New iOS 12 Design Features

Whether you’re an Apple user or iOS app developer, you’ve probably heard about the newest operating system upgrade coming to over 22 devices, Apple’s iOS 12. This is the broadest update Apple’s rolled out, and it’s coming with tons of design updates, functionality upgrades, and security enhancements.

A New Era for iOS

At our iPhone app development headquarters in Los Angeles, we’ve been playing around the with the developer beta since June 4th. The public beta rollout came on June 25th, and we expect the first stable version of 12.0 to be released sometime in September.

If your mobile app runs on iOS, you absolutely need to upgrade your code to iOS 12. In this four-part series, we’ll go over the design details, feature enhancements, benefits of updating your code, and why enterprises should adopt iOS 12.

As an enterprise, your mobile app will be visited by iOS 12 users from all over the world. If your app’s behavior and functionality don’t fit into the overall app and OS ecosystem that iOS 12 sets up, you could risk losing your user base.

All-Over Enhancements

Phones running iOS 12 will have better animations, touch features, and app switching capabilities. With this update, the keyboard displays up to 50% faster and apps launch almost twice as fast, even under a heavy load.

Users can swipe 70% faster to the Camera app, and if your app uses the phone’s camera, you can build in new ways of interacting with images with the updated Portrait Segmentation and Depth APIs.

The speed boost will even affect older iPhones and iPads; all devices will experience better battery life, meaning users can use their phones for longer.

Your finger will have much more power in iOS 12; lock-screen notifications will be more interactive, and you can set your app up to trigger custom actions with a simple swipe.

More Privacy

iOS 12 will come with built-in encryption, on-device intelligence, and more to let users set customized privacy options. Unique, strong passwords will automatically be created and saved on the phone within your app.

You can integrate password manager apps with Password AutoFill using the AuthenticationServices framework. Or create a cross-device authentication stream using the new ASWebAuthenticationSession class.

More to Come

We’ve only briefly touched upon Apple’s design updates as they can relate to your app and its users. In the next feature, we’ll talk about the functionality upgrades and what they mean for your app.