wwdc 2021
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Apple unveils iOS 15 with new features for FaceTime and better notifications
During the virtual keynote of WWDC, Apple shared the first details about iOS 15, the next major version of iOS that is going to be released later this year. There are four pillars with this year’s release: staying connected, focusing without distraction, using intelligence and exploring the world.
“For many of us, our iPhones have become indispensable,” SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi said. “Our new release is iOS 15. It’s packed with features that make the iOS experience adapt to and complement the way you use iPhone, whether it’s staying connected with those who matter to you most, finding the space to focus without distraction, using intelligence to discover the information you need or exploring the world around you.”
FaceTime gets a bunch of new features
Apple is adding spatial audio to FaceTime. Now the voices are spread out depending on the position of your friends on the screen. For instance, if someone appears on the left, it’ll sound like they’re on the left in your ears. In other FaceTime news, iOS now detects background noise and tries to suppress it so that you can hear your friends and family members more easily. That’s an optional feature, which means that you can disable it in case you’re showing a concert during a FaceTime call for instance.
Another FaceTime feature is “Portrait mode”. Behind this term, Apple means that it can automatically blur the background, like in “Portrait mode” photos. In case you want to use FaceTime for work conferences, you can now generate a FaceTime link and add it to a calendar invite. FaceTime will also work in a web browser, which means that people without an Apple device can join a FaceTime call. All of these features make FaceTime more competitive with other video call services, such as Zoom and Google Meet.
FaceTime is a big focus as Apple is also introducing SharePlay. With this feature, you can listen together to a music album. Press play in Apple Music and the music will start for everyone on the call. The queue is shared with everyone else, which means anyone can add songs, skip to the next track, etc.
SharePlay also lets you watch movies and TV shows together. Someone on the call starts a video and it starts on your friend’s phone or tablet. It is also compatible with AirPlay, picture-in-picture and everything you’d expect from videos on iOS.
This isn’t just compatible with videos in the Apple TV app. Apple said there will be an API to make videos compatible with SharePlay. Partners include Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max, Twitch, TikTok and more. Here’s a screenshot of the initial partners:
Now let’s switch to Messages. The app is getting better integration with other Apple apps like News, Photos and Music. Items shared via Messages show up in those apps. In other words, Messages (and iMessage) is acting as the social layer on top of Apple’s apps.
A new notification summary
Apple is going to use on-device intelligence to create summaries of your notifications. Instead of being sorted by apps and by date, it is sorted by priority. For instance, notifications from friends will be closer to the top.
When you silence notifications, your iMessage contacts will see that you have activated “Do not disturb”. It works a bit like “Do not disturb” in Slack. But there are new settings. Apple calls this Focus mode. You can choose apps and people you want notifications from and change your focus depending on what you’re doing.
For instance, if you’re at work, you can silence personal apps and personal calls and messages. If it’s the weekend, you can silence your work emails. Your settings sync across your iCloud account if you have multiple Apple devices. And it’ll even affect your home screen by showing and hiding apps and widgets.
New smart features
Apple is going to scan your photos for text. Called Live Text, this feature lets you highlight, copy and paste text in photos. It could be a nice accessibility feature as well. And, iOS is going to leverage that info for Spotlight. You can search from text in your photos directly in Spotlight. These features are handled on-device directly.
With iOS 15, memories are getting an upgrade. “These new memories are built on the fly. They are interactive and alive,” said Chelsea Burnette, senior manager, Photos Engineering. Memories are those interactive movies that you can watch in the Photos app. Now, you can tap with your finger to pause the movie. While music still plays in the background, your photo montage resumes when you lift your finger.
You can now search for a specific song to pair with a memory. It’s going to be interesting to see in detail what’s new for the Photos app.
Wallet, Weather and Maps
After a recap of all the features of Apple Wallet, the company announced that you’ll be able to scan your ID and store it in Wallet. It’ll be available in participating states so it’s going to be a slow rollout. When a government service wants some info from your ID, you can choose to share some data with this service directly on your iPhone.
When it comes to the Weather app, it has been updated to include many of the features that were available in Dark Sky, a popular weather app that has been acquired by Apple. Expect a new design and more data.
As for Apple Maps, the new mapping data has been rolled out in several countries and Apple is still rolling it out in Europe. Apple has added a ton of new details to some areas, such as San Francisco. You can see bus and taxi lanes, crosswalks, bike lanes, etc. On highways, you see complex interchanges in 3D. All of this is also coming to Car Play later this year.
With transit, users can pin their favorite lines and view info on their Apple Watch. When you’re in a subway or bus, you can see your location in real time. It sounds a bit like Citymapper’s itinerary feature. You can also get directions in augmented reality by holding your phone in front of you.
AirPods software update
Apple is also announcing a bunch of new features for users who have AirPods. There’s a new conversation mode that makes it a smart hearing aid to boost conversation volume. You’ll also get more notifications if you’ve activated the “Announce notifications” setting. You can tweak that setting to limit it to certain apps and change depending on your focus mode.
You can also find your AirPods with the Find My app with audio notifications even when they’re in the case. Spatial audio is coming to the Apple TV and Macs with an M1 chip. As announced a few weeks ago, spatial audio for Apple Music is launching right now.
As you can see, iOS 15 is packed with new features. Apple is releasing a developer beta with an initial release today. The public beta phase will start in July. You can expect beta updates throughout the summer and a final release this fall.
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Apple’s App Store facilitated $643 billion in commerce, up 24% from last year
In its antitrust trial with Epic Games, which has just adjourned, Apple argued it doesn’t evaluate its App Store profit and loss as a standalone business. But today, the company put out new figures that indicate it does have a good understanding of the money that flows through its app marketplace, at the very least. The company has now released an updated version of a study performed by the economists at the Analysis Group, which claims the App Store ecosystem facilitated $643 billion in billings and sales in 2020, up 24% from the $519 billion seen the year prior. The new report focuses on the pandemic impacts to apps and the small business developers the App Store serves, among other things.
It also noted that about 90% of the billings and sales facilitated by the App Store actually took place outside its walls, meaning Apple took no commission on those purchases. This is up from the 85% figure reported last year, and is a figure Apple has been using in antitrust battles to paint a picture of an App Store that facilitates a lot commerce where it doesn’t take a commission.
The study then broke down how the different categories of App Store billings and sales were distributed.
Apple takes a commission on the sales of digital goods and services, which were $86 billion in 2020, or 13% of the total. But another $511 billion came from the sale of physical goods and services through apps — think online shopping, food delivery, ride hailing, etc. — or 80% of the total. These aren’t commissioned. And $46 billion came from in-app advertising, or 7% of the total.
The larger point being made with some of these figures is that, while the dollar amount flowing through apps being commissioned is large, it’s much smaller than most of the business being conducted on the App Store.
The report also noted how much of that business originates from China, which accounted for 47% of total global billings and sales ($300 billion) versus the U.S.’s 27% ($175+ billion).
Image Credits: TechCrunch
The study additionally dove into how some App Store categories had been heavily impacted by the pandemic — particularly those apps that helped businesses and schools move online, those that offered ways to shop from your phone, or helped consumers stay entertained and healthy, among other things.
This led to a more than 40% increase in billings and sales from apps offering digital goods and services, while sales in the travel and ride-hailing sectors decreased by 30%. While the latter may gradually return to pre-pandemic levels, some of the acceleration driven by the pandemic in other categories — like online shopping and grocery delivery — could be here to stay.
To break it down further, general retail grew to $383 billion in 2020, up from $268 billion last year. Food delivery and pickup grew from $31 billion in 2019 to $36 billion in 2021. Grocery shopping jumped from $14 billion to $22 billion. But travel fell from $57 billion in 2019 to $38 billion in 2020, and ride hailing dropped from $40 billion to $26 billion. (None of these categories are commissioned.)
The study then continued with a deep dive into how the App Store aided small businesses.
Highlighting how smaller businesses benefit from a tech giant’s ecosystem is a tactic others have taken to, as well, in order to shore up support for their own operations, which have similarly been accused of being monopolies in recent months.
Amazon, for example, raves about the small businesses benefitting from its marketplace and its sales event Prime Day, even as it stands accused of leveraging nonpublic data to compete with those same small business sellers. Facebook, meanwhile, pushed the small business impact angle when Apple’s new privacy protections in iOS 14 allowed customers to opt out of being tracked — and therefore out of Facebook’s personalized ads empire.
In Apple’s case, it’s pointing to the fact that the number of small developers worldwide has grown by 40% since 2015. This group now makes up more than 90% of App Store developers. The study defines this group of “small” developers as those with fewer than 1 million downloads and less than $1 million in earnings across all their apps. It also excludes any developers that never saw more than 1,000 downloads in a year between 2015 and 2020, to ensure the data focuses on businesses, not hobbyists. (This is a slightly different definition than Apple uses for its Small Business Program, we should note.)
Among this group, more than 1 in 5 saw at least an increase in downloads of at least 25% annually since their first full year on the App Store. And 1 in 4 who sold digital goods and services saw an earnings increase of at least 25% annually.
The study also connected being on the App Store with growing a business’s revenue, noting that only 23% of large developers (those with more than $1 million in earnings in 2020) had already earned more than $1 million back in 2015. Indeed, 42% were active on the App Store in 2015 but hadn’t crossed the $1 million threshold, and another 35% were not even on the App Store — an indication their success has been far more recent.
The research additionally identified more than 75 businesses in the U.S. and Europe, where iOS was essential to their business, that went public or were acquired since 2011. Their valuation totaled nearly $500 billion.
Finally, the study examined how apps transact outside their home market, as around 40% of all downloads of apps from small developers came from outside their home countries and nearly 80% were operating in multiple storefronts.
Image Credits: Apple WWDC 2021 imagery
While the antitrust scrutiny may have pushed Apple into commissioning this type of App Store research last year, it’s interesting to see the company is now updating the data on an annual basis to give the industry a deeper view into the App Store compared with the general developer revenue figure it used to trot out at various events and occasions.
Like last year’s study, the updated research has been released in the days leading up to Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference. It’s a time of the year when Apple aims to renew its bond with the developer community as it rolls out new software development kits (SDKs), application programming interfaces (API)s, software and other tools — enhancements it wants to remind developers are made possible, in part, because of its App Store fees.
Today, Apple notes it has more than 250,000 APIs included in 40 SDKs. At WWDC 2021, it will host hundreds of virtual sessions, 1-on-1 developer labs and highlight App Store favorites.
“Developers on the App Store prove every day that there is no more innovative, resilient or dynamic marketplace on earth than the app economy,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook, in a statement about the research. “The apps we’ve relied on through the pandemic have been life-changing in so many ways — from groceries delivered to our homes, to teaching tools for parents and educators, to an imaginative and ever-expanding universe of games and entertainment. The result isn’t just incredible apps for users: it’s jobs, it’s opportunity, and it’s untold innovation that will power global economies for many years to come,” he added.
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