Revamped Messages
Now Messages can send handwriting, can send custom emojis, GIFs, and a lot of other things third party apps can do. We can send invisible message, stickers and many more. Basically, Messages becomes a lot more hipster. While this might sound great for some people, I think this over-complicates Messages. Of course users always have the choice of not using the new features, but the new UI is designed in a way that makes it hard to ignore the 3 new icons on the left side.
Individual iMessage read receipt
This is a good thing. I generally don’t like to give people read receipt of their messages, but I’d like to do so for some people. Couldn’t do this in iOS 9, now I can.
Siri opens to apps
This will be good once a lot of third party apps are implementing it.
New Home Screen
It looks good, but I’m not sure how useful it will be in everyday use. I doubt I will open it often, but let’s see.
Redesigned Music app
As far as I can see, the redesign seems to have one goal: to push people to subscribe to Apple Music. It takes more steps just to get to my local library now. Plus there is no way to display song lyrics that I already added manually to my local songs. The overall trend is to display bigger text with rather poor aesthetic. Very disappointed.
Raise to wake
This one is pretty cool, it supposed to automatically detect when we raise our phone to use it, so there is no need to press anything to see the lock screen notification. Hopefully it won’t do too many false positive detection when I am taking public transport though.
Swipe to unlock is gone
No more swipe to unlock. Instead, now we simply press the home button. If the fingerprint is recognised, it will unlock the phone, otherwise it will prompt us to enter the PIN. I usually do swipe and/or press button 50%-50% of the time. Surprisingly, adjusting to the new habit that I can only do button pressing took more time than what I initially guessed.
Redesigned Control Centre
Control Centre becomes a bit more colorful. I guess this will make things a bit easier when I need to explain it to senior people. However, moving music control to a separate Control Centre page is not the best UX decision. Doing a very frequent action now requires more taps, and that defeats the very purpose of having a Control Centre: to do things quickly.
Contextual prediction
This one is actually a simple feature, but by far my number one favorite addition in iOS 10. Now every time I need to type my email address in a text box, it automatically offers me a list of my email addresses. Super handy and saves a lot of time. It is amazing how often we have to type in our email address in a day.
Redesigned News app
News app failed to impress me from iOS 9. The new interface still does not convince me to use it as my main news source.
Face detection in Photos app
Cool addition. It detects my photos correctly, along with my wife’s. But it detects the photos of my son as 8 different persons. Well, I can merge them, but still, not the best user experience.
Apple Pay now works for web transactions
Haven’t tried this, and currently there is no purchase I need to do.
Multilingual typing
This does not work (yet) with my non-English language, so I am not enjoying any benefit from this.
Apple default apps can be deleted
This is nice to make our home screen more organised. I do not think this will have significant impact on freeing storage capacity though.
Unlimited Safari tabs
I hit the maximum limit of tabs several times, so I suppose this will come in handy.
Safari video auto play
Video without any sound can be set to automatically played by Safari. Video with sound will still paused when loaded.
Safari split view
Two browsers side by side. Naturally, this works only in selected iPads.
Sharing Notes
Now we can share note to other people, enabling different kinds of collaborations. This can be useful now that we can make check list inside a note.
Bedtime Alarm
The idea: Apple wants to help us to establish a sleeping routine. Well, we can set this up using normal alarm and I am sure many people already did. Now it just has a fancy name with dedicated tab.
Storage limit for Music app
iOS 10 allows user to specify the maximum limit of storage that can be used for music. When our songs need more space than the limit, songs we haven’t played for a while will be deleted.
Game Center app is removed
We don’t have Game Center app anymore. However, Game Center as a service remains usable. All our games that uses Game Center still works as usual and we can still adjust our nickname from Settings app.
New sounds
Apple changes some of the default sound effects in iPhone and iPad, namely the keyboard typing sound (with unique sound for backspace) and locking sound. Some people like it, some others hate it. I couldn’t care less.
New emojis
Another change that I couldn’t care less. I don’t think we need that many types of emoji. They’re quick icons to help us in instant messaging. It does not need to represent every single group of people, cultures, places, jobs and many other aspects of being human.
The new OS sure seems like someone new taking over..
The transparency idea is gone,
Every text is bolder and bigger (way to big)
The notifications seems like monkey patch,
Totally out of place..
It seems more complicated and taking more steps for simple stuff..