upgrade? We’ve highlighted 12 ways it’ll change your daily life.

1. Your old phone will be faster and worth more

You don’t have to be afraid to update to iOS 12 public beta on your old iPhone and iPad because Apple’s No. 1 goal here has been to improve the performance of dated devices. Whereas prior iOS updates seemed to slow down older hardware, iOS 12 will do the opposite – make them faster – according to Apple. 

The company specifically mentioned iPhone 6 Plus speed improvements during its WWDC 2018 keynote, detailing that, thanks to iOS 12, the still-popular hand-me-down will be 40% faster at launching apps, 70% faster at launching the camera app, and 50% faster at displaying the keyboard.

Even the iPhone X, iPhone 8 and iPhone 5S feels we tested with iOS 12 feels faster and more fluid than it did on buggy iOS 11. All of a sudden, your older, stuttering used iPhone that’s been sitting in a drawer is actually worth a little bit more money again.

2. Every morning, you’ll see Grouped Notifications

Waking up every morning with an iPhone lockscreen in the iOS 11 era meant being slammed with a seemingly endless stream of individual notifications. Like hundreds of them. It was a maddening way to start the day.

iOS 12 fixes this problem with Grouped Notifications. Being able to swipe through, unbundle and instantly clear bunches up notifications sorted by app and message thread is one of the first things you’ll love about the public beta.  It’ll change your morning routine.

3. You’ll stop losing your keys, and may buy a HomePod

Finding your lost keys via an attached Tile tracker and performing other similar tasks is another frustration iOS 12 is looking to solve in the future. It’ll do this with Siri Shortcuts, which are programmable commands you can say to Siri in order to execute a task within an app.

Yes, you can always open the Tile app, find your keys icon, and try to ring it from there, but in the heat of turning everything over in your room, so you really want to deal with opening up the way-too-slow Tile app and wading through all of your Tiles to find the keys Tile?

Siri Shortcuts isn’t part of the iOS 12 public beta yet, but the idea behind it is so promising that we just might be inspired to buy a HomePod. Asking Siri where our keys are without having to fetch our phone (which may always be lost for all we know) is yet another shortcut we like.

4. Group FaceTime will stop cutting of people’s faces

FaceTime is a great way to connect with family and friends afar because you get to see everyone’s faces on your iPhone and iPad screen. Well, almost everyone’s faces. Right now, birthday FaceTime calls for me consists of half of my dad’s face and half of my mom’s face. It time to make FaceTime whole again.

Group FaceTime with iOS 12 will fix this, as everyone with a compatible iPhone and iPad can join the video call – up to 32 people at once. My mom has an iPad mini and my dad has an iPhone. My seemingly endless number of nephews won’t hit the user cap either. That’s going to make a lot of people happy and hole in my family.

5. Yes, even Memoji will have an impact

Okay, not everyone is going to use Memoji, but a lot of times, I don’t want to appear on camera in a 1:1 FaceTime video chat. That goes double for Group FaceTimes at times. This is where Memoji may be a bit hit, especially with kids and everyone who doesn’t like staring at their own face on a screen.

Snapchat masks and Instagram filters are popular for a reason. Apple’s Memoji, complete with winking and tongue wagging, is actually a clever method to make FaceTime even more accessible. It’s definitely more useful than Animoji.

6. You may use your phone less

We use our phones too much. You’re probably using one right now. Apple is aware of the addicting nature of its smartphone, tablets, and apps, so it has created a way to track your usage and provide self- (or parent-) imposed limits.

New to the settings menu is Screen Time, which cleanly lays out which apps you’ve been binging on. It doesn’t just report that you have problems. There are solutions here, too. Downtime lets to schedule time away from the screen and App limits is a timer to lock you out of apps.

My usage numbers in the Screen Time menu have the potential to look less scary – though it’s really easy to ignore the suggested breaks. This new feature is more about much-needed awareness.

7. ARKit 2 means someone will play with you

AR games on the iPhone and iPad have been a neat party trick on iOS 11, but iOS 12 is going to bring more people into Apple’s augmented reality ecosystem thanks to multiplayer gaming capabilities. Two different Apple devices can look into the same AR world, which is something we haven’t seen from other more expensive hardware.

The iOS 12 beta is laying the foundation for developers to make these multiplayer AR games. You may not see a lot of AR multiplayer content on day one of the public beta, but developers we talked to at WWDC this year seemed eager to get started on this more than any other new feature. Shared experiences certainly seem to be in the pipeline for iOS 12’s official launch later this year.

8. Photos app event search

Let me know if you’ve heard this before:

“Hey, let me show you my photos from this recent event” …followed by ten minutes of painfully searching through your photos app to find the right photos to show someone.

Apple’s Photos app is making searching for specific photos a bit easier, automatically categorizing your snapshots by event to compete with Google Photos. It’s using over four million events, as niche as the Aspen Ideas Festival, to group photos together in the photos app.

9. Translation into 40 languages

Globetrotting with an iPhone just became easier as Siri can translate 40 different language pairs on-the-fly with iOS 12. You’ll still need an internet connection to get it done, but it makes ordering in a foreign restaurant easier.

Note: Siri still can’t translate Spanish into English yet in iOS 12 public beta, but we’re hopeful that Siri will learn every major language by iOS 13 at its current place. It can translate English into Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, and French.

10. Voice memos

The iOS 12 public beta bring new features to even the most basic apps, and we’ve found the most use out of the Voice Memos makeover. It automatically names files based on location (you can edit the name anytime) and just has a cleaner interface.

The best is yet to come. Voice Memos will sync to iCloud and that means you can quit using AirDrop to send your voice memo to your Mac computer. It’ll already be there when you update to macOS.

Even more on the way

These are just our first impressions of the newly launched iOS 12 public beta. There’s still more to explore and additional features for Apple to launch in between now and the final version of the software. Siri Shortcuts, for example, is the top feature we want to test out but have to wait for.

You can download iOS 12 public beta right now, or wait until the official launch of the software. That usually happens in September. Unlike prior beta, the software here is sound. We can’t guarantee you won’t run into problems, but so far, we haven’t had a single bug that hasn’t also plagued us with iOS 11. 

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