3 New Features of iOS 14

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3 New Features of iOS 14

1. New Widgets Display

The new iOS 14 boasts the new customizable widget display feature. This means you can now customize your apps screen with widgets of various sizes to your liking. I felt this feature would give my iPhone a fresher look after being stuck in a similar look for many generations of iOSes now, and this alone was actually a good enough reason for me to make the upgrade.

Here’s how the new display could look like.

iOS 14

The widgets are customizable, so you could definitely afford to be less boring than what I've gone for here and display slideshows of your photos, your calendar, or your calorie tracker, or the news... In weeks or months to come, it seems like a lots of apps will start piggybacking on this widget feature to take up your screen space.

iOS 14

2. Banner Phone Calls

Another thing that I would consider as a big upgrade in iOS 14 is that phone calls now don’t take up the whole screen, and instead, only appear as banners like how text messages would.

This is big because I find phone calls used to be very interruptive in earlier iOS versions. I could be crafting a message, or looking at some important information that could have some benefit if only I looked at it a few seconds longer before having to respond to a phone call that would take up the whole screen.

3. Inline Replying in iMessage

If you have used other messaging apps like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, then you would have probably been used to their inline replying features, where you could long tap on a message, and your reply would be attached to a quoted display of the message you are replying to.

This is especially useful in group messages, or when you need to reply to a number of messages in the same chat. It’s excellent that with the upgrade to iOS 14, those of us who use iMessage often will have this feature at our disposal.

Are There Any Glitches?

I upgraded my phone to iOS 14 pretty early on after its release, probably within 24 hours after it was made available. Personally I don’t think I have encountered any meaningful glitches after the upgrade, and I don’t feel my iPhone has slowed down because of it, so it’s all in all pretty great so far.

Learn More

The official webpage on iOS 14 certainly described more features that come along with the upgrade, many of which I don't use, but you might. Head down to the iOS 14 webpage on Apple Newsroom to learn more about what else your iPhone could do after the upgrade.

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