iOS 12 for iPhone and iPad: 50 tweaks, 6 home runs

Wait, is this September? Why, yes—yes it is! And you know what that means: Time for another free, annual release of iOS 12, Apple’s operating system for iPhones and iPads.

Phone OS upgrades these days rarely introduce blockbuster, routine-changing features; after 12 annual revisions, what else major is left to add? Instead, we usually get a motley cornucopia of changes: one or two exciting, some welcome, some microscopic.

This is a long article. So here’s a highly compressed version of iOS 12’s highlights:

It’s faster, especially on older iPhones. Works on the same models as iOS 11.
New Settings that measure, or limit, how much you (or your kids) use certain apps.
Much improved notifications. Smarter Do Not Disturb.
Make up your own Siri commands.
Group FaceTime video chats (coming soon, Apple says).
100 more little nips and tucks.

And now, the complete version.

Speed

Apple proudly announced that iOS 12 would be much faster than iOS 11, especially on older phones. And the new OS won’t require any more horsepower than before; if your phone now runs iOS 11, it’ll run iOS 12, too.

I ran a bunch of timing tests on an iPhone 7, before and after the upgrade. In iOS 12, Apple’s staple apps open much faster, including Camera, Messages, Photos, Phone, Music, Maps, Safari, Files, opening things within Files, Mail, and Notes.

On the other hand, starting up from fully Off takes a few seconds longer in iOS 12. And the newly rewritten apps Stocks, News, and Voice Memos actually take longer to open than their predecessors.

WCCFTech.com created a set of videos like this one, comparing iOS 12 with iOS 11, one iPhone model at a time, one operation at a time. It’s fairly hypnotic, but you get the idea: Most things are a little faster.

New zip to older phones? That’s quite a gift.

Digital Health

This year, Apple, Google, and Facebook have all introduced features designed to help us with our smartphone addictions. In iOS 12, a new Settings screen called Screen Time offers options like these:

Screen Time is a series of graphs that show how much time you’ve spent on the phone, how much time you spend in each app, how many times you wake your phone a day, and so on. (You’ll probably discover that that statistic is horrifying.) You get a weekly summary, too.
Downtime is scheduled periods when you’re not allowed to use your phone except for certain apps that you designate. During working hours, you could declare Facebook and Instagram off-limits, for example (yeah, sure).
App Limits are daily time limits for categories of apps, like Games, Entertainment, and Social Networking.
Restrictions. You can also block raunchy or violent movies, music, games, and so on. This is the old Parental Controls, just in a new place.

Screen Time is comprehensive, but also, unfortunately, complex.
You can opt to apply these restrictions to your phone, or to a child’s phone; you can have it apply to all of your devices, or only the one in your hand; you can require a password to override the blockades; you can manage the kids’ limits remotely, from your own phone; and so on. Good stuff, but it’ll take you some time to wade through it.

Improved Notifications

Seems like every year, the designers of both iOS and Android rejigger their notification systems. One of these days, they’ll get it right.

In iOS 12, your alerts enjoy enhancements like these:

Grouped notifications. At last: notifications from each app can show up as a “stack,” a cluster, to be expanded with a tap (or dismissed en masse). Just like Android’s had forever! Tap to expand a stack to see them individually, or swipe across to reveal buttons for clearing them all or “managing” them (make them stop appearing for this app, or appear more “quietly”).

You can have your notifications grouped (left)—press your finger to expand a group, or swipe to clear them or shut them up for this app (right).

Quiet notifications. When you choose Manage for a certain app, you’re offered the chance to make it deliver notifications quietly: they’ll show up in the Notification Center, but won’t make sounds and won’t appear on the Lock screen. You’re also offered a Turn Off button for this app—a much easier way to shut up an app you don’t care about than having to drill into Settings.
Ending times for Do Not Disturb. As you turn on Do Not Disturb (DND) while you enter a movie or a meeting, you can tell it to turn itself off when the time comes. You can have it turn off after an hour; as you leave your current location; or (if iOS knows from your calendar that you’re at a meeting or appointment) when that appointment time slot ends. This is really amazingly excellent. You’ll never again miss calls and texts because you forgot to turn off DND when the movie or the meeting ended.

When you turn on Do Not Disturb from the Control Center (left), you can press extra hard to get this auto-turn-off menu (right).

Do Not Disturb During Bedtime. You wake in the night, check your phone for the time, see all the piled-up notifications, get sucked in, and can’t get back to sleep. No more! A new Bedtime switch, in Settings -> Do Not Disturb, hides all your notifications during your sleeping hours. In the morning, you can tap to see the notifications that have piled up while you were unconscious. (Without this option, DND shuts off sounds and vibrations, but still displays the alert bubbles.)

Augmented Reality

Apple continues to charge forward in making AR (augmented reality) a thing. (Here’s my explainer.)

In ARkit 2, software companies can create multi-player AR games. Two or more people, standing in different places, will see the same virtual 3D scene from their own angles, and play together.

iOS 12 comes with a demo AR app: a tape-measure app called Measure, which lets you measure straight things around you just by aiming the camera.

The Measure app is close enough for estimating if a new table is going to fit, but not accurate enough for, you know, NASA.

One nice part: If the camera spies a complete rectangle, like a picture on the wall, it highlights the entire thing. One tap measures height, width, and area