Last Updated on October 27, 2021 by Shivanandana Hegde
The ‘much awaited‘ release of the year; i.e., apple iOS 15 update might not have lived up to the hype in terms of features. In fact, if you’re someone like me who switched from Android, most of these features don’t really feel like an ‘update’ at all.
However, below are the top 7 picks of best apple iOS 15 features for day-to-day use of most people. By the way, Apple has a detailed blog about all the features in their press release if you don’t mind spending an hour or two to read it.
2021: Top 6 features of iOS 15 at a glance:
- Safari now supports extensions
- Focus Mode is most under-rated feature of iOS 15
- Find your iPhone even when turned off
- Separation alerts
- Background sounds – My favorite iOS 15 feature
- Scan text – Slightly over rated feature of iOS 15
1) Safari now supports extensions
The reason why this tops the list is because apple is finally budging to ‘customization‘ side of our needs.
With extensions you can now make safari dance to your tunes. Whether it’s content blocker or downloader, you got it.
2) Focus Mode is most under-rated feature of iOS 15
So you can now get to your ‘zone’ effortlessly and automatically.
Whether you want to focus on your work or art, iOS 15 has a feature called “focus mode” which helps you be in your productivity zone.
The way I use it is like this:
- Pick 5-6 most critical apps for work like Outlook, email, notes, phone etc.
- Create a home-screen with only these apps only for this mode. (hide it for regular mode).
- Create a focus mode by selecting these apps and home-screen.
No more ting-tings and chang-changs. Just productive business!
3) Find your iPhone even when turned off
Yep. Now you can! Although it is supported only on newer iPhones from iPhone 11 and up, this is a super useful feature to have.
Apple has details about this here. So, basically when are on SOS screen, just swipe and choose the feature to turn it on.
4) Separation alerts
Another useful iOS 15 feature if you are someone who easily forgets their belongings. I suspect myself to be a victim of this after returning to normalcy from pandemic. Having things scattered around in home is one thing but getting back outdoors, you might use this more than you think.
5) Background sounds – My favorite iOS 15 feature
Now you have a built in feature to play white noise and calm nature sounds right from your control center. Combine this with iPod pros or any noise cancelling headphone and it’ll be a blessing if you’re around noise.
Go to control center settings and enable ‘Hearing’ to see the option when swipe down from right.
Yes. Apple has almost killed a couple of meditation and white noise apps with this feature but nevertheless, it’s such a handy feature for people just trying to focus on things in the midst of all the background noises.
6) Scan text – Slightly over rated feature of iOS 15
I feel this iOS 15 feature to be slightly exaggerated in Apple’s ads. Like who would want to pick the phone number from a name-plate by opening the camera, scanning that image, selecting that text, copy it and then paste it on dialer? Huh. Such a bad example.
However for students who want to prepare notes, people who work with data-transfer and data-entry jobs, this might be a boon.!
Honorable mentions of best iOS 15 features to explore
- Photos – Memories gets revamped
- New music and new AI based memory videos.
- Account Recovery Contact
- Now you can set a person you trust as your recovery contact (only iPhone user of course) and they can help you unlock your phone from their phone.
- Apple Maps – Walking is somewhat better
- Though still not up to the Google maps standards, apple maps has lot of nifty features especially when you’re exploring areas locally by walk.
- Notification Summary – Just get it over with!
- Remember Focus mode? Now you can read through all your notifications in one go.
- App privacy reporting (early stage) – For advanced technical users
- I find this feature highly valuable as this will enable you to get an extremely detailed our log file of all the services and background usage report of every single app in your iPhone.
You may also like to read: Moving from Android to iphone in 2020. What will you really miss?
