So iOS 15 has been released and I'm sure most of you have already heard of
all the big, common features that have been popularized, like mail privacy
protection, focus modes, notification summaries, live texts in the camera.
And if you haven't known about those, definitely look those up.
But in this video, I'm going to talk about 10 kind of hidden new features
that I have not seen many places talk about and are barely mentioned by apple.
But are still very useful.
And I also have a few bonus hidden features at the end in addition to the 10.
Now starting off with number one, this one definitely excites me.
And it is that the password manager in your iPhone and iCloud now has a built-in
two factor authentication code generator.
To use this go into settings,
then passwords and then click on an entry that would be saved in
the keychain or add a new one.
And then you click "set up verification code" and you can either enter
a setup key or scan a QR code.
Most websites are going to let you just scan the QR code.
But basically this is the thing where if you set up two factor
authentication, It will generate a code that also has to be entered with the
password, so that if someone steals your password, then they still don't
have that changing, rolling code.
And your account will stay safe.
Before you would have to use a separate app like Google Authenticator, or
Authy, or Microsoft Authenticator.
But now, because it's built into iCloud natively, it will actually even
auto-fill when a website asks you for it.
Now I should point out one could argue that this is not exactly ideal because the
whole point of two factor authentication,
is not to have both the password and the two factor
authentication thing in one place.
However, I think for most people, the main risk is their password being leaked
in some database and then trying to be used on all their different websites.
So for most people, it probably is fine, as long as you keep
your iCloud and Apple account
absolutely secure.
Definitely enable two factor authentication on that account
to be sure that no one can break in and access all your passwords
and two-factor authentication codes from your Apple account.
So that does mean unique password definitely enable two
factor authentication on your Apple account and really enable
every security feature you can.
But again, I think for most people, the risk-reward kind of makes sense
because most people are probably at higher risk of losing their two factor
authentication code than it really getting stolen by a hacker or something.
So you just have to decide for yourself.
All right, moving on.
These next ones are not going to be as long as that first one.
But number two is the native iOS video player will have
a playback speed option now.
So if you're watching a video in Safari or you downloaded a video and are
watching it in Safari, you'll now have the option to change the playback speed.
You click the bottom right thing, and then it'll give you that option.
So you can speed through it if you want.
This is really nice because I use the feature all the time on YouTube, but
you might be on a website that has a video, but it doesn't have that feature.
You can add to it anywhere.
Now, one exception might be certain websites that have a custom player
built into the website that might not necessarily have a speed option.
So that's not the fault of iOS, it's just going to use the website's
custom player if it has one, but for anything else, you can change it now.
All right, number three, this one is dead simple, but also super useful.
And it is the ability to add a shortcut to Shizam the music
identifier to the control panel.
So all you do is go into settings and then go to the control
panel options and add Shazam.
And now when you swipe down into the control panel, there it is.
So if you're listening to a song or hear one on the radio.
And you're like, what is that song?
Now you don't have to search through your different apps
to find the music identifier.
You simply swipe down from the control center when you
tap it, it'll start listening
and then after a little while it'll pop up a notification banner telling
you whether or not it was able to detect the result of the song.
All right, next up number four, this one's pretty cool.
And it is background sounds.
So this is going to be useful if you're ever in a situation where you're trying
to study or do anything really, and there's a lot of noise around, but maybe
you don't want to listen to music, but just drown out the rest of the noise.
You can now do just that.
To use this feature, just go back into the control center settings and look for
the one that says "hearing", and add that.
So now when you swipe down into the control center, you'll
see a new ear icon and you tap that and it'll bring up a menu.
You can enable and turn on this feature by clicking either the icon at the
bottom or in the middle of the menu where it says background sounds off.
And when you tap it, it will start playing just kind of ambient background noise.
I think the default one is rain and you can change the volume.
And also if you tap on rain or whatever sound is playing, you'll
have a choice of the different ones.
For example, balanced noise, bright noise, dark noise, ocean, rain, stream.
And you can choose that one.
And of course this will probably make the most sense to use with
headphones or something, but you might also be able to stream it to
different device around your home.
Now you can further customize the settings for this by going into
Settings >Accessibility > Audio Visual and then Background Sounds.
And here you can access most of the settings you already saw, but you can
also do things like whether or not to play it while media is playing.
So music, you can keep it playing.
Or also whether to stop when locked.
So definitely could see this one coming in handy if you want
to try and focus on something.
All right now, moving on, we have number five, safari extensions is now a thing.
So forever
we've had Chrome extensions, Firefox extensions for browsers on
desktop, but now you can install extensions for safari on iOS.
And these are going to be available through the app
store, just like any other app.
And it'll basically allow you to add just third party features to safari.
Because this is so new, I haven't seen too many examples, but one good one is
an "Amplosion" which basically redirects from those sometimes annoying "amp" links.
So a lot of times, if you're on Google and you click on a news article, it'll
take it to an "amp" version of the page which sometimes you want to link to it.
It's really annoying.
So the amplosion extension is one where it will automatically redirect
to the actual version of the site.
Our number six also has to do with safari and it is, you can now
customize the start page for when you bring up a new blank tab, for
example, and this is long overdue.
So what you do is when you open up a blank tab, scroll all the way to the
bottom and you'll see a edit button.
And when you bring this up, you can now remove and rearrange different sections.
So for example, I always found these Siri Suggestions section
more annoying than it was useful.
So I can just hide it here and then you can rearrange them
however you want, put them in order, maybe you want to keep the favorites,
maybe you want to keep the reading list.
And another cool feature is you can actually change the background
image of this start page.
So you can add either one of the default ones or add a custom image.
So that's just kind of cool.
Our next step, number seven is the ability to keep track of which apps request to
access different parts of your phone, like microphone, camera stuff, and when.
To do this, you go into the Settings and then Privacy, and then scroll all the
way to the bottom, where it says Record App Activity, and then enable that.
Now at the moment, there's not much to do with this information.
You can download it and it'll be a JSON file, so you can look at the information.
But later on in a later update, Apple will be creating App Privacy Reports
that will basically let you easily see all this information organized all nice.
So that feature is not available yet, but you can at least
start recording the activity.
So when it is available, you'll be able to see all of it right away.
Okay, on to number eight, it's per app accessibility options.
So if you go into settings and then accessibility, and then you scroll near
the bottom, it says per app settings, and then you can add different apps.
And this allows you to do a lot of different customizations
for a specific app.
So for example, maybe you're using an app and that particular app for some reason
has really small text or something.
Well you can for just that app increase the default text size
or make it bold, for example.
You can also do stuff like increase the contrast or invert the colors,
reduce the motion, that sort of stuff
that's standard for accessibility but now maybe just for one particular app that
annoys you and not for any other apps.
And in particular one good one might be the auto-play video previews toggle.
So if there is an app that has a lot of videos in it, and it's
always constantly auto-playing them.
Maybe you want to disable that for that app.
You can toggle that off right there.
So just keep that in mind, if you ever come across apps that annoy you in
some way, you might be able to fix it.
All right, up next number 9 and 10, both are going to have
to do with the FindMy app.
And it's a pretty big deal for both of them I think.
Number nine is especially going to be infuriating to thieves, which is that
the Find My iPhone tracking can now track phones that are even turned off.
And not only that, but if also been factory reset and erased.
Now for the tracking while powered off, this is only going to be for iPhone
11 and newer because they have the U1 chip, which is required for this.
But I believe for the factory reset, it might be for all of them.
So to see this in action, when you go to turn off your phone, you'll see now
under the "slide to power off" thing, a little thing of text that says "iPhone
Findable After Power Off", and then it'll give you some information about it.
And then also give you the option to temporarily turn off finding, so maybe if
you really are on a super low battery and you're turning it off to conserve battery.
But do keep in mind to temporarily turn off, you still need to
type in the passcode, so a thief wouldn't be able to do that.
That would kind of defeat the purpose.
And then it would re enable when the phone turned back on.
I don't believe Apple has specifically explained how this works, but
I assume it has to do with the Bluetooth Low Energy and the U1 chip.
So similar to how Air Tags work and stuff.
Now as for after a factory reset, it's kind of always been at least
for a long time that there would still be the iCloud activation lock.
And this is different from that.
So the activation lock is that if you had an iCloud account tied to
a phone and after it's been reset, you still can't log into it without
entering the passcode of the account.
So if it was stolen, it would be kind of useless.
But if you did reset it, you couldn't be able to actually track
the phone with find my iPhone.
But now that is different.
Now it will tell the person on the Hello screen that, hey, this phone is locked
and also, still findable by the way, so the owner still is looking for it.
So it's going to be less useful to thieves.
And also for people who are looking to buy an iPhone, maybe
used, they can specifically check whether or not it was stolen if
it's still find-able or not.
All right, we're on a number 10, and remember, I do have
some bonus ones at the end.
So this one is also in the Find My app, and it is to notify
when you leave something behind.
So for whatever devices you enable this on, I guess if you move a certain distance
away, probably the range of Bluetooth Low Energy, which would be like 30 feet or so,
and then probably for some amount of time, it will notify you "hey,
you're not near your device anymore.
You might've forgot it".
For Air Tags.
It seems to enable this by default, or at least it was for me.
And then for devices like other iPhones or iPads, this is not going to be
enabled by default as far as I can tell, but you can still enable it.
Like if you don't usually bring your iPad somewhere, then you can enable
it for that, and then it will notify if it goes too far from your phone.
And you can add exception locations.
So obviously if the device is at your home, then you don't care about
it being too far away from you.
So for each device, you can select that and select the radius of
that location for the exception.
It also does seem that you can enable this for your iPhone itself, even
if it's like your main device, as long as you have an Apple Watch.
When I was looking at mine, I did notice on my iPhone, it
says "enabled for apple watch".
So I assume that would mean if I was wearing my Apple watch and
got separated from my iPhone.
It would let me know that my iPhone is missing.
And I believe that's the case because I can't actually enable the "left
behind" feature on the Apple watch directly, because I guess it doesn't
have a U1 chip, but I can still get the notification on the apple watch,
I expect is what's gonna happen.
So definitely maybe go through your different devices,
like if you have Air Tags and choose how you want to set those up.
All right, now I've got three different bonus hidden features.
So the first of them is the ability to enable more data on 5G.
You might not have known this was a thing you could enable, but if you go
into Settings and then Cellular and then go into a data plan, you should see an
option to "allow more data with 5G."
And what this does is you might not realize that certain apps like FaceTime
or whatever, even though they might've been using 5G, they might not have
been using as much data as they could.
But if you enable this, then apps presumably will be able to use as much
bandwidth as they want, which is probably not a problem if you have unlimited data.
So that might be one to enable if you want to have like improved video quality
streaming, stuff like that, maybe.
And the reason this one's a bonus is because I believe it was in iOS 14, just
not many people might've known about it.
All right, now this next bonus is new to iOS 15, and it's specifically
for people who have Dual SIM.
So two phone numbers on the phone, like me.
And it is that now you can switch a message conversation
between phone numbers.
This is actually one complaint I made before, because you can actually change
which contacts if you're calling them over the phone, which phone line it will use.
But if you're using iMessage to message someone and you are already texting
them, it will always default to whatever first number you texted them with.
So if you want to switch to a second number to start using, then you can't
do that, you would have to delete the whole conversation and start it by
texting them with a different one.
But now you can just switch between it directly.
Alright now the final bonus feature is that iCloud will now temporarily
grant unlimited backup storage if you're transferring to a new phone.
So you know how normally you can restore from iCloud if your phone is
fully backed up, onto your new device.
Well, some people might've had so much video and stuff on the original phone
and they didn't upgrade to an increased capacity for their iCloud account.
But now if you're specifically just going to be backing up to restore onto a new
phone, you'll now have as much data as you need to fully back it up and then restore.
And you have it for like three weeks.
So obviously it's not unlimited, but it's long enough if you just
need to restore to your new phone.
So that's kinda cool.
So hopefully learned some of these new features that you might
not have known about before.
If there's any missing ones that I missed down in the comments section,
definitely let me know and also check down there because someone might've
left a comment for one that I did miss.
If you guys want to subscribe, be sure to also enable the bell because
I upload about just twice a week.
So you don't want those to get lost in the rest of your subscriptions.
And if you want to keep watching, the next video I'd recommend is one where
I was talking about sort of a hidden feature in Windows that basically
allows you to create "super shortcuts"
I'd call them.
So definitely really useful, if you want to check that out, you
can just click on that right there.
So thanks so much for watching guys, and I'll see you in the next one.