Apple's Craig Federighi showed off iOS 9 during Monday's Worldwide Developer Conference, and it looks like the company wants to make our iPhones an even bigger part of our daily lives. It also includes changes like renaming Passbook to Wallet, and introducing the News app.
iOS 9 has big improvements for Siri, power management, more
Mr. Federighi said Apple focused on extending battery life, improving performance, and enhancing security. He also said Apple wanted to improve iOS's intelligence, and he used Siri to show off what it can do.
Siri is now 40 percent faster, and comes with a new interface that matches Apple Watch, and understands contextual statements like, "show me my WWDC photos from last year," or "remind me to follow up on Bryan's email later today."
iOS 9 includes Proactive Assistant that learns your routine and offers to perform tasks based on your location, the time of day, or activity. Proactive Assistant can search your email messages for phone numbers to suggest who might be calling for people who aren't in your Contacts.
Since Siri and Proactive Assistant can learn from your activities, it can suggest apps to launch that relate to what you're doing or the time of day, and can people you may want to contact, too.
To make Siri searches more useful, Apple is releasing a search API for developers. Translation: Siri will soon be able to look into the data other apps when performing searches.
Notes now includes text formatting options, and supports checklists, offers easy access to the camera and Camera Roll for adding images, and lets you draw on screen. You can also link to Notes from other apps through share sheets.
Maps is getting a big boost with public transit, and Siri will support the feature, too. Transit will launch first in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, the U.K., Germany, and China, but only in selected cities.
Developers can download the iOS 9 beta today, a public beta will be available in July, and the official release will come this fall. iOS 9 will run on every device that supports iOS 8.
Apple's 2015 WWDC keynote is still underway, so be sure to follow along with The Mac Observer's ongoing live coverage.