Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “iOS 12: How Apple overhauled iPhone notifications”.
One of the first videos we made in this processor series was about how notifications on the iPhone are bad. And, like I said last week, oh my God.. I think they might have fixed notifications in iOS., But here’s a question. Did they. Now all the caveats at the top.
One, I’m feeling kind of sick, so give me a little bit of space to have a terrible, raspy voice. Two. This is the developer preview., It’s not a public beta, it’s very very early, so we might see bugs – and this is definitely the furthest thing from a review.. Also.
Last but not least since this is such an early preview of iOS 12, it’s possible that some things might change between now and when it comes out in the fall. Got all that cool. ( coughs, ) Cool cool cool.. So this is the big one for me..
With group notifications, your notifications are, you, know, grouped. And they’re, grouped together by default app by app.. So when you have a ton of notifications, it’s much faster to sort of scroll through and parse through what is and isn’t important.
Before on iOS 11, your notifications were just one giant big unsorted list and honestly it felt like scrolling through Twitter and if your operating System feels like Twitter you’re, definitely doing something wrong. Anyway. The reason that group notifications are interesting is they don’t just group app by app, but they can be grouped within an app.. So, for example, with Messages all of your different conversation. Threads can be different groups on the lock screen.. Now this could be a potential for abuse. If, like say, a news, app wanted to send you lots of different groups, and you really only want like the top stories or something. We’ll have to see what developers do with it.. So this is all incredibly helpful, but I don’t know yet if it goes far enough for me..
So, for example, in a group you can only see the most recent notification at the top. You have to tap in to see the rest of them. And I’d like to see kind of a summary of everything that’s inside there, but whatever..
You can swipe a group away all at once and that is so much better than we had before. I’M just pleased to see that Apple did something. Even more important to me is that now, finally, when you get a notification, you can jump to edit that notification’s settings directly from the notification itself., And this is huge.. When you get a notification, you can swipe over and tap the Manage button which brings up a new panel. That Apple calls the quick tuning UI.
And there are a few options: here. Deliver quietly turn off and settings.. Basically, what these buttons do is set up a preset group of notification settings.. So when you tap deliver quietly, it sets up the following things.: It sets notification to go to your notification center and not the lock screen.. It turns off sound and vibration., And it also turns off banners.. If you tap turn off, it turns off notifications., But look at that turn off button.. You notice that there’s a dot dot dot on it. That’S because if you tap it brings up another panel.
And on that panel, there’s a button to turn off all notifications, which is probably what you wan na do.. But some apps will give you another button that will take you that app’s in app notification settings and the reason that’s there is like an app developer – is annoying. You Apple wants to give them the option to have you go into the app and tweak the settings. Instead of turning notifications off altogether., Here’s why this is a huge upgrade over iOS 11., Because before, if you go an annoying notification, you had two choices.
Just swipe it away to get rid of it, but then the next time they send you one you’d, be annoyed. Again. Or stop whatever it is you’re doing go into the settings app find that app tap into it to change notification, settings or open the app and see if the app has its own in app notification settings., It was just a whole mess that you just never Bothered with. And now you finally will. We’ve been talking about settings a bunch. So, let’s actually just look at the settings.’Cause they’ve been completely redesigned.. In the last video we talked about ( in deep voice, ) the mystery of the check, boxes. And the mystery is still here, but it’s slightly less mysterious because they’ve got the nice little graphics.
Now that show you what all these different buttons mean. So it’s a little bit easier to figure out.. Now I’m not gon na go through it and count them partially, because in the last video I got the math wrong.
I don’t want you to yell at me in the comments I deserved it and I’m sorry., But suffice to say, there’s still a ton of options here, they’re just easier to understand. Now. One of the more interesting UI choices in iOS 12.
Is that the notification center and the lock screen are now very different? Things. Notifications can go to one or the other or even both. Developers in iOS 12 can now send a notification silently to the notification center without asking for your permission, which seems scary, but it’s actually maybe an interesting idea because you’ll see it in the notifications center There’Ll be a button that says I don’t want these, so that’s pretty easy to get rid of, but it’s a better solution. Apple thinks for developers than when you know the first time you open the app they’re like ( ding ). Do you want notifications, (, ding )? Do you like notifications? We have notifications for ya.
(, ding ), That’s annoying! This seems better., But we’re gon na have to see. It’s gon na. Take some time for me to see what I think of this new paradigm of notification center and lock screen being completely different, because I’m a little bit worried that notification center is just gon na become a dumping ground of crap I’ve ignored and stuff that people wan Na send me that I don’t wan na bother looking at., But it’s still early and we don’t know yet.
Alright. So the last big set of features I wan na talk about are all the upgrades to do not disturb., And I really love them and the best one is that you can now set a time limit for how long do not disturb lasts.’Cause. I always forget to turn the dang thing off.
You can have it go off by a time you can have it go off by a location. You can even do really clever things like have it go off by what’s in your Apple calendar., Here’s a neat thing that happened to me over the weekend. Siri did something good.. It saw that I had a movie ticket in my Apple Wallet and then popped up. A thing saying: hey: do you wan na turn on do not disturb during the length of this movie? That’S really smart.. Another thing, that’s really neat is the new do not disturb at bedtime..
Basically, you turn it on and it hides notifications on your lock screen, which seems like a small thing, but then, when you wake up in the morning, the first thing you see isn’t everything you missed. It’S like the weather and that’s nice. I like to wake up and just see the weather.
It’S nice. Thanks Apple you’re, so nice. That really seems insincere, but I mean it.. Last but not least, there is this new screen time feature which shows you how much you use your phone, but there’s a lot going on in there, and so I think we’re gon na wait until the full iOS 12 preview to really get into it..
I am super happy that Apple’s finally giving us tools to deal with notifications., But I just don’t know if they’re the right tools, yet. Or maybe they’re instruments Whatever anyway. The point is, this is an early developer preview and so it’s too early to review and honestly, that’s why I’m not comparing it to Android. Yet if you’ve been waiting for that., I wan na wait till these things are a little bit more developed.. What I do wan na do is talk about what I think has happened, because I think Apple’s philosophy around notifications has very clearly changed.. It’S no longer enough to just try and keep it simple. Think about all of the abstract concepts which you have to understand now to deal with: notifications. Notification, center versus lock screen and temporary banners versus persistent banners versus app badges..
You need to understand the difference between the main notification settings and the in-app notification settings, and I could just keep going here., But what’s funny is iOS is supposed to be simple. This doesn’t seem very simple.. That’S the point.. Notifications are just plain hard and complicated, and that’s the way that they’re going to be from now on. And Apple finally had to admit that. Back at WWDC, one of the Apple executives told me a story about Steve Jobs..
He said that Steve used to liken user interface to a Pixar movie. Now Pixar movies appeal equally to both children and adults, and a good user interface should be simple enough for novices but complex enough for pro users. And what’s new in iOS 12 is we finally Have the notification controls for pro users., But notifications are so crazy right now, they’re, so prevalent and they’re, just all encompassing.
That you know who the pro users are Honestly, I think it’s all of us., Hey thanks for watching and let me know in the comments: do You think that Apple did enough to fix notifications in iOS 12. We’Ll have a chat. There maybe hit the subscribe button. When you’ve done all that head on over to this other video, where we talk about all the rest of the features in iOS 12, because really there’s just a ton of them. .