Apple’s iOS 16 has arrived and is available for download from iPhones 8 and above.

Among its features, two stood out the most. The first, is the customizable lock screen. And second, the Response, which will automatically download updates to tidy up your security. We’ll breeze a little more on that in a bit. 

iOS 16 is trying to herald an era where users no longer need to open their phones to check for notification updates and other tasks. All of it can be done now through the lock screen itself. 

You can now customize your lock screen with a swath of widgets, such as calendar and notes, which makes it far more accessible than unlocking the entire phone and swiping around to launch apps. Right now, we’re trying to imagine how incredibly useful this is going to be in the iPhone 14 Pro with its always-on display. All that information we typically check on a daily basis, without ever unlocking your phone. 

Live Activities is one interesting feature. It provides real-time information from our apps. One of the most-used examples is checking scores in a sports game. This way, if you cannot watch a game, you can at least immediately check the scores with a glimpse. It’s interesting to see how or if third-party app developers will pick up on this feature. We imagine it would be cool to get live updates when your food is about to arrive.

iOS 16 also brings improvements for previous features. This includes changes to Focus mode. Now you can change background images of your lock screens. You can set background images for work days, where you will receive work updates such as email, and you can set background images for non-work days where you won’t be getting updates from certain apps relating to work. 

Live Texts, which was once only available for images, is now possible through video. So if you’re checking a past video and find some interesting keywords, it’s easier now to highlight them and do a search. According to some reports we’ve read this feature is not 100% perfect, as some errors are bound to pop up here and there. And personally that’s fine. The update itself is already quite impressive and there’s always room for further improvements.

The iMessage app gets some quality-of-life improvements as well. You can Unread messages, which can be useful, when you don’t have time to reply now, but want to make sure you remember this message later. You can now also edit messages. You can edit up to five times and within fifteen minutes only. If messages were exchanged on iOS 16, the recipient of the message will be able to see the previous versions of the message – so no, you can’t go around saying mean things about them and then quickly editing it. There’s also an unsend feature, which only works if sender and recipient are both using iMessage.

Finally, we’ve mentioned earlier in the article about automatic updates. This is called Rapid Security Response system. This feature is aimed at automatically updating iOS, MacOS, and PadOS, ironing out any vulnerabilities that were discovered. Prior to the Rapid Security Response, Apple rolled out security patches alongside OS updates. Now this way, Apple is at least trying to guarantee your device will always be secured.