Should You Upgrade to Apple iOS 16?

Touchdown! For iPhones and iPads worldwide, Apple iOS 16 and iPadOS 16 are now available. Numerous new features, functionalities, and significant security patches are included in the upgrades. I can also identify several flaws in the latest versions, so upgrading immediately is risky. Detailed information is provided below.

It's for whom?

The iPhone 6S and iPhone 7 series, the iPod Touch, the iPad Mini 4 and iPad Air 2, and Apple iOS 16 and iPadOS 16 no longer support these devices. All more recent gadgets are supported.

Apple acknowledged auto-update delays earlier this year, therefore it is advisable to start the update manually by going to Settings > General > Software Update. If you are using more recent beta software, you must unenroll your device before the upgrade is applied (see "The Road Ahead" section at the end).

Although I will include relevant topics in these tutorials, this guide is not focused on prior iOS versions, iPadOS, or macOS. Here is a link to my iOS 15.7 Upgrade Guide.

The Deal-Killers

In general, the more modifications software makes, the more faults it introduces. This is the reason why every new release of iOS and iPadOS has issues right out of the gate, and iOS 16 and iPadOS 16 are no exception.

A day after the upgrade's release, I saw reports regarding update problems, sluggish touch responses, and some striking user interface errors. Apple Photos no longer seems to be finding duplicate photos (09/13 update: this last problem may automatically disappear as Photos reindexes your collection), sync issues (incl. with Apple Watch), a blank screen screenshot bug, AirPlay issues, MMS messaging, levels for brightness and volume levels suddenly jumping, and MMS messaging issues.

Several people have complained about battery depletion. The battery drain rises for 24 or 48 hours following iOS upgrades, so for the time being, take this with a grain of salt.

What Do You Receive?

Apple's release notes for iOS 16 are fantastic:

Lock Screen - Redesigned Lock Screen offers you a variety of new methods to make your Lock Screen uniquely yours by showing cherished images, choosing your fonts, displaying widgets, and more.
You can build many Lock Screens and quickly switch between them.
The Lock Screen gallery provides selected collections from Apple and tailored suggestions for your Lock Screen.
Font and colour choices to alter how the date and time appear on your lock screen.
Widgets on the Lock Screen provide quick access to information like the weather, battery life, upcoming activities on the calendar, and more.
A recent effect puts the photo's subject in front of the time (iPhone XS and later)
To complement one another, picture styles alter the colour filter, tinting, and text style of images on the Lock Screen.
Notifications are presented in a count view, stacking view, or extended list view at the bottom of your Lock Screen.
FocusLock Screen connection links your Lock Screen to a Focus so that you may access the appropriate Lock Screen to activate a Focus.
Focus filters hide distracting material in third-party applications and programs including Calendar, Mail, Messages, and Safari.

With tailored Lock Screen and Home Screen options that include applications and widgets relevant to the Focus, you're setting up, a streamlined setup makes it quicker and faster to get started with Focus.

Messages

You may make changes to a message up to 15 minutes after sending it, and the recipients will see the changes.
For up to two minutes after sending a message, you can cancel it.
Marking a chat as unread makes it simple to return to it later.
SharePlay in Messages enables you to engage in activities with friends while communicating, like viewing movies, listening to music, playing games, and more.
Through Messages, Collaboration offers a quick method to ask others to work with you on a file. You can also receive activity notifications whenever someone makes changes to a shared project.

Mail

Improved search returns more accurate, comprehensive information and offers ideas as you enter.
Within 10 seconds after pressing send, you can undo send to stop a message from being delivered.
Scheduled send allows you to send emails at set times and dates.
Follow-up brings unanswered emails to the top of your inbox so you can easily follow up on them after they have been sent.
Remind me allows you to specify a time and date for an email reminder.

Passkeys and Safari

Shared Tab Groups enable you to collaborate with others on a collection of tabs while simultaneously updating the Tab Group.
The start pages for each Tab Group may be personalized with unique background photos and preferences.
You may bookmark commonly visited websites for each Tab Group using pinned tabs in Tab Groups.
Turkish, Thai, Vietnamese, Polish, Indonesian, and Dutch online pages are now translated using Safari's web page translation feature.
Passkeys facilitate the replacement of passwords with a simpler and safer sign-in technique.
Passkey synchronization using iCloud Keychain keeps your passkeys end-to-end encrypted Live Text and makes them accessible across all of your Apple devices.

You may copy, translate, lookup, share, and more with text that is shown in a stopped video frame thanks to living text video support (iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone XR and later)

With a single tap, you can perform quick actions on data recognized in images and videos, such as tracking shipments or flights, translating a foreign language, converting currencies, and more (iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone XR and later)

Visual Search

Lift topic from background separates an image's subject so you may copy and paste it into programs like Mail and Messages (iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone XR and later)

Visual Look Up enhances your images' recognition of birds, insects, spiders, and monuments (iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone XR and later)

Siri

Easy Shortcuts setup enables Siri shortcuts to be used immediately after downloading an app without any initial setup (iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone XR and later)
A new option enables you to send texts without Siri requesting your approval.

Siri, what can I do for you right here? lets you learn how to use Siri's features in iOS and applications merely by asking (iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone XR and later)

The ability to stop talks with Siri on the phone or FaceTime simply by saying, "Hey Siri, hang up." (Apple iPhone XS, XS Max, XR, and after)

Dictation

The brand-new Dictation experience allows you to enter and modify text using both your voice and the keyboard (iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone XR and later)
As you speak, automatic punctuation adds commas, periods, and question marks.
Emoji support enables voice-activated emoji insertion (iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone XR and later)

Maps

Google Maps' multi-stop routing allows you to add up to fifteen stops along your trip.

You may check the amount of your transport card in Maps and top it off by adding more transit cards to your wallet without ever leaving the application.

Transit fares in the San Francisco Bay Area, London, New York, and San Diego show you how much your trip will cost.

Apple Wallet and Pay

Apple Pay Order Tracking enables you to obtain thorough receipt and order tracking details in Wallet for Apple Pay transactions with approved merchants.
ID cards in Wallet enable sharing of validated data with applications that need identity verification (iPhone 8 and later)
Apple Account allows you to add money to your account by using the Apple Account card in Wallet.

Home

The Home app has been redesigned to make it simpler to browse, explore, organize, and operate your smart home accessories.
For a whole-house view, the Home tab now combines all of your accessories, rooms, and scenarios into a single tab, enabling you to quickly scan your whole house.

You may rapidly access all the necessary accessories arranged by room using the categories for lighting, temperature, security, speakers and TVs, and water. These categories also provide more extensive status information.

The Home tab's new camera view puts up to four cameras front and centre; scroll to see any other camera views in your house.
Redesigned accessory tiles come with new behaviours for more accurate accessory controls as well as more easily recognized icons that match their category's colour.

Health

The medication tool allows you to keep track of and manage your prescription drugs, vitamins, and dietary supplements by making a list, setting up reminders according to your preferences, and examining the recording over time.
Use the iPhone camera to add prescription drugs (iPhone XS, iPhone XR and later)
When you add a new drug, interaction warnings let you know if there is a potentially dangerous interaction.
If your reported menstrual cycles reveal a trend of infrequent periods, irregular periods, longer periods, or chronic spotting, cycle deviation notifications will notify you.
Invitations for Health Sharing let family and friends securely and conveniently share their health information with you.
Health Sharing reminders provide you control and transparency over the health information you share with family and friends.

News

With My Sports, you can follow your preferred teams and leagues with ease and view highlights directly in the News app.
Favorites position the channels and subjects you frequently read towards the top of your Today feed for convenient access.
New homepages give graphically updated and simpler to explore subject feeds for local news regions, sports clubs and leagues, and more

Shared Family

Improved kid account setup makes it simpler to set up an account for a child with the proper parental controls, such as media age limitations.

Device setup for a kid enables you to quickly set up a new iOS or iPadOS device for your child with the parental controls you've chosen in place using Quick Start.
Requests for screen time in Messages are simpler to accept or reject from your youngster.

Family Checklist provides advice and recommendations, such as altering a child's parental control settings, enabling location sharing, or just reminding you to share your iCloud+ membership with everyone.

Security Check

A new feature in Settings called Safety Check enables those who are experiencing domestic or intimate partner violence to rapidly revoke the access they've given to others.
Emergency reset enables you to swiftly take action to reset access across all users and applications, including turning off Find My location sharing, resetting application privacy rights, and more.
Reviewing and customizing which applications and individuals may access your information is made easier with Manage Sharing and Access.

Accessibility

Magnifier's door detection feature finds doors, reads the signs and symbols they are surrounded by, and provides directions on how to open them (iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro)
To get the most out of your Apple Watch, utilize Switch Control, Voice Control, or any other assistive features on your iPhone with Apple Watch mirroring, which gives you complete control of your Apple Watch from your iPhone.
For customers who are Deaf or hard of hearing, Live Captions (beta) instantly transforms audio into text so they can follow along with calls and media content more easily (iPhone 11 and later)

A Buddy controller combines inputs from numerous gaming controllers into one, enabling players with cognitive difficulties to get assistance from a caregiver or buddy while playing a game.

VoiceOver is now accessible in more than 20 additional languages and regions, including Vietnamese, Catalan, Bulgarian, and Bangla (India).
You may dictate names, addresses, or other custom spellings using the Voice Control spelling mode.

Other enhancements and additions in this edition include:

Fitness apps allow you to monitor and achieve your fitness goals without an Apple Watch by utilizing the motion sensors in your iPhone to predict how many calories you will burn each day to contribute to your Move goal.
Support for AirPods Pro (second generation)
Personalized Spatial Audio creates a personal profile for Spatial Audio using the TrueDepth camera on the iPhone to provide a more accurate and immersive listening experience on AirPods (3rd generation), AirPods Pro (1st and 2nd generation), and AirPods Max.
FaceTime's Handoff feature enables you to smoothly transfer FaceTime calls from your iPhone to your iPad or Mac, and vice versa.
More sticker positions, hairstyles, hats, noses, and lip colours have been added to the Memoji updates.
Quick Note enables writing notes in any iPhone app and adding connections to establish context and make the material easier to discover.
The Translate app's camera feature allows you to translate any nearby text.
Duplicate detection in Photos helps you rapidly organize your collection by identifying duplicate images.
Portrait photographs with foreground blur To create a depth-of-field effect that seems more realistic, the camera blurs the foreground objects (iPhone 13, iPhone 13 Pro, and iPhone 13 Pro Max)
Pinned lists in Reminders make it easier to access your favourite lists fast.
Spotlight can now be accessible right from the Home Screen's bottom thanks to Search on the Home Screen, making it simple to launch applications, locate contacts, or search the internet for data.
Automatically transmit messages in CarPlay to omit the message-sending confirmation phase.
Rapid Security Response makes it possible for significant security upgrades to be implemented to your devices even more quickly, in-between routine software updates.

It is a lot, yes. Having said that, given that the iPhone software has undergone 16 iterations, many of these improvements are iterative, which is not surprising.

The major draw here is the updated lock screen controls. This crucial Android catch-up was scheduled to coincide with the release of the new always-on iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max screens.

Security in iOS 16

The surprising release iOS 15.7 and Apple iOS 16 both have 11 security patches. The most critical is CVE-2022-32917, a flaw in the iOS Kernel that might let hackers run malicious code on your iPhone and iPad.

Additionally, iOS 16 patches two additional kernel vulnerabilities, two WebKit weaknesses, as well as problems in Contacts, Maps, MediaLibrary, and Shortcuts.

Apple iOS 16 Review: Hold off and get iOS 15.7

The sheer volume and diversity of issues being reported in iOS 16 make it something I would recommend avoiding for the time being unless you prefer being on the cutting edge. Although security upgrades are necessary, iOS 15.7, which appears to be much more reliable, may be used to apply them.

After each new iOS/iPadOS generation, Apple regularly releases several bug repair updates. Therefore, I anticipate iOS 16.0.1 to release in the next few days, then iOS 16.0.2 and iOS 16.0.3 to follow shortly after. To its credit, Apple makes a concerted effort to fix issues in each new iOS version.

The Future Route

You may anticipate a swift introduction of iOS 16.0.1 or possibly iOS 16.1. If the former, I predict there won't even be a beta stage. Sign up for the Apple Beta Software Program if you want early access to future iOS 16 releases.

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Should You Upgrade to Apple iOS 16?