Here are our favourite new features in iOS 15
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Find My, Health, Magnified loupe, Live Text
Enhanced Find My tracking, even if the phone is turned off
Previously, when you misplaced your iPhone, you’ll have to pray really hard that the phone has Find My tracking turned on and it’s not completely out of battery.
With iOS 15, the Find My phone tracking feature now works even when the phone is turned off or has already undergone a full restore. So, if someone finds your iPhone and has no intention of returning it to you, they can’t avoid tracing by wiping the phone, nor can they power it off to avoid detection.
Also, if they sell the misplaced phone, the unfortunate buyer will see that the Hello screen is locked and the phone has an original owner. The only way to fully release an iPhone is to go to iCloud and disassociate the device from the iCloud account.
Beyond the phone, Find My in iOS 15 also offers Separation Alerts. Instead of waiting until you’ve misplaced your AirTagged belongings in an unfamiliar location, the iPhone will notify the user and give directions back to it. This builds upon what we tried in our Apple AirTag review.
These enhanced Find My tracking features use Ultra-Wideband technology (UWB). So, even with iOS 15, only the following older iPhones with the Apple U1 chip can use them:
Of course, we’re also expecting this year’s iPhone models to join this list too.
Sharing Health data with healthcare professionals, showing vaccine proof
Most people would be familiar with Apple Health, which first started with tracking the number of steps taken in a day. The app and its features have since evolved, but the ways to communicate health data to the right people haven’t. Until iOS 15.
While Apple introduced many Health features for iOS 15, our favourite would be the ability to share Health data with select healthcare professionals and loved ones. Sharing with a physician makes it easier to explain how you’re feeling instead of having to rack your brain to recall any problems or symptoms you might’ve encountered. Sharing with loved ones also helps offer peace of mind since not everyone can easily communicate their well-being fluently.
We also hope that the feature for sharing with healthcare professionals would extend beyond supported U.S. healthcare organisations.
Another timely feature is iOS 15’s ability to store vaccination results directly in the Health app. It also lets users download verifiable Covid-19 vaccination or test results via an online browser or QR Code, even if the country’s health authorities don’t yet support this Health feature. So if you have any intention of leisure travelling or going on overseas work trips, you probably shouldn’t sleep on this feature.
Return of magnified text during copy-pasting
Up until iOS 12, iPhones would magnify text during copy-pasting. As a result, it was much easier to select the correct point of the text. Unfortunately, text copying also became really clumsy when this feature disappeared, especially when it came to copy-pasting URLs.
iOS 15 sees the return of the magnified view. Apple calls it “magnification loupe for text cursor and selection”, but it’s really just the same feature. The only difference? Instead of a circular magnified area, the magnified loupe takes on an oblong shape that gives a better view of the whole word.
Camera app gets Live Text
Perhaps long overdue, but welcomed, either way, is Live Text. It lets the default Camera app in iOS 15 recognise text in real-time, and in images found online. Users can copy, search, or translate Live Text from images too.
If you’ve ever used the Google Translate app, you’ll know that Live Text is very similar in function to its instant camera that provides instant translation. With iOS 15, you don’t need a separate, dedicated app for this one feature anymore.
