Apple this week revealed a new initiative that's meant to help protect children. The Expanded Protections for Children effort is three-fold, each feature baked into Apple's major platforms. Two of the new additions appear to be going over well enough, but it's the other one, the photo scanning one, that's ruffled a lot of feathers.
Yesterday, Apple unveiled new child safety features that are going to be baked into iOS 15, iPadOS 15, macOS 12 Monterey, and watchOS 8. The goal is to help protect minors from being abused, seeing explicit material, and more. However, to reach that goal, the company has to implement some intrusive features.
User privacy and security is a major focal point for Apple. Safety, too. Making sure that a user is able to keep their data safe, for instance, is one of the selling points of iOS in general. So it makes sense that Apple would want to broaden that scope, especially as it relates to protecting children.
App Store Events is one of the newest features coming soon to iOS 15 and iPadOS 15. It's a way for developers to highlight in-game and in-app events that users can participate in. This new feature is going to launch to the public alongside those software updates later this year, but Apple is already testing it out.
Safari's compact tabs on iPad are now entirely optional, and that's awesome news—the latest iPadOS beta now defaults to showing a separate row of tabs, just like Safari on your Mac.
iOS 15's redesigned Maps app now factors weather warnings when suggesting navigation routes to help you avoid flooded roads, snowstorms and more when planning your next journey.
Back in June, Apple unveiled the next major versions for all of its most popular platforms. Since then, Apple has been working on the public launch as it normally does: by seeding betas. And today, the newest prerelease software is now available for public beta testers trying out iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS 12 Monterey.
Apple implemented some controversial Safari changes with iOS 15 and iPadOS 15. To give you a feel of everything new in the Safari browser, we've created this hands-on video walkthrough,
Now that the third betas of Apple's next big updates are out there in the wild, the details are still trickling in. There's quite a bit of new in the latest prerelease software beta. And now we know one more bit, which should be helpful to those who might be worried about available storage on their device(s) when the new update arrives.
Earlier today, Apple seeded the latest beta of iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 to developers. Along with betas for the other major platform updates. With this being a big update for all of Apple's most popular operating systems, there's bound to be additional tweaks added to the mix with subsequent beta seeds.
We continue to march towards the inevitable public release of Apple's next big operating system updates. Before that can happen, though, developer and public beta testers need to get their hands on prerelease software. The goal? Test out the platforms, work out the bugs, develop apps, and prepare for the next big thing.
iOS 15 brings offline Siri, which leverages on-device processing to handle specific types of requests even without an internet connection, and we have a video to show it to you.