WWDC 2020: Thoughts
As we did last year, we’ll cover this up by platform/topic:
tvOS:
They didn’t really say much about tvOS itself., but they did show off some cool new home features that work with Apple TV.
watchOS:
The sleep tracking features look pretty nice (thought a bit overdue). You have to manually enable sleep mode every night, so that’s a bummer. Hopefully it’ll gain the ability to detect when you’re sleeping even if you forget.
The new chronograph face is slick.
For some reason, they removed Force Touch.
iOS:
The new home screen widgets and app library are all that I’d hoped for. I’m very excited for these changed, and they’ve breathed new life into my iPhone.
The translate app is really neat, I just wish it supported more languages. I’m curious how well it could possibly work, given the shitty state of dictation and Siri.
The Back Tap Accessibility feature is great.
I’m very happy that the Siri UI is now less obtrusive. It makes using Siri feel better, even if she hasn’t improved in regards to speech recognition or intelligence.
Incoming calls no longer hijack the entire screen. 🙌🏼
The updates for the Messages app will be very nice once everyone’s upgraded. The ability to pin conversations is great, and the new controls and features within group messages will be great (name tagging and in line message threads!).
We did get some good privacy features. The privacy cards in the App Store will be great, if people actually look at them (I know I will). It’s also really cool that you can now share a general location with an app rather than your precise location. I’m glad you can now restrict which specific photos in your photo library you give apps access to, rather than all or nothing.
The Music app did get a refresh, but I’m not actually sure that it’s better. The library screen is unchanged.
The Weather app now incorporates features from Dark Sky, a third party weather app that Apple acquired months ago. They’re using Dark Sky’s minute by minute precipitation predictions, and I’m hoping they incorporate precipitation notifications as well.
No lockable photo album.
No improvements to Siri’s speech recognition or intelligence.
No updated Cash card.
iPadOS:
The handwriting recognition is cool, and in my experience so far, it works very well.
The lack of widget options on the iPad home screen is surprising and a little disappointing.
macOS:
It’s nice that a lot of the iOS messages features are making their way to the Mac after several years.
I’m glad control center is finally making an appearance.
Is it just me, or do the redesigned buttons and apps look a lot more finger-friendly? It’s also interesting that most of the screenshots on the macOS Big Sur preview site lack cursors, except for two: in one of those it’s a standard arrow pointer, in the other, it’s a large translucent circle similar to the new iPadOS cursor. I’m not suggesting that they’re merging the platforms, but Apple recently realized that adding cursor support for the iPad didn’t take away from its standing as a touch-first device. I think they’re realizing that the opposite is true for the Mac: adding touch support doesn’t change the device’s nature, it just adds a bit of usability that’s really nice for some use cases.
Apple Silicon:
Apple announced that they’re going to start building their own processors for the Mac rather than using Intel processors. Apple’s A12Z chip used in the new iPad Pro (which is nearly identical to the two year old A12X) was able to run macOS and do some really heavy duty lifting without breaking a sweat. Just imagine what a custom Apple chip designed to run macOS will be able to do.
Privacy
Safari tracking reports are very handy. The number of trackers that Safari has been able to identify and block in the two days I’ve been using iOS 14/iPadOS 14/macOS Big Sur are staggering. I hope people will look at these reports and question the long list of companies who are trying to follow them around the internet. (A quick example from my report: Safari blocked 44 trackers from Olive Garden’s website.)
When an app wants to access your Local Network to find out what other devices are around you, a permission request will now pop up. Apps can use that information to learn the IP addresses of the devices (other phones, computers, TVs, routers, etc.) that belong to you and others you interact with so that they can send frighteningly specific targeted ads to those devices. There’s almost no reason to grant this permission: unless the app asking for it is an app that facilitates setup of other internet connected devices (like smart light bulbs, for example), you should say no. Amazon? No. Instagram? Nope. YouTube? Definitely not. Facebook? Hell no. Get in the habit of smashing that “don’t allow” button.
Now, when an app accesses your clipboard, a little message pops up at the top to let you know. At first this seemed unnecessary to me, but the feature quickly outed TikTok for snooping on users (we’ve known that TikTok is a Chinese surveillance instrument — even the Navy and Army have banned the use of TikTok — I don’t know why anyone trusts them) by constantly checking to see what they had in their clipboard, regardless of whether they copied it from the TikTok app or not. They claimed it was to prevent spam (haha), and immediately disabled that function.
Small dots now show up at the top of the screen to indicate when the microphone (orange dot) and camera (green dot) are being accessed. In time, I’m sure this will out a few apps, as well.
I’m very excited after this WWDC. I know I said I wasn’t particularly hyped up, but man, Apple didn’t disappoint this year. I can’t wait for more people to get their hands on the updates they announced; I’m having a ball with them.