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The iOS "Spring Edition" is Coming Soon (developer beta likely coming today)

Posted by Matt Birchler
— 1 min read

Apple is continuing their tradition of having feature-packed spring updates to iOS:

In addition to horizontal surfaces like tables and chairs, ARKit can now recognize and place virtual objects on vertical surfaces like walls and doors, and can more accurately map irregularly shaped surfaces like circular tables.

This is a really cool addition to ARKit, and it tackles one of the most obvious limitations of Apple’s augmented reality platform. AR apps on iOS tend to be great at detecting floors and tabletops, but the illusion is broken a bit when something slides through a wall because ARKit has no idea where the surface ends. This is also a differentiator from Google’s ARCore for Android, which only does horizontal surfaces for now.

In addition, iOS 11.3 will also include 4 new Animoji for iPhone X users, Business Chat for corporate customers, and a new Health Records feature that looks astoundingly useful!

The new Health Records feature brings together hospitals, clinics and the existing Health app to make it easy for consumers to see their available medical data from multiple providers, whenever they choose. Patients from participating medical institutions will have information from various institutions organized into one view and receive regular notifications for their lab results, medications, conditions and more. Health Records data is encrypted and protected with a passcode.

I pray that our medical institutions opt into this because this would actually be amazing and HUGELY useful to so many people.

But despite all that, this release will forever be known as the “Apple concedes on the battery conspiracy” release. They will be including an option to better see your battery health as well as turn off the protection from automatic shut downs if you want to throw caution to the wind.