It’s traditional for Apple to be unable to finish new features by the public release of new operating systems, and iOS 16 is no exception. As reported by MacRumors, there are nine iOS 16 features that users will have to wait for.
Last year, at the first official release of iOS 15 and iPadOS 15, there were several features that had been announced but were not available in the initial public releases. These features included SharePlay, Digital IDs in the Wallet app, and Universal Control.
This year, there are again several announced features that aren’t quite ready for prime time at today’s expected public release of iOS 16 and iPadOS 16.
- Live Activities: Follow activities happening in real-time like a sports match or a ride-share with just a glance at the Lock Screen.
- Game Center SharePlay support: Games that use Game Center multiplayer support have SharePlay integration. Users can automatically start playing with friends during a FaceTime call.
- Game Center Contacts integration: Your friends’ Game Center profiles will show up in Contacts. Tap to view what game they are playing and what they’ve achieved.
- Support for Matter: This new smart home connectivity standard enables compatible accessories to work together seamlessly and across platforms. Matter allows users to choose from even more compatible smart home accessories and control them with the Home app and Siri on Apple devices.
- Updated architecture for the Home app: Offers faster, improved performance and efficiency.
- Freeform app: A new digital whiteboard app with a flexible canvas for diagramming projects, aggregating important assets, and brainstorming, with real-time collaboration features and rich multimedia support.
- iCloud Shared Photo Library: A new option in the Photos app to allow users to create a shared photo library and invite anyone with an Apple ID to view, contribute to, and edit it.
- Key sharing: Securely share keys in Apple Wallet via messaging apps and Mail.
- Easy Shortcuts setup: iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X will have to wait a while to ask Siri to run shortcuts from installed apps without any setup process. The feature will be immediately available for newer devices.
Apple says that all of these features are coming in an update to iOS 16 later this year, but it has not yet offered a specific timeframe for their availability. iOS 16.0 will become officially available for every compatible iPhone today.
