Apple has made iOS 14 official at WWDC 2020. The latest installment in Apple’s smartphone operating system comes with a plethora of upgrades and quality-of-life improvements, some of which users have been waiting for for years.

iOS 14 revamped home screen

App Library

App Library is a a new app view that shows apps on your iPhone in different folder-like groups. You get suggestions based on app categories (like entertainment, social, games, and others), or based on your own use-patterns. Apple has made iOS 14 more flexible in learning from your habits in order to deliver more custom-tailored features to users.

Widgets

Widgets in iOS 14 are becoming much more like their Android counterparts. Widgets have been redesigned to fit just about anywhere on the home screen and are more data-rich than ever before. You can choose from a variety of different styles of widgets that can be customized and dragged around the home screen, while app icons automatically reposition themselves to make room for the widget.

One of the cool new iOS 14 widgets showcased on stage is the Smart Stack – a “blank” widget that you can place on your home screen and switch it for whatever widget you may need at the time. It’s sort of like a widget gallery that you can quickly browse through at any time, or set it to automatically change the widget for you based on your use patterns or time of day.

Picture-in-picture

Picture-in-picture (PiP) in iOS 14 allows you to watch and listen to videos while interacting with other apps on your iPhone. If you’re watching a video inside of an app and go to another app, the video will shrink into a floating window that you can drag around the screen, all the while using a second app like iMessage or Email.

Siri

Siri in iOS 14 is getting a more compact design that doesn’t take up the entire screen every time you ask for something. When you ask for certain things in iOS 14, like launching an app or adding items to a list, Siri pops up in a small bubble at the bottom of and performs the action without obscuring much of your view.

But the new Siri design in iOS 14 is only a part of the story. Apple’s AI assistant is also getting smarter in this update. On stage, Apple shared information that Siri is processing an average of 25 billion requests each month and showcased how the assistant will be more deeply integrated into the iOS 14 experience.

For example, you can now ask Siri to send an audio message and Siri will start recording your message, while a small window will pop up at the top of the screen with recording controls. Leveraging the same voice recognition as Siri, the Apple keyboard now supports dictation. It runs on device and, Apple says, is a very secure way to do dictation when you don’t feel like typing.

Translate

Apple’s new Translate app is not a simple translation tool that you can use for looking up words (though you can), but instead aims to do real-time translations of entire conversations both on- and offline. Using advanced on-device machine learning and a powerful neural engine you can translate your text and voice between any combination of eleven languages. Presumably, support for more languages will roll gradually roll out.

iOS 14 Apple Translate supported languages:

• English
• Mandarin Chinese
• French
• German
• Spanish
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Arabic
• Portuguese
• Russian

Messages

iMessage in iOS 14 is getting a handful of great improvements that allow you to more conveniently sort through messages and engage in conversations with friends.

On the main iMessage screen, you can now pin important Conversations so they don’t get lost as new messages come in. Once pinned, the Conversations appear at the top of the list. You can unpin them at any time by swiping right.

Memoji is getting many new customization features in iOS 14 so that you can really nail your look down. There’s over 20 new hair and headwear styles, “face coverings” (a.k.a masks), more age options, as well as new Memoji sticker options.

Group chats in iMessage now have in-line replies that allow you to directly reply to specific messages. Replies will get chained into their own threads that you can either view on their own or as a part of the general conversation. Mentions allow you to tag people in group conversations in a Slack-like manner, so you can easily ping friends.

Apple Maps

Apple has been rebuilding its map from the ground-up for quite some time now. Earlier this year, the new map rolled out to the US, featuring better navigation and richer detail for roads, pedestrian paths, and landmarks. The updated Maps app is coming to more countries this year, including the UK, Ireland, and Canada.