iOS 8: Are You Ready?

Today, Apple will unveil iOS 8 for the first time. The overhauled mobile operating system will be preloaded on the iPhone 6 and the 6 plus, available Friday, but the adoring public can download iOS 8 on iPhone 4S 5, 5c, and 5S two days early. For all previous models of iPhone, sorry, you’re out of luck. But hey, for the first time since the iPhone 4, this is the iPhone upgrade you’ve been waiting for. And it all begins with iOS 8.

Our favorite feature has to be Family Sharing. With iOS 8, up to six people across separate accounts will be able to share their purchases from iTunes, the App Store, and even iBooks if you haven’t gotten around to cracking The Da Vinci Code just yet.

In a word: sweet. For groups of friends, or just your local book club, this is a no-brainer. We recommend finding a combination of music lovers, book lovers, and mobile game lovers in your extended “family” so you can reap the rewards of this new feature.

For an actual family, it’s even better. Parents have the option of approving purchases, and can also use a shared family calendar and photo album. With a household full of iPhone users, this will be your favorite iOS feature as well.

One of the more useful features, even if it’s not immediately apparent, is the new QuickType feature, which Apple believes will cut down on those embarrassing autocorrect mistakes. This way your mom won’t wonder why you think she should be thinner when in fact you were just asking her to dinner. Trust us. It’s happened. If the new predictive text isn’t enough, Apple is opening up the walled garden for third-party keyboard options, like SwiftKey, popular on Android for some time now. Kudos to Apple for opening up at all, as developers will also be able to create new widgets for the notification panel. Open is good. We love open.

Guess what? Siri is all grown up. We remember when she was a precocious little girl that could barely understand the English language. Now you can activate Siri by just saying “Hey, Siri” and possibly even, “Yo Siri, what’s up dawg?” In any event, she is always listening, and Siri will transcribe your text in real time so you don’t spend 20 seconds waiting for her to say, “I’m terribly sorry but I can’t help you right now.” Hands-free voice commands are the future. We’re not there yet, but there will come a time when Siri transcribes all your texts and emails.

And for you workers out there, you may come to love, or possibly loathe, the new Handoff continuity features. Let’s say you’re typing an email at work on your Mac and the last train is leaving the station. Head on out and work on that message on your iPhone, and when you get home, go ahead and polish it on your iPad. All of your Apple devices will be connected when OS X Yosemite is released in October for Mac. The Handoff features will work with Mail, Keynote, Maps, Messages, Reminders, Calendar, and Contacts. Your family, if not already reading all your iBooks, will thank you.

So backup that iPhone and get ready. iOS 8 is coming today, and we are all on board.

If you still have iOS 8 questions, please contact our mobile app developers at Appstem to learn more.