What's New in iOS 16 For iPhone

iOS 16 for iPhone has a ton of new features. See some of the best new things you need to try out as soon as you update.

Check out What's New in iOS 16 For iPhone at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's look at what's new in iOS 16.  
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So there are a lot of new things in iOS 16 for iPhone. Let's take a look at some of the best new features. First let's look at Lock Screen. You can highly customize your Lock Screen in iOS 16 and you can see here the the basic one but you can have many more. I've got several here and you can easily create them just by going to the last one. It is very similar to the Apple Watch Interface for doing this. There's a ton of different things here. You've got all these different basic featured ones and then you can dig down deeper and see ones like Photo Shuffle, Weather & Astronomy. There's emoji patterns that you can create. You can just do them by color, you know, with a color gradient. Once you select one you can customize it beyond that with different fonts and things like that. Plus you can add and remove widgets. So you can see there's a Calendar widget and a Weather widget and a Reminders or Clock widget there. You can remove those. You can add some other ones. Different apps have widgets as well. So you can scroll down through the apps and you'll be able to see third party apps that have widgets for the Home screen as well. 
Once you have customized your screen you can add that to the list of screens there and it is so easy to actually tap and hold the screen and then swap around and choose a different one. So you can kind of choose a different Lock Screen depending upon your mood. 
Now Focus has some new features as well. One of them relating to those Lock Screens. So you can actually go into a Focus and you can customize the Home Screen and the Lock Screen when you're in that Focus. So, for instance, you can choose the pages on your Home Screen that show but also you can set a different Lock Screen. So you can have Focus modes that, say, go on in the evening and then change your Lock Screen for the evening as opposed for the day. You can also, in Focus now, go in and add Focus Filters. So instead of having to turn Off all notifications for Calendar, say, you could go in and only have notifications for certain calendars. The same thing for people sending you messages in Mail and in Messages and in other apps as well. Third party developers can add filters in for their apps too. 
Now there are some new features in Messages. A big new one is Undo Send. So Send won't send right away. There's a slight delay. So when you send a message you could always tap and hold it and you can see Undo right here. So that's really handy. Also you can Edit a message. So once it is already sent you can go in and edit. Of course this will only work with iMessage and other people that have iOS 16 or newer. You can change something and then correct a mistake and then they will actually see the edits if they really want to dig down. So you can't hide something by doing this. But you can make something a lot clearer. You can also mark an entire conversation as Unread which is handy in case you read it but you still want to be reminded to go back to it a little bit later on. 
So you've got some new features in Mail as well. You'll also have Undo Send here. So after you send something there's an Undo Send button and you have a little bit of time before the message is actually sent where you can hit Undo and get the message back  so you can make changes to it. You can also schedule a Send so you can have it sent later at a couple of times or have it sent at a specific time or even date. You can highly customize exactly when this message will go out. You'll see Send Later as a mailbox when you have at least one message there that is scheduled and you can go back and Edit the time when it will be sent. Now you can also use a feature called Remind Me which isn't actually that useful in my opinion. So in your inbox you can go to Remind Me for a message and have it remind you later. But you have to leave the message in your inbox which means that it is not that useful. I'd rather be able to archive the message and have it reappear in my inbox. There's also Follow Up which allows you to go to your sent messages, tap a Follow Up button, and then you can compose a new message that's being sent to the same place. But this only happens if there is some text in the message that indicates that a followup might be needed like you say something, like remember to do this, and then it will appear. Which is kind of weird that you just can't use it anywhere or you can't set a time to remind you to do the followup. 
Here's one other feature. Search is a little smarter now in Mail. If you search for something but maybe you don't spell it quite right or using a different word you'll still find it. Here you could see I've spelled vacation wrong. Yet it still finds the message. 
So we've had Live Text before where you can get the text out of an image. But now you can do it in video. So here's a video I'm playing in the Photos App but will also work other places you play video. I can actually pause the video and actually capture some text in the video on that still frame there. So I could just grab it or translate it. I can just copy it right here and then paste it in somewhere else.
In Maps you can now finally do multistop routes. So here I've got a route already set but I can add a new one and then add that in and now you can see I've got three places in this route. It's going to calculate it. Now you can even drag and drop to reorder the locations. 
In the Health App there's a great new feature Medications. You can add to the Health App your medications. Say if you take a pill everyday at a certain time you can add it in, get reminders to take that pill, and be able to check the box saying that you have taken it for that day. So you know you're finished for that day. You can just type in a medication name and provide all the information and when you do it will even check to see if there are any interactions you should know about. So it's really handy there and you can go back in and edit later and archive medications. So if you take something say for ten days you can archive it so it is not something you're getting reminded of anymore. 
Here'a a little thing but I think it is something I use all the time. There's now going to be a search button at the bottom of your Home Screens. So you can use that to get to Spotlight. Now I know it was just a gesture before so it is really just as easy to get there but I'm often using it to launch apps and do other things so I know I'm going to be using this button all the time. 
There's also now a Fitness App for iPhone. There's was before but you needed an Apple Watch to have it. Now you're just going to have it on your iPhone so you can still access parts of the Fitness App even if you're not an Apple Watch owner. 
There's something in the Settings App under Privacy called Safety Check. You can use this if something has changed or you're concerned about security and safety here. It basically walks you through things like doing an emergency reset of who has access to things and what sharing options are on. 
Another cool option in Settings you can get to is Live Captions. When you turn on Live Captions basically any video that is playing is automatically going to be captioned at the bottom of the screen. Your phone is going to take the text that is being spoken and actually show it on the bottom. Of course it is using live speech to text technology there so the results are kind of mixed and the overlay doesn't show up on screenshots. At least not yet. So I can't even show it to you here. You'll have to try it on your own. 
In the Books App there's a lot more customization to how the text looks for e-pub type books. So before you could just change the font and background and a few things. But now you can go in and there's a whole Themes and Settings section here. So you've got your different themes and there are a ton more options you can customize and save. You could change the Font size and all of that. You can change different things about how it looks on the screen. You can dig deeper and even go and Bold the all the text if you want. Change the Line spacing, Character spacing, and Word spacing to make it easier for you to read.
Now a huge new feature across all of the new operating systems, iOS 16, iPadOS 16 and macOS Ventura is going to be iCloud Shared Photo Library. So you can now have a shared library between several people. Your family usually. This means after you turn it On any photo that you designate as being part of the Shared Library you have, just like always, but they also see in their photos library as well. You can indicate whether you want all your photos do this or just some. You can manually set some to being just personal or shared. There's tons of different options and ways to set it up. But this is a big deal especially if say you and your spouse go on a trip and you both take pictures with your camera and it's annoying that you can only see your pictures and you can't see their pictures unless you setup Shared Albums and all. Now you don't have to mess with that. You can just have a shared iCloud photo library and see each other's photos. 
Another big new feature in the Photos App is the ability to find duplicates. So you do that down here under Utilities at the bottom of Albums. Apple does it the right way. The way I've been telling people to do this forever. It shows you the photos that it thinks are duplicates and you can go through and decide what to do with each one. Get rid of one. Merge the information for the two and all of that. It looks for photos that are exact duplicates but also ones that are really close. Like maybe if you took two  shots in quick succession and they're basically the same thing. That way you could go through and say well this one is the better one, I'll get rid of the other one and limit what I have in my library. 
You also now can Copy and Paste Edits so you can make a change, say, in one photo. Now here I'll just make some adjustments and then once I get those adjustments made I can go and tap here. Copy the edits and now I could go and apply that to another photo. I don't even have to go and edit the photo to do it. So I can select this photo here. Instead of Edit I can just tap here and then Paste the edit and it applies exactly the same settings to that photo. 
A cool new thing you can do is Lift the Subject from the Background. So you can't outline the subject. It will do it for you. You tap and hold on the subject and then you can drag and pull it away and use all the dragging commands to drag it to another app if you want. You can also just tap on it again and Copy or Share. Here I can share to Mail. Instead of pasting the entire photo in there it's just the subject in there. So it has some really cool uses. 
Now there's already Look Up in the Photos App where you can look up things like animals and plants. Well now we have Birds, Insects, and Statues as well. Here's an example although this is actually using Landmarks.
Now Reminders has a couple new tricks as well. One thing is you can now Pin a List to the top. So if there is some really important list and you always want it to be on the top, you have lots of other lists, you can pin it up there. In addition now you can have Templates. So you can go into Templates here and you can have a template like a packing list. You can just basically create a new list from that template and reuse it and check all the items off. It's easy to create them as well. You can just select a current list that you've got and then turn it into a template. 
Here's one last one. There's a Translation App that you already have on your iPhone. It predates iOS 16. But now there's a camera mode in it. So you tap on the camera at the bottom and now you can just point at something and then tap the button and it kind of freezes it and gives you a translation. This is going to be really handy while traveling and trying to interpret signs and such. 
So there are many more small features in iOS 16 as well. These are just the ones that I thought were the most interesting and worth checking out right away. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 20 Responses to “What's New in iOS 16 For iPhone”

Steve

5 months ago

Any tips about the new passkey feature?

Gary Rosenzweig

Steve: Gonna have to wait for some sites to actually use it first. I think a few do, but I haven't run into any yet. After some major sites start using it I'll probably do a video. Until then it is hard to demonstrate (or even try it out).

Jerry Brightbill

My ios 16 doesn't seem to have the remove duplicates in Photos. Was this removed before the final release?

Jerry: Either you don't have any duplicates, or you haven't waited long enough for Photos to check for them.

nick

Gary, I don't see the Search button at the bottom of the home screen. Does it have to be turned on somewhere? thx

nick: Settings, Home Screen, Search: Show On Home Screen.

Les Philpot

I’ve noticed since upgrading to iOS 16 that my battery drains at a phenomenal rate. I have a relatively new iPhone 13 Pro and it has a battery level of 100%. Never had the problem before upgrade.

Les: Have you checked in Settings, Battery to see which apps are using the most power?

Sorry Gary but in Settings, Home Screen, the only choices are: Add Newly Downloaded Apps to Home Screen or App Library, and show Notification Badges in the App Library. I also searched in Settings but don't see that option.

nick: Not sure why you aren't seeing that. https://imgur.com/a/mJ0C68f

Robert

They ruined the Contacts app. Groups are now Lists. Cannot select multiple Lists - we could select 2+ Groups in past versions.

Robert: Just a name change. By selecting multiple groups, what do you mean? What context? In Mail I can add multiple groups to an email just as easily as before.

Jonathan

Does iOS16 contain a native app for scanning business cards directly into contacts?

Jonathan: No, nothing built into iOS for that.

We could go to the main "Groups" screen with "All iCloud" at the top. Below that title I had other Groups of people/numbers/emails: Residents [where I live] + Family + Birthdays [because only ONE birthday per family of 2+] + Church people + Staff [where I live] + Medical people. All these are different Groups to keep them separate. I could select 3 or 4 of these Groups and view those as if they were one Group. In ios16 you can ONLY select one Group at a time. This is a Lost usable feature.

Robert: Ah, I see. Never used them like that (Don't use Groups at all, come to think of it). Well, send feedback to Apple so they know you will miss it.

It gets worst at Apple Feedback: there is NO category in "iOS and iPadOS" section for Contacts or Calendar.

Robert: Just put it in "iPhone."

Fred Lee

I have over 10.000 photos so I know there are duplicates.
But when I scroll to utilities, I do not have "duplicates"??

Fred: Either you don't have any duplicates (possible, why not?) or you simply haven't waited long enough for them to be checked. Wait a day or two.

What's New in iOS 16 For iPhone

Comments: 20 Responses to “What's New in iOS 16 For iPhone”

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