Apple opens up with iOS 8 and targets the privacy high ground
Apple claims its latest annual update to its operating system for iPhones and iPads is its “biggest iOS release ever”. Those inured to its perpetual hyperbole may at first struggle to see any difference: the eight-year-old grid of apps and icons seems largely unchanged. But the boast is more than just a punning reference to the new iPhone 6, its largest phone yet.
While last year’s iOS 7 brought startling visual changes, it left much the same under the hood. This year’s upgrade – which was set to be released for download on Wednesday – brings a long list of tweaks to the iPhone’s basic utilities, such as photos, messages and its touchscreen keyboard. It also introduces a whole new way for apps to send data to each other behind the scenes.
Several of these improvements are to areas in which iOS has lagged behind Google’s Android. Years after the facility first appeared in Android, iPhone users can now choose whether they want to share the photo they have just taken in WhatsApp Messenger or Instagram, instead of just Facebook, Twitter or the small number of other apps that Apple has chosen to build into the operating system. This is a welcome concession to freedom of choice from a company that often seems to think it knows better than its customers.
Keys and notifications
Another trick Apple has borrowed from Android is the ability to swap the iPhone’s default keyboard for one with fancier features, such as SwiftKey. So good is SwiftKey’s predictive messaging at guessing what you want to write – by analysing your linguistic style from emails and texts – that its lack of availability on iPhone hitherto was almost worth switching to Android for.
Notifications are also getting handy tweaks that lift some ideas from Android, then improve them. With iOS 8, you can respond to a text message, “like” a Facebook post or accept a dinner invitation by sliding down on the notification as it appears at the top of the screen, without having to leave the app that you were looking at before the interruption.
Apple has also borrowed some features from chat apps to improve its iMessage. You can now send short audio clips, walkie-talkie-style, by holding then swiping up on a new microphone icon, and can also share your current location, which is faster than typing an address.
Privacy
Yet Apple is also going out of its way to avoid following Google in one key area: privacy. Google gives away many of its services – including Android – free, in exchange for data that can feed its personalised advertising business. To distinguish itself, iOS 8 asks for permission in a series of prompts whenever personal information is shared, whether with the iPhone itself or an app developer.
Location tracking is a prominent example. Whereas in previous generations of iOS, an app that needed to know your exact whereabouts would ask for permission just once, when first downloaded, iOS 8 reminds you of your decision with intermittent pop-ups that ask if you really do still need that flashlight app to know where you are all the time.
Health
IOS8 apple health app
Privacy concerns are particularly acute when it comes to our health information, which iOS 8 gathers into a new app called simply Health. If users give the OK, fitness apps such as MyFitnessPal or Fitbit – and, in future, the Apple Watch – can drop statistics about calorie consumption or distance walked into Health. There, it can be plotted on a timeline chart or, again with permission, shared with another app that might use the data differently. Think of it as a clearing house for your health data.
Apple has slapped new restrictions on app makers to prevent them from using health information to sell targeted advertising and promises that all health data are stored on the iPhone itself, not in the cloud. And to try to avoid more embarrassing incidents, such as Jennifer Lawrence’s stolen selfies, anybody who backs up their iPhone to iCloud can now protect it with two-step authentication, which sends a single-use passcode to your device as well as a traditional password when you log in. This should help Apple to win back some of that lost trust.
For the privacy conscious, these controls are welcome, even overdue. But while iOS 8 makes many improvements in usability, all those pop-ups asking for permission seem a clunky and awkward piece of design. Too many requests for consent are likely to lead to speedy, thoughtless dismissals rather than considered contemplations of whether an app’s privacy infringements are offset by the value it provides.
The verdict: Apple’s designers have made many improvements that make iOS 8 easier to use. But they may need to apply their considerable talents to improving the iPhone’s privacy controls in the same way they have spruced up messages, notifications and photos in this latest release.