- Hey, this is Jake with The Verge,
we've been trying out iOS 12, it's supposed to
hit your phones this fall, but it's available in beta
for developers right now.
Things are definitely still subject to change,
but there's some cool stuff in here,
so let's check it out.
The first thing I wanna talk about is
probably the most superfluous but also the most fun,
and that is Memoji.
This is Apple's new version of Animoji,
that lets you customize it to your face.
So I have worked on this all morning,
and this is my best job at making my face.
I can't say it's amazing, but it works just like
the others ones where you pull it up
and it will start mimicking your face,
but now you can customize it.
There are a ton of different options,
it's actually pretty interesting,
they don't group things by gender at all,
it's just all mixed together and allows you to
create whatever you want.
You can even make a sort of alien looking thing
if you feel like it, so here's my like punk alien.
And what's really neat is if you take a photo
of yourself inside Messages, you can overlay it
on top of your head, so here's my like punk alien.
And I can have fun with that.
So that's Memoji, I imagine you're gonna see these
everywhere, starting this fall.
The second thing I wanna talk about isn't really as fun,
but it is a really big deal.
And that is Screen Time.
This is Apple's answer for iPhone addiction
and just us using our phones too much.
And so it's this new screen inside of the settings app,
that lets you set time limits, basically,
on how much you use different categories of apps.
So when you open it up, the first thing you see
is this chart of how much you're using your apps.
And it'll break down by individual apps,
but also by categories.
So you can see if you're playing games too much,
or social media too much.
But the really big thing is down time and app limits.
And basically, you can go into app limits
and tell it, you know what, I should only be able
to play games for an hour every day,
and then once I set that, that's locked into place.
And it's gonna tell me once I'm playing games
if I've been doing it for too long,
and it'll sort of lock you out.
So let me show you what that looks like,
I'm gonna lock myself out of basically every app.
And there we go, so now when I jump into an app,
it's gonna tell you you've reached your
time limit on the app.
There's a button at the bottom that lets you
ignore the limit and just keep using it again,
so really this is all about your willpower.
But I think it's still a really neat approach.
Google is doing something very similar,
but the big difference with Google is you don't
have this button, you have to jump through
a lot more hoops to let yourself back into your apps.
So I think it's gonna be interesting to see which
of those is more useful and if people actually
take advantage of them.
So the next thing I wanted to show you is how
iOS 12 is changing notifications.
And we're gonna have another video that's going
like really in depth on this soon,
so I'm not gonna get too deep in it.
But it's actually a really big deal because
this is a lot easier to read now.
I have four Slack notifications in total,
but it's only taking up one thing,
because they're all grouped.
So I can just tap on it to see them all,
I can deal with the ones that I wanna deal with,
or manage my notifications if I want to.
This is just much, much neater than that endless list
that we've been used to for years and years
in iOS right now.
One of the other new features in iOS 12 is Siri shortcuts,
which lets you create custom commands
to trigger actions with Siri.
It's a really big feature, and I think people are
gonna use it in very different ways,
but let me show you how I've been using it.
So there's this big list that has a bunch of different
available commands that you might wanna trigger.
And these actually change, depending on what you've
been doing recently with your phone.
So I've been using voice memos,
so it's just suggesting I might wanna make a command
to start a new voice recording.
So I'm gonna hit that.
It's gonna ask me what phrase I wanna use
to automatically start a new recording.
So I'm gonna show you that.
(beep)
Record this.
(beep)
So now, whenever I tell Siri, record this,
it's gonna automatically launch into voice memos
and immediately start a recording.
So I'll show you how that works.
Record this.
So now it's immediately jumped over to voice memos,
and it's already recording.
Which is pretty great, 'cause that's actually
a really fast way to start a recording.
So now we're on the iPad because iOS 12
also brings iPhone 10 style gesture control
over to the tablet.
And it's not a huge change, especially because
iOS 11 already had a lot of gestures involved,
but there's some key ones.
So for one, control center is now in the top right corner.
And notifications are in the center, or the left,
or anywhere else.
The other big thing is that if you're inside an app
you can now swipe up to go straight home.
And if you want to go into the multitasking menu,
it's more of that bring it into the middle and hold
kind of thing.
So, if you're switching between the iPhone 10
and an iPad, basically it's just gonna be
a little bit more consistent for you.
There are a ton of other new features,
not all of them are available just yet.
We're definitely gonna have more on iOS 12
as the summer continues, but these are some of the
biggest features you can look forward to
starting this fall.
If you liked this video be sure to subscribe for more,
and check out our new channel, youtube.com/vergescience,
they have a bunch of really fascinating,
in-depth science videos.