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Jonathan Baran

Apple previewed a number of new product features that are perfect for a pandemic, like watching streaming TV together or blurring your messy FaceTime background. Unfortunately, many will arrive just as much of the United States is reopening and switching back to in-person socialization.

The software updates for iPhones, iPads and Macs were announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on Monday. The annual event is like a public to-do list for Apple’s products over the next few months. The operating systems will be available to everyone this fall, and in July as a public beta for people who like to test out new features before their friends.

There was a barrage of hundreds of new features, some long-overdue improvements and others that will dig Apple’s products further into our private lives and health.

Help Desk: Ask our tech columnist a question

Among the highlights: The next iPhone update, iOS 15, will include more Zoom-like capabilities for video-call app FaceTime, including screen sharing and the ability to call people who aren’t using Apple devices. There are also new privacy controls, including an extra service to cloak your Web surfing that’s similar to a VPN.

iPhones and Apple Watches will now be able to carry government IDs (from participating states), which could be great in bars and airports, unless your battery dies. And a handful of new health options let your devices look for patterns and send you reminders about your health — as well as give family members and doctors more ways to see other people’s health information.

For the second year in a row due to the coronavirus pandemic, Apple streamed the announcements over the Internet rather than perform them in a conference hall full of guests. Without the live element, the WWDC keynote felt at times like one long, glossy video ad.

The event is especially fraught this year. Apple typically uses WWDC to bolster its relationship with app developers, some of whom don’t like Apple’s tight control over its App Store. Last month, a judge finished hearing arguments in a lawsuit from “Fortnite” maker Epic Games about Apple’s 30 percent commission.

Here’s what Apple previewed that most caught our eyes:

More privacy — and even more, if you pay

Apple announced several new privacy changes — including, for the first time, some additional protection you’ll have to pay for.

Among the updates that will come to all Apple customers, the iPhone and Mac’s built-in Mail app will now combat efforts to track you through email. Marketing emails often contain pictures or tiny pixels that are used to gather information about the people opening them.

Amazon is about to share your Internet connection with neighbors. Here’s how to turn it off.

Apple’s Mail app will now hide your device’s IP address when you open messages, so senders can’t as easily link you to your other online activity. Doing this will also hide if and when you open emails, as well as some clues about your physical location.

Second, a new section in Settings called App Privacy Report will fill in a big gap in our knowledge about what apps are doing with our data. This report will tell you how often apps use your location, photos, camera and microphone. It will also show you all the third-party domains apps are contacting, a missing element of the app privacy “nutrition labels” Apple introduced last year. (Maybe this will finally end the perpetual debate about whether Facebook is listening to our conversations.)

Finally, Apple’s paid iCloud storage subscription will now be called iCloud Plus and include a service called Private Relay that encrypts the traffic coming and going from your device. This will prevent your Internet provider from knowing what sites you look at, and also remove some of the clues websites use to identify you. This is similar to a virtual private network (VPN), though Apple underscored its system had been designed with a double-blind protection so even Apple can’t tell what sites you’re visiting.

Apple Inc/Handout

iOS gets pandemic-ready features, and some peace and quiet

FaceTime is adding its best Zoom-like features, more than a year into the pandemic. In addition to blurring out backgrounds, a new option called SharePlay turns the video calls into tools for watching the same streaming TV with friends, listening to music and sharing your screen. They’re the kinds of activities that have been key to keeping people connected over the past year, but on other apps.

Apple put everything on the iPhone: Your work life, your social life, notifications for everything from vet appointments to breaking world news, and a camera roll filled with thousands of photos. It’s great to have everything on one device 24/7, until it isn’t.

In iOS 15, it is trying to make it all of its own bells and whistles a little less overwhelming, starting with a way to tune people and apps out.

A new feature called Focus is similar to ‘do not disturb,’ but you can customize it for different parts of your day. It will let you pick whom or what you want to have access to you during work or after work, while sleeping or at other special times like while working out.

Another place Apple is trying to give back control is its notifications. Apple regularly tinkers with its notification features and pages, and now it is adding a summary that shows non-urgent notifications in one spot, so you can visit them when its convenient.

Health goes all in on tracking and sharing

At the heart of Apple’s health strategy is the belief that to get and stay healthy, you just need more data and monitoring. The iOS Health app and Apple Watch already suck up information about how much you walk (or don’t walk), your menstrual cycles, your heart and lab results. Now Apple is adding new ways to use that information, by turning it into reminders from your phone, and sharing it with relatives, doctors or caregivers.

The new Apple Watch says my lungs may be sick. Or perfect. It can’t decide.

It’s taking all of your historical data and trying to make sense of it with trends, comparing changes in your activity and vitals over time. It will look at things like your resting heart rate, blood glucose, sleep patterns and steps to detect long-term changes. It might alert you to anything concerning, like a drop in activity level.

The Apple Watch and Health app features have always had a focus on older users. The latest option turns the watch into a way to remotely monitor the health of older or at-risk relatives, children or partners. The features will give doctors or relatives access to more personal health information gathered by the watch and iPhone.

The option requires the users’ permission, but raises questions about how we increasingly use technology to monitor the health of people in our lives.

In addition to the existing fall detection feature, which uses the watch’s sensors to tell when someone had a tumble and offers to call for help, Apple is adding more mobility sensors. It will track how someone walks and look for signs of decline or unsteadiness, then make recommendations for mobility exercises.

iOS 15 will also bring the iPhone a few steps closer to actually replacing your wallet, long one of the big promises of smartphones.

The iPhone Wallet app will now be able to scan and store an official U.S. government ID such as a driver’s license. Your ID would be encrypted and stored in the same bit of iPhone hardware that’s used by Apple Pay.

Now the fine print: Apple said the digital ID would only work with participating states, and didn’t immediately say which ones had signed on. But it did say it was working with the Transportation Security Administration to enable airport security checkpoints as one of the first places we could use it.

The iPhone is also making inroads in replacing keys, albeit slowly. Last summer, Apple introduced digital car keys. This year, it’s adding the ability to use the iPhone’s Wallet app for keys to unlock a home, office or a hotel room. But it will only work with compatible smart locks, and that’s starting with about 1,000 Hyatt hotels.

The Mac got fewer updates at WWDC this year than it did last year, when Apple <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/22/apples-new-processors-give-it-more-power-over-developers-mac/?itid=lk_inline_manual_52" target=_blank>unveiled its plans to use its own chips in laptop and desktop computers</a>.

There was no new MacBook Pro announced, something Apple fans have been pining for.

But one update to MacOS, called Monterey in its next version, had to be seen to be believed in an extended demonstration. If you’re using a Mac right next to an iPad, you can just keep mousing right over the edge of the screen and start controlling the iPad. Called Universal Control, it also works between multiple Macs — and more than two devices at once. It also lets you drag and drop documents between the devices.

I’m not sure how often I’d use this feature, but these examples of tight hardware and software integration are part of what makes Apple products feel magical to loyal customers.

Geoffrey A. Fowler

At the heart of Apple’s health strategy is the belief that to get and stay healthy, you just need more data and monitoring. The Health app and Apple Watch already suck up information about how much you walk (or don’t walk), your menstrual cycles, your heartbeats and your lab results. Now Apple is adding new ways to turn that information around into reminders from your phone, and into ways for people to monitor relatives.

First, it’s taking all that historical data and trying to makes sense of it with trends, comparing changes in activity and vitals over time. It will look at things such as your resting heart rate, blood glucose, sleep patterns, and steps to detect long-term changes. Then, it will notify you that, hypothetically, you haven’t moved as much in the past 15 months.

The Apple Watch and Health app features have always had a focus on older users. The latest option turns the watch into a way to remotely monitor the health of older or at-risk relatives, children or partners. The features will give doctors or relatives access to more personal health information gathered by the watch, iPhone and through medical tests.

It requires their permission, but raises questions about how we increasingly use technology to monitor the health of people in our lives.

In addition to the existing fall detection feature, which uses the watch’s sensors to tell when someone had a tumble and offers to call for help, Apple is adding more mobility sensors. The watch will track how someone walks and look for signs of decline or unsteadiness, then make recommendations for mobility exercises.

Meanwhile, on the Apple Watch, there is a new feature called Reflect that shows calming, inspirational phrases to help with mindfulness.

Heather Kelly

Apple announced several new privacy product changes, including some you’ll have to pay for.

I’ll need to dig into details Apple didn’t share during its keynote, but here are three highlights:

First, the iPhone’s built-in Mail app will combat efforts to track you through email. It will hide your IP address when you open messages with embedded images and trackers, so marketers can’t link your emails to other online activity. It will also hide if and when you open emails.

Second, a new section in Settings called App Privacy Report will fill in a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/05/28/its-middle-night-do-you-know-who-your-iphone-is-talking/?itid=lk_inline_manual_67" target=_blank>big app transparency gap I’ve written about</a>: knowing what kind of data they take, and how often they take it. This report will tell you how often apps use location, photos, camera and microphone. It will also show you all the third-party domains apps are contacting, an element missing from the app privacy “nutrition labels” Apple introduced last year.

Finally, Apple’s paid iCloud service will now be called iCloud Plus and include a service called Private Relay that encrypts the traffic coming and going from your device. That sounds a lot like a VPN, or virtual private network, though Apple underscored that its system had been designed so even Apple can’t tell what sites you’re visiting.

The iPad wants nothing more than to be a real work computer. In the upcoming iPadOS update, the tablets will get some of the same upgrades iPhones are getting, along with a few features that are just for iPad users.

Widgets — those square and rectangle mini versions of apps — are getting improvements on the iPad’s home screen. There is a new larger size, and you can plop them between your app icons. There are new options for games and Find My, Apple’s tool to locate lost devices.

Your library of apps can be accessed from the doc, and there are new multitasking controls for people who really do a million things at once on their iPads, and new keyboard shortcuts to flip between it all. A new notes option called Quick Notes captures the spirit of the classic Mac Stickies app, letting you start a mini note from any screen with links to sites and apps. And finally, Apple’s translation app is coming to the iPad.

iOS 15 will bring the iPhone a few step closer to actually replacing your wallet, long one of the big promises of smartphones.

The iPhone is also making inroads in replacing keys, albeit slowly. Last summer, Apple introduced digital car keys. This year, it’s adding the ability to use the iPhone’s Wallet app for keys to unlock a home, office or a hotel room. Of course, it will only work with compatible smart locks, and that’s starting with about 1,000 Hyatt hotels.

Apple put everything on the iPhone: Your work life, your social life, notifications for everything from vet appointments to breaking world news, and a camera roll filled with thousands of photos.

In iOS 15, it is trying to make it all a little less overwhelming.

Here are some of the highlights of the new features:

Focus: It’s similar to ‘do not disturb,’ but you can customize it for different parts of your day. The Focus feature will let you pick whom or what you want access to during work (bosses and emergency family contacts), after work (no bosses, more friends), and while asleep (nobody at all please!). It will know when you’re doing something like working out and suggest customized options as well. You can also add custom pages for each mode. (Related: You can let your contacts know that you are not to be disturbed.)

Notifications: Apple is still tinkering with its notification features. It’s constantly adding new options for these pop ups and pages, this time with a new summary that shows notifications based on what Apple detects you’re doing and want to do. It’s part of a push and pull the company seems to constantly have over giving people more and making it less overwhelming.

Select text in photos: The photos app was once for cute pictures of pets and vacations, but somewhere along the line it also became a dumping ground for notes, screenshots and pictures of menus. A nifty new Apple Photos feature makes text in images selectable, so you can look up that ingredient you don’t know or paste notes on a whiteboard into an email.

Apple kicked off WWDC with iOS 15 and some changes to the most-important technology of the pandemic: video calling.

Many of the features bring Apple’s FaceTime service up to speed with Zoom, the app that became so popular during the stay-at-home orders, it became a verb.

Better late than never, FaceTime can now hold group calls with all the participants in little boxes. You can also slightly blur out your background — like in a Portrait Mode photo — so other participants on the call can’t see just how messy your room has become. New microphone modes can also help separate your voice from background noise.

And the biggest Zoom-like change: Previously FaceTime was only useful for immediate calls, not scheduled ones. Now you can put FaceTime calls on the calendar and share a link to them. Even better, those links will also work via the Web for people on Android and Windows devices. That’s not quite a dedicated FaceTime app for rival devices, but it’s a big step closer to making the iPhone work better for customers whose friends, family and co-workers don’t use iPhones.

Being able to use FaceTime with other kinds of devices was an item on <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/27/apple-iphone-monopoly/?itid=lk_inline_manual_89" target=_blank>my recent iPhone Owner’s Bill of Rights</a>. (In fact, when Steve Jobs first introduced FaceTime during a keynote a decade ago, he said it would be part of an open industry standard.)

Apple has increasingly made privacy a cornerstone of its marketing. WWDC is where we get into the nitty-gritty of how it actually protects customer data.

Two critical questions hang over any new privacy changes Apple announces: Is it actually doing enough to put us in control of our data and is it just defining privacy in a way that hurts rivals while helping its own business?

At WWDC in 2020, two privacy changes were among the most important announcements. First, Apple introduced app privacy “nutrition labels” — short summaries of app data practices included in the App Store. It’s a great idea, but <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/29/apple-privacy-nutrition-label/?itid=lk_inline_manual_93" target=_blank>when I checked some of the labels in January</a>, I found many contained inaccuracies.

Will Apple take new steps to improve its labels — or find ways to better vet their claims?

How Apple’s new privacy ‘nutrition labels' might be misleading you

Last year, iOS 14 also introduced a big change to how apps handle our data, requiring them to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/26/iphone-ask-app-not-to-track-ios-update/?itid=lk_inline_manual_96" target=_blank>ask users to track them for advertising purposes</a>. Apple delayed implementing this <a href="https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apptrackingtransparency" target=_blank>App Tracking Transparency framework</a>, which affects how apps can snoop on what else you do on your iPhone, until April of this year. Facebook and other developers said it interfered with their ability to make money from free services with targeted advertising.

Nearly a year later, <a href="https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/6048248" target=_blank>Google said last week it would make a similar change</a> to the way Android handles user requests to not be tracked.

But the privacy fight is far from over. I’ll be watching to see what Apple does to counter more sophisticated efforts to track iPhone and Mac users, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/31/think-youre-anonymous-online-third-popular-websites-are-fingerprinting-you/?itid=lk_inline_manual_98" target="_blank">including a technique called device “fingerprinting.”</a>

The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference is ostensibly an event for app developers. And Apple’s relationship with some of them is particularly strained right now.

Last month, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/24/apple-epic-trial-hot-tubbing/?itid=lk_inline_manual_101" target=_blank>a judge finished hearing arguments in a suit from “Fortnite” maker Epic Games</a> over the 30 percent commission Apple charges for the App Store.

Epic argued the App Store is an unlawful monopoly because its customers cannot go anywhere else to download apps and subscribe to iPhone games. Apple said it alone can keep the App Store safe, because it curates the collection.

On Sunday, The Washington Post’s Reed Albergotti and Chris Alcantara published an investigation that questions how good of a job Apple is doing at actually curating the App Store. They found that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/06/apple-app-store-scams-fraud/?itid=lk_inline_manual_103" target=_blank>2 percent of Apple’s top-grossing apps on one day were scams</a> — and that they had cost people $48 million.

The App Store fight is also about a question that is core to Apple’s future: How much control should Apple have over what people do with their iPhones? To some lawmakers scrutinizing Big Tech’s power, Apple’s “walled garden” approach to tightly integrate its hardware, software and services looks like an anti-competitive effort to stifle rival apps and services.

Last month, I argued that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/27/apple-iphone-monopoly/?itid=lk_inline_manual_105" target=_blank>many of the restrictions Apple puts on the iPhone no longer make sense</a> for consumers who live in a world where the iPhone is their most important device and where they necessarily have relationships with multiple tech companies and services.

Gerald Loeb Award for commentary, 2020

Harvard University, B.A. in Anthropology and Afro-American Studies

Cambridge University, Trinity College, M.Phil in Social Anthropology

Geoffrey A. Fowler is The Washington Post’s technology columnist based in San Francisco. He joined The Post in 2017 after 16 years with the Wall Street Journal. He won the 2020 Gerald Loeb Award for commentary.

New York University, BA in journalism

Heather Kelly is a San Francisco-based reporter covering the ways technology affects everyday life. 

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WWDC 2021: Apple announces iOS 15 features and more for iPhone, iPads and Macs

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iPhones get better video calls, paid privacy protection and virtual driver’s licenses in iOS 15

From watching TV on FaceTime to monitoring the health of family members, Apple’s all-virtual developer conference is a peek at updates coming to its devices.

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