[WWDC 2020] The features we are excited to dig in with our clients.
On June 22nd, Apple held its famous annual developer conference WWDC (World Wide Developer Conference). This year, due to the current sanitary situation, it was held exclusively online with no live performance in California. Nonetheless, it was a very exciting conference with lots of reveals welcomed warmly by our team at Idean France.
In this article, I will share what we are looking forward to create with everything Apple brought us this year. It almost sounds like a summer Christmas for mobile developers right?
Widgets on iOS, iPadOS and macOS
Apple has announced a major update in its user experience. The springboard (that’s the lovely name of the iOS home screen) now can be customized with widgets, right where app icons usually belong. These widgets can come in three sizes and are highly customizable. Having a well designed widget for you app can be an amazing addition to its user experience.
For a banking app for example, which is one of our specialty at Idean, the users could have a glance at their balance right on their device home screen by using the linked widget. This widget could even provide more data by selecting a bigger display size — eg: the last three operations on their account.
App Clips
A few years ago, Android released “Instant Apps”. A way to provide a part of an app’s experience right from a website without downloading the full application. Today, Apple revealed its own way to do pretty much the same: App Clips. Yet they made the emphasis on how it could be used in the everyday life, outside with NFC tags providing a shortcut to theses app clips.
Need to order in a restaurant? Bring you phone close to an NFC tag at the entrance to get in a light version of the restaurant’s application where you can easily order and pay. Apple is trying to make the process as easy as possible with every application by pushing the use of “Apple Pay” and “Connect with Apple” to remove any heavy enrollment from these App Clips. The experience should be as lite as possible.
Here at Idean, we can already see a lot of usage for our clients, and we are ready to dig into this amazing feature!
CarPlay
CarPlay is now available on more than 80% of worldwide new cars says Apple. For quite sometimes now, we’ve been eager to work on apps for CarPlay. With this year’s update, we can now feel that day coming as Apple extended the third party app categories with three new ones: Parking, EV Charging and Quick Food Ordering.
Apple Watch : Watchface sharing with multiple “complications”
We love Apple Watch, but applications on this device tend to be overlooked. A new way to bring your users to use your Watch application may be in this year’s release, that enables multiple “complications” for a single app and allows you to share a customized watchface that includes these complication to your users.
iPadOS : new design guidelines
By creating iPadOS from iOS, Apple has decided to make dedicated UX guidelines for iPad. This year, Apple provides new native interactions guidelines that apps may want to integrate in order to fit the OS’s overall experience. A few example provided by Apple during this keynote were the Side Menu and NavigationBar buttons and submenus. At Idean, we deeply believe in consistency between apps and their host OS, that’s why we are looking into theses new guidelines with care.
Some thoughts abouts improvements in all of Apple’s Operating Systems
Apple has made the decision to bring what the users wanted to the table. Incoming calls will no longer block the whole phone, springboard is becoming more customizable, Siri is way more compact… There’s been a lot of polishment coming with this update. And we are definitely seeing iOS become closer to android yet retaining what’s making it so different.
As it has been the case for quite sometimes now, Apple is deeply focusing on privacy and security, processing less and less data on servers and more on the actual devices. A nice concern that we appreciate to see.
Thank you for reading this article, let’s hope the next one in September will be about Apple Glass!
Written by: Nicolas Fontaine, iOS tech leader at Idean France.
