What you need to know
- Apple will reportedly change the way notifications and our Home screens work with iOS 15 and iPadOS 15.
- The two new software updates will likely be announced during WWDC in June.
Apple's upcoming iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 updates will reportedly bring a ton of changes including new notification controls as well as a redesigned iPad Home screen.
According to Mark Gurman and Bloomberg, the iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 updates will be a "major revamp" across multiple different facets of the operating systems. Starting with new notification settings based on what a user is doing at the time they are received.
The company is planning a new feature that will allow users to set different notification preferences, such as if the phone makes a sound or not, depending on their current status. The enhancement will come in the form of a new menu that lets users select if they are driving, working, sleeping or custom categories of their choosing. The menu will be shown on the updated Lock Screen and in Control Center, the iPhone and iPad's menu for quickly accessing settings.
Unfortunately the report doesn't go into detail about what Home screen changes are afoot, but it does sound like Apple is working to make iMessage more of a social network competitor than it currently is. Although it's possible these changes won't make this year's software updates.
The company is also working on upgrades to iMessage with the eventual goal of acting as more of a social network and better competing with Facebook Inc.'s WhatsApp. Those changes are still early in development and could come later, the people said.
The same report says that the new updates will also include improved automatic replies based on a user's status. an auto-reply could be generated when someone is asleep, for example, just as it is now when an iPhone detects that its user is driving.
Both iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 are likely to be announced during Apple's annual WWDC event, taking place from June 7. The new updates will be pre-installed on this year's iPhone releases and will also work just fine on the best iPhones already available today.
