Five New Features Coming to Your iPhone With iOS 16.1 Later This Month

[MacRumors]

In a few weeks, Apple will release iOS 16.1 for all compatible iPhones, marking the first major update to the iOS 16 operating system since its public release in September.

With iOS 16.1, Apple is bringing several new changes, features, and bug fixes to iPhone users. We've highlighted five noteworthy changes below. iOS 16.1 is currently still in beta testing with developers and public beta testers.

Live Activities

With iOS 16.1, Apple is enabling Live Activities on the redesigned iOS 16 Lock Screen and on the Dynamic Island on the iPhone 14 Pro. Live Activities are a new type of interactive notification that can dynamically display real-time information from apps without needing to open an app directly.

Uber, for example, can display a Live Activities notification on the iOS 16 Lock Screen to show the estimated time of arrival of a car. Sports apps will also be able to utilize Live Activities to showcase game scores in real time.

On the latest iPhone 14 Pro models, Live Activities are also integrated into the Dynamic Island, which allows users to see real-time information from apps as they use their phone. Live Activities are also shown on the Lock Screen in always-on display mode. Once iOS 16.1 is released to the public, apps will begin to adopt support for Live Activities.

Redesigned Battery Indicator

Over the summer, Apple added a battery percentage indicator to the status bar for iPhones with a notch. The initial version of the battery indicator included a battery icon that remained visually full, regardless of the iPhone's actual charge. In iOS 16.1, Apple is changing the behavior of the battery icon to accurately reflect the iPhone's charge level when the percentage is shown. iOS 16.1 also expands the battery indicator to more devices, including the iPhone 12 mini and iPhone 13 mini.

Apple Fitness+ With Just an iPhone

Starting with iOS 16.1, iPhone users will be able to subscribe and use Apple Fitness+ without needing an Apple Watch. Fitness+ is a subscription from Apple that provides a wide catalog of workout videos and programs with different trainers. At launch, an Apple Watch was needed to use Fitness+ to display real-time metrics on the screen.

Clean Energy Charging Option

In iOS 16.1, Apple has added a new Clean Energy Charging Option that selectively charges the iPhone when lower carbon emission electricity is available in an effort to provide a more green charging method. Apple says the ‌iPhone‌ will still reach a full charge before it's needed based on a user's daily routine, and the feature can be toggled off if desired.

Pre-Load In-App Content

iOS 16.1 adds a new toggle for apps downloaded from the App Store that can automatically run newly downloaded apps in the background to download content before you first launch them. The new toggle is meant to make it faster for users to begin using an app immediately after downloading without waiting for the in-app content to load.

More

iOS 16.1 is the first major update to iOS 16, so as expected, several smaller but noteworthy changes and bug fixes are included in the update.

• Redesigned Wallpaper section within Settings
• Constant Copy and Paste prompt has been fixed
• Includes the groundwork for the smart home standard Matter and Emergency SOS via Satellite
• Ability to delete the Wallet app

Article Link: Five New Features Coming to Your iPhone With iOS 16.1 Later This Month

 

[mnsportsgeek]

So shared Photo Library is gonna be this year's universal control?

 

[mrr]

I just want bug fixes for dreadful battery life and for Safari that keeps freezing with a white screen of death.

 

[mystery hill]

I just want bug fixes for dreadful battery life and for Safari that keeps freezing with a white screen of death.

It could be worse. It could be blue.

 

[arkitect]

• Constant Copy and Paste prompt has been fixed

I really hope this is true.
It is worse than the EU Cookies prompts…

 

[JM]

Iiiiiiiiii’m gonna reserve judgement till the clean energy charging is out to see if it actually works sufficiently.

 

[ian87w]

Clean energy charging? What does that even mean, and how does Apple know what my electricity company is doing? Whats next, you can only charge iphone when you have Apple approved "green" electric company providing the electricity to your home? I mean virtue signalling is one thing, but this is either dumb or super Orwellian.

 

[gk_brown]

Hope they fixed the bug that requires me to manually sign into iCloud every time my phone restarts...

 

[David1964]

I hate the iOS 16 wallpaper picker.

 

[rp100]

“Clean energy charging” sounds like some kind of psychology experiment in virtue signaling. The option probably doesn’t even do anything, but Apple will be able to predict things about your behavior based on whether or not you have it enabled.

 

[The Game 161]

just hope it helps battery life. Live activities i would say is the only thing I'm looking forward to.

 

[citysnaps]

Excellent news! Looking forward to the update.

 

[David1964]

Hey Apple, give us back our dark mode wallpapers and the ability to set a home screen wallpaper direct from the Photos app instead of going straight to the clunky Lock Screen.The iOS 16 wallpaper picker sucks! Poor choice of stock wallpapers.

 

[TheYayAreaLiving 🎗️]

The re-design battery indicator looks very nice. Hopefully, iOS 16.1 stops the battery drainage.

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

And 16.1.1? And maybe 16.1.2?

It seems there has been a lot of maintenance updates lately, with their new goodies. Both the iPhone and Apple Watch with mandatory updates as they are about to ship? Just seems unusual.

But updates are good. New features are good.

 

[podycust]

Macrumors you forgot to say the clean energy thing is us only!

 

[LeadingHeat]

I’m just over here waiting for shared photo library

 

[tehabe]

Green energy charging is probably very simple, the phone is looking up the current electricity mix in your grid and optimising the charging according to the supply sources. I don't think it is worth it.

 

[infinitejest]

I know that they want to ship their new iPhones with the new iOS versions. But it's so weird that so many major features of iOS 16 weren't available when iOS 16 was released and won't come with 16.1 either. Maybe it would be better if they waited till everything is ready and in the meantime use the time to fix bugs. Even the features that were released with iOS 16 seemed rushed.

 

[cocky jeremy]

Macrumors you forgot to say the clean energy thing is us only!

Don't feel left out. Most of us won't use it either.

 

[TechieGeek]

Clean energy charging? What does that even mean, and how does Apple know what my electricity company is doing? Whats next, you can only charge iphone when you have Apple approved "green" electric company providing the electricity to your home? I mean virtue signalling is one thing, but this is either dumb or super Orwellian.

A lot of the data is public. In California for example, you can see a live view of energy demand vs. supply and break-down the source of energy production in real-time: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx

It doesn't matter who the electricity company is or what electric plan you're personally on, it only matters who the grid operator is.

 

[jimothyGator]

The average daily engergy consumption for U.S. residential customers is 29,400 Wh. The iPhone 14 Pro Max has a battery capacity of 16.75 Wh.

If you fully drain and charge your iPhone twice a day, congratulations: by using the Clean Energy setting, you've reduced your carbon footprint by no more than 0.12%. (That maximum reduction would require that 100% of grid energy production during the clean energy time is carbon-free, 0% of the energy production during other times is carbon-free, and that if it weren't for this Clean Energy setting that 100% of your charging would be done during non-clean energy times).

Doing nothing for the planet, one virtue signal at a time.

 

[JulianL]

I wonder whether live activities might get some level of Apple Watch integration at some point. E.g., taking the example used in this article, Uber dropped its Apple Watch app a while ago which I was pretty sad about because being able to check the status and car and driver details on your watch rather than having to take your phone out of your pocket especially if waiting in a slightly dodgy area seemed to me to be a perfect use case for Apple Watch. If Apple extended the live activities a bit so that a developer adding support for live activities on iOS could declare in the code that they want the live info also available on any connected Apple Watch and Apple would then handle all of the synchronisation and display on the watch without the developer having to do anything more other than setting that flag in their iOS code and presumably defining some sort of alternative display template for the display info on the watch since the display canvass would be a different shape on the watch vs the iPhone but that probably wouldn't be actual code, it would be some sort of formatting template to declare where to place on the watch display the same dynamic info already being generated for the live activity display on the iPhone.

Apple would probably also have to give some user control via the Settings app so that the user could disable the mirroring for apps if they didn't want it mirrored to their phone for a particular app, and to have a workable interface on the Watch if multiple apps want to echo stuff at the same time, but if those details could be worked out it could be a major boost to watch functionality while demanding very little effort on the third party app developers' part to support it.

 

[haruhiko]

“Clean energy” charging 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

 

[SactoGuy18]

Hopefully, iOS 16.1 will actually be reasonably stable when I upgrade.