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Apple has rolled out its next major iOS update that will be available for iPhone and iPad users to download and install now. The update is the twelfth major update to iOS 11 and is the first major one to address the performance throttling criticism that Apple endured in December last year.
New battery health features and the ability to disable throttling are definitely the most talked about additions to Apple’s mobile software in iOS 11.3. There are some other things that have Apple fans buzzing as well, such as four new Animoji characters — lion, bear, dragon, and skull and notifications when iOS wants your personal data. There’s much more to the iOS 11.3 update, though, and in this article, we’ll discuss five cool new features that you might not know about.
Must Read: Five rarely used iPhone features
Apple's Battery Health feature
By default, the performance management is switched off and only put it place when the iPhone experiences an unexpected shutdown.
Apple said: “Users can now see if the power management feature that dynamically manages maximum performance to prevent unexpected shutdowns, first introduced in iOS 10.2.1, is on and can choose to turn it off.”
Alongside the usual tweaks to performance and security updates, there are a couple of other smaller features that users might find helpful.
Inside Apple News is a new “For You” section that offers up curated news and videos that it thinks you may life. There's also a new music video section in Apple Music. And it's also now possible to sort reviews of apps in the App Store by most favorable, most critical or most recent.
Upgraded Animoji
Animoji: animated emoji that mimic the user’s voice and facial expressions – have also been given an update, in the form of four new characters.
Apple said: “iOS 11.3 introduces four new Animoji, giving iPhone X users the ability to express themselves as a lion, bear, dragon or skull.
“Working with the A11 Bionic chip and TrueDepth camera in iPhone X, over 50 different facial muscle movements are captured, analyzed and then animated, allowing users to send Animoji messages as one of 16 different characters.”
Augmented Reality enhancements
ARKit is still relatively new and buzzy, but no one is really talking about the nifty enhancements Apple introduced in iOS 11.3. Here are the relevant notes from the iOS 11.3 change log:
ARKit 1.5 allows developers to place virtual objects on vertical surfaces, such as walls and doors, as well as on horizontal surfaces. Supports the detection and integration of images, such as movie posters or works, into augmented reality experiences. The real-world view perceived through the camera has a higher resolution as part of the augmented reality experience.
There are countless things that developers can do with these enhancements. As someone with a horrible eye for visualizing decor, I personally can’t wait for good apps that let me see what different paintings and prints will look like on my walls.
App review sorting
This might not seem like a big deal at first glance, but it is:
Four options now allow you to sort the customer reviews on the product pages: the most useful, the most favorable, the most critical or the most recent.
In general, customer reviews in the App Store are really, really, really bad. People get frustrated over silly things or they don’t understand something that should be obvious, so they hop on the App Store and leave a 1-star review. In iOS 11.3, people can finally sort app reviews to weed out the junk and more easily find reviews that are actually useful.
Username and passwords autofill in apps
This change is also a huge deal that people are going to love. In earlier versions of iOS 11, Safari could store usernames and passwords to autofill them on websites where users need to log in. Now, this functionality is finally available in apps, as per the following note from the iOS 11.3 change log:
Automatic filling of usernames and passwords is now available in apps’ web views.
So, for example, when you click through a link to The Wall Street Journal in your Twitter app, you can auto-fill your login info rather than having to leave the app and dig your username and password out of a third-party password manager like 1Password.
