HomeKit and Apple Music
Anyone who uses the iPhone’s HomeKit feature must’ve felt the need for it to work with speakers too. Apple has added this much-needed upgrade in iOS 11 to the HomeKit, and now users will be able to control speakers all over their house using Airplay 2, which is a new version of AirPlay. Airplay 2 enables you to have multi-room music controls from your phone. Several speaker manufacturers like Apple’s Beats, Bose, Bang and Olufsen, and others have stated that they would make speakers compatible with AirPlay 2.
Now coming to Apple Music, the major upgrade in it will you to create a profile and share the songs you listen to with your friends, making it more social. A new section has been introduced in the app called “Friends Are Listening To”, which will give you live updates of what you’re friends are enjoying on the app. You can also choose to share selective playlists with your friends, or keep your profile private (and hide your Taylor Swift playlist to stay a badass in the eyes of your friends).
There’s another new feature in Apple Music called “Shared Up Next List”. This feature will let your friends add songs that would play next in a playlist without disturbing the current song, which will come in handy if you use the new AirPlay 2 feature to play music over the speakers in your home (did someone say House Party?).
In addition to this, Apple announced the new MusicKit for developers, which they will be able to use to integrate their apps with Apple Music easily. Major developers such as Nike, Anchor and Shazam have already started using MusicKit.
App Store
At the WWDC today, Apple announced a huge make-over of the App Store on iOS 11. The App Store will now have a brand new interface, which will be focused on the discovery of new apps and how-to’s. One of the main features in the new interface is “Today” which would highlight one new app every day. The App Store looks a lot more like Apple Music now, having similar fonts and colorful images.
Another new feature is that the in-app purchases will now be available for purchase on the description page of the App Store, instead of only being available inside the said app. Finally, the last big change Apple announced was that the App Store will feature a “top story” of the day, guides on using apps, and text description pages for apps which will resemble articles in blog posts. We believe that with this feature Apple wants to turn the App Store into something you open very often just to scroll around, like Pinterest, instead of using it only when you need to download a new app.
These were the main features of the iOS 11, which will be available for download later this year.