An Apple Engineer Lists His Favorite iOS 12 Features and Improvements

With the release of iOS 12, Apple’s newest mobile operating system, pretty much every iPhone owner out there is seeing fantastic performance upgrades.

While iOS 12 brings significant performance upgrades across the board, it’s full of easily-overlookable features. Ricky Mondello, an Apple software engineer who works on Safari, authentication, and security, has listed some of his favorite iOS 12 features that the average user might otherwise not be aware of.

To start, iOS 12 brings a big change to the iCloud Keychain password manager by generating passwords when creating accounts within various applications, much like it already does in Safari. This removes the temptation to reuse an older password, pushing users to create more complex, individual passwords.

iOS 12 can also look up a previously-saved password by having Siri show one’s password after passing a Face ID or Touch ID check, allowing users to employ more complex passwords that they don’t otherwise have to memorize. iOS 12 also employs AutoFill for everytime a user needs to enter a password for Apple TV. Touch ID is also now required to AutoFill a password into an app or in Safari.

Additionally, iOS 12 allows users to employ Password AutoFill feature with apps like 1Password or LastPass, and it also extends to Password AutoFill for Apple TV.

The link to change your password for a website through iCloud Keychain on iOS 12 and Safari 12 allows for web developers to help streamline the password change process, as well.

Another simple-yet-appreciated feature in iOS 12 will show users texted security codes automatically on the QuickType bar, allowing users to fill in the information with a simple tap.

A small but appreciated feature is the newly-improved gray theme for iBooks and Safari Reader, which has an overall-cleaner and smarter look to it.

Finally, iOS 12 features an improved Intelligent Tracking Prevention, ensuring that comment fields and “like” buttons across the web are not tracking users without their explicit permission.

iOS certainly brings some much-appreciated improvements to Apple devices both new and old, sometimes it’s the smaller feature that really let an operating system shine.

Big day! iOS 12 is out! I hope y’all love it.

I’m going to highlight a few iCloud Keychain, Safari, and WebKit features and improvements that mean a lot to me. (Thread…)

— Ricky Mondello (@rmondello) September 17, 2018