iOS 15 hidden features — 11 changes that make your iPhone better - Tom's Guide

The upcoming iPhone software update commanded considerable stage time at Apple's WWDC 2021 event, and you can find a lot of documentation about the changes coming to the iPhone on Apple's website.

We've taken their findings and compared it to Apple's feature list to come up with a list of significant enhancements and improvements that likely didn't catch your eye at first.

Every iOS update grants new powers to Siri, and this time, Apple seems to have come up with an impressive update for its digital assistant — at least on paper.

We've already talked about how Siri's getting faster, thanks to on-device speech processing (at least if you've got an iPhone XR or later), but a Siri improvement that's gotten lost in the shuffle is its ability to share photos, web pages, news articles and other things.

Ask iOS 14's Siri to share that with a contact, and you'll get an apology about how that's beyond the digital assistant's current capabilities.

And in iOS 15, if you ask Siri to share something on your iPhone screen that it can't, the assistant will offer to take a screenshot and send that instead.

That way, should you lose access to your Apple ID, you can tap one of those contacts to help simplify the recovery process.

Those contacts will be able to access your Apple account should you pass into the next life, making your subscriptions to Apple News and Apple Fitness the least of your concerns. .

This will only be of interest to anyone with an iPhone 12 model — or the iPhone 13 devices that come out in the fall since they'll be 5G-ready, too — but Apple says its enhancing some system functions and built-in apps to connect to 5G networks faster.

The end result should be improved iCloud backup times, better streaming from Apple TV and Apple Music (and potentially third-party apps), snappy iCloud Photo syncing and quick downloads of Apple News Plus articles for offline reading.

It's not an especially news that Apple's Find My app can track down the location of any Apple devices when they connect to a network — that's one of the app's primary reasons for existing.

(Presumably, this means you'll get the last known location of the device, but we'll figure out exactly what Apple has in mind once the iOS 15 public beta arrives.) According to Apple, the expanded feature means you'll be able to track down devices even if they've run out of battery or a thief has shut them down.

Additionally, Find My will be able to locate devices even after they've been erased — another feature meant to thwart the resale of stolen Apple devices.

But there are improvements in iOS 15 to talk about, even in advance of the inevitable camera enhancements coming via the iPhone 13 models in the fall.

Your panorama shots in iOS 15 should look better, as Apple says it's improving geometric distortion and doing a better job at capturing moving subjects — at least if you've got one of the four iPhone 12 models.

Here's a feature that will only come in handy when you set up a new iPhone, but you'll certainly appreciate it, if your available iCloud storage is at a premium

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