IOS12 was unveiled with WWDC 2018, but disappointingly it didn’t bring a sea change: no change to the five-year-old flat UI, no dark mode (but a work in progress), no Swift5, no truly powerful Siri.

So first, let’s take a look at the biggest feature of iOS12, Animoji.

Now to the point

On top of that, Apple added Siri control. You can now say a code word to Siri and it will help you complete a series of previously scheduled tasks. This is hardly an evolution of Siri, more of a complement to Workflow. You can understand that Siri is not as smart as Bixby to grab a red envelope for you, send you moments, follow you on Weibo, but it will be able to do as much as you want with appropriate Settings and learning. Of course, this requires you to have a certain logical ability, as well as third-party App adaptation.

Is Siri getting smarter besides that? Can you do more for me? Not according to the information so far, at least.

Machine learning is still hot this year, but there seems to be no bright machine learning App on mobile (not including cloud-based machine learning).

At present, VR has gradually lost its halo due to cost, technology, experience and other reasons. With the support of Apple, ALTHOUGH AR is still hot, it still has not much flash point. This requires vendors and developers to continue to explore the commercial and technical possibilities. In this context, Apple proposed Quick Look, which turns 3D model +AR into files that can be shared. This is a very interesting idea, even a little divergent, it will be possible to replace pictures and videos, PPT, moments of friends as a new media.

Imagine, you hit the legendary dragon slaying sword in a mobile game, click to share, your friends can see the 3D model of the sword, even in the form of 1:1 in the real world, this is how interesting a thing. I believe this will revolutionize business, gaming, education, and more.

The Metal 2.1

Metal has gone through minor iterations, adding support for accelerated Ray tracing and indirect command buffers.

Interactive Controls in Notifications

Notifications are now more interactive, allowing users to do more without opening the app. In addition, this time the most visible is the notification grouping function. This will no longer be dominated by IM.

Authentication Services

In fact, we have been able to automatically fill passwords of Safari and some apps through Integrate Password Manager. With the addition of Password AutoFill, it is possible to extend Password AutoFill across a wide range of applications, such as 1Password or even third-party browsers.

I even imagine that if all of our passwords were associated with our devices (Face ID, Touch ID), we wouldn’t need to have a memorable password, or even know it, to provide authentication. I think this is the final form of the code.

CarPlay for Navigation Apps

CarPlay now supports third party navigation

Network Framework

Although they didn’t say it at the event, it looks like apple has rewritten the Network Framework for iOS12. The advantage of this is that if your App needs to use protocols such as TLS, TCP and UDP directly, the new Network Framewor will make things much easier. Of course, if you only use URLSession or a third-party network framework based on URLSession, no change is required. URLSession is built on the new Network Framework.

In addition, As in previous years, Apple has routinely put a number of older apis on the back shelf, and you will see a warning when you update Xcode ⚠️.

So those are the new features that iOS12 brings to us. Is not like me to feel not enough to enjoy, slightly disappointed. In fact, as the media speculated before, due to a large number of bugs in iOS11, iOS12 delayed a large number of new features and even new UI interactions, and will focus on the quality of the code. Of course, another important reason is that the Mac OS has brought a lot of new features and features for the same N years without a major update. Maybe the Mac OS will be a testing ground for iOS, and all the features we see on Mac OS today will be coming to iOS over the next few months. Even the integration of Mac OS and iOS, which has been in the works for years, will come slowly, one way or another.