The Changes in iOS 12 for Developers
It's here, iOS 12 - Apple's latest operating system, and it's full of changes in all areas, from user experience to programming. In addition to the new operating system, Apple has also introduced a new cycle of hardware, in particular with larger screens, a faster A12 chip and the new Apple Watch Series 4. We have all seen the introduction of the keynote and the specifications piloted correctly on the sheets? But what does all this mean for
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? ARKit 2 First of all, now you can create multiplayer games in AR. This is a huge step forward, leading to all kinds of gaming scenarios, including archiving world map data structures to be shared across multiple games. ARKit 2 also adds object recognition, which in a sense gives you AR "without markers" in a sense. For example, suppose you are in an airport and want to get information about the plane you are looking at. Point the phone at "this" level and the object detection rules can show the details. Or an even simpler example would be the recognition of different types of flowers or trees. If you go further, you can also scan objects in the real world and integrate them into your AR experience. As I suspected, the faster the iOS device, the faster the object is scanned. However, this little nugget has far-reaching capabilities that we can not fully imagine. abbreviations Siri Now you can define shortcuts that Siri can use through donations that your code provides to Siri. Allow what actions are available to the user as shortcuts and purple! Now users can open your app, review some data, perform actions and continue - all without opening your app! Wait, is not it a bad thing for the developers? What about showing my ads or is the user going to interact with my screens so he can continue to be involved? Welcome to the world of "Well spent time", my friends - a methodology that aims to reduce the time that people spend on electronic devices. In the new world of trying to convince people to stop using their cell phones and waste time repeating the same things again and again, Apple is loading the Siri shortcuts and the usual Buzz Feed app Evernote and Payal already. In fact, today we count over 200 apps with enabled Siri shortcuts. Since users have a habit of not touching their mobile phones to perform common tasks, they may also consider enabling keyboard shortcuts in the app or being beaten by competitors who have already done so. medical records If you have a health app, this is a big problem. Users can now share clinical history with their app by providing developers with read-only access to so-called FHIRs (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) from the same HealthKit store. The data stored in FHIR are regularly updated by Apple. So if you have an app to lose weight and you want to incorporate someone's real medical history into your app's algorithm to help them lose weight, you can do it. Naturally, an absolutely strict privacy policy is required. effects This applies to the iOS stickers packages displayed when using iMessage in Messaging. If a pack of stickers is already installed in your app, users will not see it in the iMessage and Facetime Effects section. The interesting part is that users can now attach their stickers in real time, so the door opens up a little to clean the face with small animations of any kind. Interactive controls in notifications The notifications in total have received an important update. Grouping user notifications now means that only a single message from your app will appear on a card-like stack (the most recent first). This is useful, but also emphasizes the importance of having your messages important to the user. Now you can also make interactive notifications so that the user can touch the message. Instead of getting details about your app, they will see the details directly in the message. authentication services Now you can share authentication profiles between Safari and apps. Suppose you have a website blocked behind an access and a mobile app that accesses the same data: now you can allow the app to use any saved access previously used on the Web access your app or vice versa. CarPlay for navigation apps Do you have an application with GPS or some other form of navigation in the game? With iOS 12, developers can now view specific parts of this app in CarPlay-enabled car audio systems. This is enabled only for browsing-based apps. network framework There is a new network structure designed to replace sockets and provide developers with direct access to protocols such as TCP, TLS and UDP. The new framework offers advantages over the current native socket processing, as the clean state and wait state are more powerful. Another goal is the duration of connections in different network environments and switching between them (WLAN-> mobile). Natural language The Natural Language framework enables natural language processing on the device and supports speech recognition, tokenization and tagging. Tokenization divides the text into single words, sentences or paragraphs. The marking identifies parts of the language, people, places and organizations. The Natural Language framework can also use custom ML core models to classify and tag text in specific contexts. The NSLinguisticTagger class is still available. However, the Natural Language Framework is the preferred mechanism for processing natural language. depreciation With the old and the new in progress, iOS 12 requires the end of some classic calls that you could use. Here's what Apple refuses (we do not recommend using it and will eventually kill it). OpenGL ES (together with OpenCL) will be replaced by Metal. For now you can still use OpenGL ES on iOS 12. There are many games and platforms that use OpenGL, so this is a bit of a shock. But to know that Metal is linked to Apple and xCode is evident for the development on the iPhone. Metal has some advantages, but I think Open GL will be supported in the coming years. On both sides of this barrier there are fierce arguments from the developers. The push for subscriptions purchases in your apps Last year, Apple held a secret meeting with a select group of iOS app developers in New York to discuss the modification of the current app provisioning model from single purchases to subscriptions. From Apple's point of view, these one-time purchases are generally inexpensive ($ 1-2), but offer end users unlimited access to the app and support. This can be expensive from a service as well as from the research and development perspective. Apple's expectation was that developers were moving towards a different way of thinking about long-term customer engagement and recurring revenue, which is easier said than done. Today there are few successful subscription apps in the Apple Store. To change this reality, it is necessary to modify the development, distribution and maintenance of the app. As users commit to subscribe on a monthly or annual basis, they have clear expectations in terms of service, support, quality and value. Apple has always encouraged app developers to switch to a subscription model. The reasons are obvious: who does not want to make money while he sleeps? But keep this in mind. Not all apps are eligible for subscriptions.