Welcome to Brown’s Bytes! Your weekly insight from Mobliciti’s CTO Andy Brown. Follow #brownsbytes
3rd July 2020
It’s been a busy few weeks here at Mobliciti and apologies in advance if it’s taken me a little longer than I would have liked to get around to discussing all the important news that came out of Apple’s WWDC last week.
There was a LOT of stuff announced here so let’s get straight into it!
iOS 14 and iPadOS 14
Let’s get the obvious one out of the way. As would be expected we have the annual new version of iOS/iPadOS to start thinking about.
First things first – let’s hope this comes out with fewer issues than iOS 13 did! I have spoken many times about how iOS13 has been a challenge to manage with the bug levels in it. Fingers crossed Apple nail it first time with 14…
Anyway, as you would expect there are a wealth of changes coming. Probably the most visible one is going to be the ability to have widgets on the home screen and better sorting of apps by default… Android users are clearly going to gnash their teeth about how much of a big deal this is, as Apple is very late to this particular party, but even so, this is a BIG DEAL!!
The basic layout of iOS hasn’t really changed much in a long time now, this is definitely a key change and I’d suggest Admins think about how some of their users might react to the changes. We have the beta in the labs already – I’d suggest you do the same to get early sight of this.
Another nice change is you can FINALLY change the default apps for email and browser – particularly useful for enterprise Admins to ensure links open as you’d like them to – although Maps can still only be Apple!!
There are some more cosmetic tweaks for Siri to make it less annoying and interesting features like on-device translation and app clips that I suspect your security team will want to investigate.
We’ll keep an eye on this and report back on the Betas as they progress.
On the iPad side, we also have a feature that will finally bring the pencil to life (hopefully) with Scribble. Handwriting to text finally arrives! Again, probably need the security team to dig into how that feature works and where the data goes…
Enhanced Privacy
Apple continues to add privacy features that allow you to see what Apps are actually getting up to in the background and iOS14 really does up the capabilities here. These new features are already causing quite a stir even in Beta with TikTok and LinkedIn already getting caught scraping text off the clipboard constantly – expect to see more of this sort of stuff and fair play to Apple for the way they are doing this. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is quite a bit of controversy in this area as a result (which must be a good thing).
When is a Mac not a Mac?
Finally, let’s look at the news that Mac is shifting from Intel to ARM-based silicon (the A12Z Apple design to be precise that’s already in the latest iPad Pro).
As an Intel Mac user, I must admit this is potentially good news. My MacBook Air runs pretty damn hot when under load and makes a complete racket with the fan as well, switching to the much cooler ARM chips makes a lot of sense (at least in theory), but this isn’t a small change as all the applications need to make the jump (or run in painful emulation modes).
For the next couple of years, we will see a co-existence of two flavours of Mac which is going to be painful and confusing as people work out which applications work on which device, but the endgame is where this gets very interesting…
MacOS and iOS/iPadOS unification?
Once the Macs and iPads are running on the same chipset family then the boundaries between an iPad Pro with a keyboard and a MacBook really will blur even more. I do also wonder how the new ARM Mac will be managed and suspect it to fall more in line with the iOS way of working.
So, loads to be excited about and to keep an eye on… as always, we’ll keep you posted, but if you need any assistance or guidance with all this then please do get in touch.
