iOS 15 Tidbits: Per-App Settings, Notification Summaries, New Calendar Widget, and More

[MacRumors]

We've highlighted several new features coming in iOS 15, like the return of the text cursor magnifier and the ability to rearrange Home Screen pages, but additional tidbits continue to surface that we think readers will find noteworthy.

Per-App Accessibility Settings

Last week, we highlighted a new Control Center option that lets you set the text size for individual apps. But per-app accessibility settings don't end there.

Individual app customizations also include adjustments to bold text, button shapes, toggle switches, transparency, contrast, color, motion, and more, allowing you to effectively remodel many app elements that you find particularly burdensome to use.

Small Calendar Month Widget

Annoyingly for many iOS 14 users, the square Calendar widget only shows the current day and any events, rather than the full calendar month, which can only be displayed in the larger 2x4 widget.

New 2x2 Calendar widget (left) versus original 2x2 widget​

This always felt like a poor use of widget space, but fortunately iOS 15 adds a new 2x2 widget that displays the full calendar month with the current day highlighted. In another related change, you can now make a calendar a custom color using the color picker, in addition to the seven default color options that the Calendar app offers.

Improved Siri Suggestions

Apple continues to work hard to improve Siri in iOS 15, not only in terms of voice requests, which now get processed on your device instead of being sent to the cloud, but also when it comes to Siri suggestions, as evidenced by the following suggestion spotted by a Redditor.

The user had simply wished someone in their contacts a happy birthday during a Messages conversation, which resulted in the notification "Siri Found a Birthday" and the option to update that contact card with their birth date. This is similar to the existing suggestion to add someone to your contacts if they say their name or have Share Name and Photo turned on, but adds another layer of contextual awareness.

Custom Frequency of Notification Summaries

In iOS 15, notifications have been redesigned, and Apple now also includes a Notification Summary option that uses on-device machine learning to automatically populate notifications based on priority in a new lock screen design.

You can select which apps are included in these summaries, which are delivered to your lock screen at a time of your choosing. For example, you could opt to have them delivered during your lunch break, after dinner, or last thing before bedtime. If that sounds a little too infrequent, no problem – you can have up to 12 individual notification summaries within a 24-hour period, which could be timed hourly over the course of a working day, for instance.

Along with macOS Monterey and iPad iOS 15, iOS 15 is currently in developer beta with a public beta due next month and an official release sometime in the fall.

Article Link: iOS 15 Tidbits: Per-App Settings, Notification Summaries, New Calendar Widget, and More

 

[gwhizkids]

I know these changes are not the red meat many were looking for, but in many ways they make the iPhone a more functional, more usable product.

 

[Kylo83]

Same look and icons since 2013 iOS 7 it’s so bad iOS has had zero main look overall in 8 years

Just let us remove home bar and I’ll stop moaning I hate it

Widgets need to be interactive or it’s not very useful

 

[Dekema2]

Would be nice if there was an option to "Disable Opening in App" for webpages and their corresponding apps.

 

[Premium1]

I just hope the notifications actually group together and stay together and not have some grouped together and others not for the same app.

 

[motm95]

Please, Apple, let us finally put icons or widgets wherever we want without being forced into the grid layout.

 

[AwesomeSheep]

Just let us remove home bar and I’ll stop moaning I hate it

That's the little thing at the bottom that you swipe?

 

[Kylo83]

That's the little thing at the bottom that you swipe?

we dont need it do we, we know how to swipe and use our phone give us an option to remove it, it ruins the display and gaming, it would look so much nicer without it

 

[macduke]

This biggest tip that I've learned is you pull down now to refresh Safari. It was driving me crazy up until this point to have to tap that stupid little three dots in a circle and go into another menu to refresh.

That month calendar view is a good tip. I just stacked that one on top of my existing 2x2 Up Next calendar view and now I can swipe between the two to quickly check the days in the month.

I hope before iPad OS 15 comes out, you can increase the icon density on the Home Screen. The widgets take up so much more space because a 2x2 takes up the spot of one icon. They really need to increase the density! It also makes it trickier to arrange widgets. For instance, you can't put a 4x4 under a 1x2 unless there is another 1x2 above it. Might have something to do with the way icons rearrange in portrait orientation. Serious question though: How many people use their iPad in portrait by default? Their cases and keyboards are designed to be used in landscape. They should just go ahead and rotate the Apple Logo and put Face ID at the top. I get constantly annoyed when unlocking and my finger is barely in the way of the sensor.

 

[Attirex]

If you need to use that functionality to manage that many daily notifications, you have larger issues in your life to deal with. Unless you're the Most Important Person on Earth or a constantly texting teenager, I don't get it.

In fact, a lot of iOS 15 features seem targeted towards insane use cases where someone gets 500,000 notifications every day including 14,000 phone calls, 60,000 text messages, 80,000 calendar reminders, and manages 40,000 notes. Who are these people? Can I be you? Or maybe I don't want to be....hm.

 

[hagar]

It's nice Apple is making Siri detectors smarter: up until now I see one every 3 months I guess. Apple should make them far more available across the board. And they should be less picky on formats: at least in my region we use several time and phone formats, and I guess Siri just doesn't recognise them. Also addresses and appointments remain missing in action.

And the most important one: make Siri recognise addresses in Safari so we can click and open them in Maps, instead of always being redirected to Google Maps. It's so annoying to select/copy/paste addresses.

 

[coocooforcocoap]

nice improvements... the only gripe i have is with the siri suggestions widget... there is no background on the widget so when placed on a page of app icons it just looks like a mess.

 

[Apple_Robert]

I will take the new changes with a smile.

 

[Chris Grande]

I just hope the notifications actually group together and stay together and not have some grouped together and others not for the same app.

I think you are looking for this setting, which is in Settings, Notifications and available per app. The default is Automatic.

 

[esdunbar]

We've highlighted several new features coming in iOS 15, like the return of the text cursor magnifier and the ability to rearrange Home Screen pages, but additional tidbits continue to surface that we think readers will find noteworthy.

Per-App Accessibility Settings

Last week, we highlighted a new Control Center option that lets you set the text size for individual apps. But per-app accessibility settings don't end there.

Individual app customizations also include adjustments to bold text, button shapes, toggle switches, transparency, contrast, color, motion, and more, allowing you to effectively remodel many app elements that you find particularly burdensome to use.

Small Calendar Month Widget

Annoyingly for many iOS 14 users, the square Calendar widget only shows the current day and any events, rather than the full calendar month, which can only be displayed in the larger 2x4 widget.

New 2x2 Calendar widget (left) versus original 2x2 widget​

This always felt like a poor use of widget space, but fortunately iOS 15 adds a new 2x2 widget that displays the full calendar month with the current day highlighted. In another related change, you can now make a calendar a custom color using the color picker, in addition to the seven default color options that the Calendar app offers.

Improved Siri Suggestions

Apple continues to work hard to improve Siri in iOS 15, not only in terms of voice requests, which now get processed on your device instead of being sent to the cloud, but also when it comes to Siri suggestions, as evidenced by the following suggestion spotted by a Redditor.

The user had simply wished someone in their contacts a happy birthday during a Messages conversation, which resulted in the notification "Siri Found a Birthday" and the option to update that contact card with their birth date. This is similar to the existing suggestion to add someone to your contacts if they say their name or have Share Name and Photo turned on, but adds another layer of contextual awareness.

Custom Frequency of Notification Summaries

In iOS 15, notifications have been redesigned, and Apple now also includes a Notification Summary option that uses on-device machine learning to automatically populate notifications based on priority in a new lock screen design.

You can select which apps are included in these summaries, which are delivered to your lock screen at a time of your choosing. For example, you could opt to have them delivered during your lunch break, after dinner, or last thing before bedtime. If that sounds a

 

[esdunbar]

I switched to Android at the beginning of the year after being on the iPhone since the first one in 2007. I was blown away at how much better the Android OS is.

I had no idea what I was missing with interactive widgets. I can't belive Apple hasn't given this to their users yet.

Also, the standard grid layout with iOS always annoyed me because there is so much wasted space on the iPhone screen. Android allowed me to add a row and a column, easy peasy. So much better!

Those are two simple things but they make my phone usage much, much better. I couldn't possibly go back to iOS now that I know what I've been missing. Not being restricted to only the apps Apple deems suitable for me is another huge advantage, the camera on the S21 ultra is insane also.

iOS 15 doesn't have a single thing in it that would woo me back. Even my wife is starting to hate her iPhone now. I keep laughing saying the screen looks like a child's toy.

 

[gwhizkids]

I switched to Android at the beginning of the year after being on the iPhone since the first one in 2007. I was blown away at how much better the Android OS is.

I had no idea what I was missing with interactive widgets. I can't belive Apple hasn't given this to their users yet.

Also, the standard grid layout with iOS always annoyed me because there is so much wasted space on the iPhone screen. Android allowed me to add a row and a column, easy peasy. So much better!

Those are two simple things but they make my phone usage much, much better. I couldn't possibly go back to iOS now that I know what I've been missing. Not being restricted to only the apps Apple deems suitable for me is another huge advantage, the camera on the S21 ultra is insane also.

iOS 15 doesn't have a single thing in it that would woo me back. Even my wife is starting to hate her iPhone now. I keep laughing saying the screen looks like a child's toy.

Thank you for sharing your happiness with us. We wish you well. It is good to find something you like.

 

[GuruZac]

I switched to Android at the beginning of the year after being on the iPhone since the first one in 2007. I was blown away at how much better the Android OS is.

I had no idea what I was missing with interactive widgets. I can't belive Apple hasn't given this to their users yet.

Also, the standard grid layout with iOS always annoyed me because there is so much wasted space on the iPhone screen. Android allowed me to add a row and a column, easy peasy. So much better!

Those are two simple things but they make my phone usage much, much better. I couldn't possibly go back to iOS now that I know what I've been missing. Not being restricted to only the apps Apple deems suitable for me is another huge advantage, the camera on the S21 ultra is insane also.

iOS 15 doesn't have a single thing in it that would woo me back. Even my wife is starting to hate her iPhone now. I keep laughing saying the screen looks like a child's toy.

Since the grass is greener, why look back? I can appreciate some of those changes, namely interactive widgets, but nothing else about Android is appealing. It doesn’t do anything objectively better for my needs, and comes with a lot of cons I’m not willing to compromise, mostly the lack of being in sync with macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and tvOS. All of my devices talk to each other which I can’t get with Android.

 

[Wando64]

I switched to Android at the beginning of the year after being on the iPhone since the first one in 2007. I was blown away at how much better the Android OS is.

I had no idea what I was missing with interactive widgets. I can't belive Apple hasn't given this to their users yet.

Also, the standard grid layout with iOS always annoyed me because there is so much wasted space on the iPhone screen. Android allowed me to add a row and a column, easy peasy. So much better!

Those are two simple things but they make my phone usage much, much better. I couldn't possibly go back to iOS now that I know what I've been missing. Not being restricted to only the apps Apple deems suitable for me is another huge advantage, the camera on the S21 ultra is insane also.

iOS 15 doesn't have a single thing in it that would woo me back. Even my wife is starting to hate her iPhone now. I keep laughing saying the screen looks like a child's toy.

That’s right. As long as it looks pretty, who cares about security, privacy and seamless ecosystem integration.

 

[ToadyBlegh]

It's all fairly arbitrary and probably only useful to the most devoted fanbois. iOS15 is little changed from iOS14, basically more 14.8 than a new operating system. As the company strives to remain relevant in a market stuffed with agile competitors offering far cheaper products with all the same functionality, it's being tempted into slapping in more and more of these little tools that don't really work and, being Apple, insisting on forcing users to keep them. For me, the height of that is the App Library, a tool that probably makes sense to really disorganised super-users but just doesn't to lean users who want to manage their own work space. You'd think that they'd just let people turn it off if they don't want it, instead I have an extra page (one of three, including the equally unhelpful search page) which divides 10 apps into eight folders with a great deal of duplication. Why? Just... why? I am sure other people have other examples of things that just tick them off but it's the mentality that really crawls under my skin, the idea that Auntie Apple knows best, like a soviet state in the 70s insisting we all drive Trabants, eat borscht and listen to the national anthem in our concrete state-built apartment blocks.

 

[gwhizkids]

It's all fairly arbitrary and probably only useful to the most devoted fanbois. iOS15 is little changed from iOS14, basically more 14.8 than a new operating system. As the company strives to remain relevant in a market stuffed with agile competitors offering far cheaper products with all the same functionality, it's being tempted into slapping in more and more of these little tools that don't really work and, being Apple, insisting on forcing users to keep them. For me, the height of that is the App Library, a tool that probably makes sense to really disorganised super-users but just doesn't to lean users who want to manage their own work space. You'd think that they'd just let people turn it off if they don't want it, instead I have an extra page (one of three, including the equally unhelpful search page) which divides 10 apps into eight folders with a great deal of duplication. Why? Just... why? I am sure other people have other examples of things that just tick them off but it's the mentality that really crawls under my skin, the idea that Auntie Apple knows best, like a soviet state in the 70s insisting we all drive Trabants, eat borscht and listen to the national anthem in our concrete state-built apartment blocks.

Thank you for sharing your happiness with us. We wish you well. It is good to find something you like.

 

[tgwaste]

We don’t need a new calendar widget that’s just pure laziness. Googles calendar app for iPhone is 1000x better than Apples own app. Thats a problem.