iOS 10 preview: Apple goes back to ignoring the iPad in a wide-ranging update

Enlarge / The iOS 10 beta on a 9.7-inch iPad Pro and an iPhone 6S.

Andrew Cunningham

I’ve spent most of the last six months buying a house, so you’ll need to forgive me if I have houses and house metaphors on the brain. I’ve found them helpful while trying to nail down iOS 10.
Imagine iOS 6 as a fundamentally solid house in need of some major remodeling. iOS 7 was largely a cosmetic update, putting on some new siding (or maybe a nice brick façade) and giving all the rooms a nice paint job. iOS 8 with its under-the-hood changes was roughly equivalent to replacing wiring and plumbing—stuff that’s harder to see but makes a big difference in everyday usage. iOS 9 gave an extensive makeover to one particular room (let’s call it “the iPad”) that had been basically fine for a while but wasn’t being used to its fullest potential.
In the context of this overextended metaphor, iOS 10 is best thought of as an effort to redo multiple other rooms in the house, knocking out some figurative walls and removing metaphorical ugly dropped ceilings. For the first time in a while, Apple is making notable changes to the way basic things like the lock screen, the notification center, and Siri look and work.
We've had a couple of days to play with the second developer build of iOS 10, which Apple tells us is more-or-less identical to the public beta being released today. The short turnaround time means there are a couple of major areas of the operating system—Music, Photos, Maps, and News are probably the most significant—that I’ve glossed over here in favor of spending more time in other areas. Evaluating features that depend on third-party app support will need to wait until more of those apps are ready.
Finally, a lot of what's outlined here will be subject to change between now and the time the final Golden Master build is issued in the fall. We’ll be able to go into more depth in our final review in a couple of months.

Installation

Once they’re posted, both the iOS 10 and the macOS Sierra public betas will be available from this site. Installation is fairly simple, especially if you’ve done this before. You’ll just download a profile, install it, and then check for an OTA update the same as you normally would.
This page has a few warnings and other information about how to roll your iDevices back to iOS 9 if it comes to that, but I’ll reiterate some of the most important points. Do not install this on hardware you rely on daily, since it’s still an early beta and stability, speed, battery life, and compatibility with existing apps isn’t guaranteed. Do make a local, encrypted iTunes backup before you get started, since if you decide to roll back you’ll need to wipe your phone or tablet entirely and start from scratch. Remember, backups made with a newer version of iOS can’t be restored to devices running older versions of the software.

Compatibility and feature fragmentation

iOS 10 cuts five iThings from the support list. Anything with an Apple A5 or A5X in it—the iPad 2, iPhone 4S, iPad Mini, fifth-generation iPod Touch, and third-generation iPad—are all gone, and given how those devices performed with iOS 8 and iOS 9 it was probably time. They were slow and were often missing features, and the oldest of them has been receiving updates for five years. That’s an eternity in the smartphone and tablet biz.
The iOS 10 support list includes all of the following devices:

The iPhone 5, 5C, 5S, 6, 6 Plus, 6S, 6S Plus, and SE
The iPad 4, iPad Air, and iPad Air 2
The iPad Mini 2, 3, and 4
Both 9.7 and 12.9-inch iPad Pros
The sixth-generation iPod Touch

This is a pretty big deal for developers who choose to target iOS 10 exclusively. For the first time in two years, the baseline hardware capabilities are increasing, and they’re increasing quite a bit. The iPhone 5 has between two and three times the CPU and GPU power and double the RAM of the iPhone 4S. This isn't just about speed, either—developers can finally stop worrying about cramped 3.5-inch screens, and non-Retina displays are a thing of the past. Every single one of these devices supports Siri and can communicate using AirDrop and Handoff.
The support list reduces the iOS lineup’s feature fragmentation—the stuff newer iThings can do that older ones can’t. This is an attempt at a comprehensive rundown, and it includes features that were introduced in earlier versions of iOS as well as hardware-enabled features like Apple Pay and 3D Touch.

Missing iPad features

Split View multitasking requires an iPad Air 2, iPad Mini 4, or iPad Pro
Slide Over and Picture-In-Picture multitasking requires an iPad Air or Air 2, an iPad Mini 2, 3, or 4, or an iPad Pro
The True Tone display feature is only supported on the 9.7-inch iPad Pro
The Health app is available only on iPhones and iPods

Missing iPhone and iPod features

Raise to Wake requires an iPhone 6S, 6S Plus, or SE
3D Touch requires an iPhone 6S or 6S Plus
Step- and distance-tracking without external hardware requires an iPhone 5S or newer, or a sixth-generation iPod Touch; tracking and elevation without external hardware requires an iPhone 6 or newer or a sixth-generation iPod Touch
Burst photos, slow-mo video, and related features require an iPhone 5S or newer or a sixth-generation iPod Touch

Features missing from both

Low Power Mode is only supported on iPhones
Support for Apple Pay mobile, in-app payments, and Apple Pay on the web requires an iPhone 6 or newer. The iPad Air 2 and iPad Mini 3 only support in-app payments and Apple Pay on the web. The iPhone 5, 5C, and 5S can support Apple Pay in a roundabout way via the Apple Watch.
Safari Content Blockers and Night Shift mode require 64-bit hardware (this includes the iPhone 5S or newer, the iPad Air or Air 2, the iPad Mini 2, 3, or 4, any iPad Pro, or the sixth-generation iPod Touch)
TouchID-related features require an iPhone 5S or newer, an iPad Air 2 or iPad Mini 3 or newer, or an iPad Pro
OpenGL ES 3.0, the Metal graphics API, and 64-bit ARMv8 apps aren’t supported on the iPhone 5 or 5C or the fourth-generation iPad

Unlike previous years, a lot of the stuff that older iPhones and iPads are missing is related to specific hardware components—TouchID, NFC, newer cameras and sensors—rather than raw performance. Using iOS 9 on an iPhone 4S meant living without things like Continuity, Siri suggestions, and Apple Watch support, all of which Apple was pushing as integral to its ecosystem’s future. iOS 10 running on an iPhone 5 or 5C supports all of this stuff at a bare minimum.
This isn’t the time to comment on performance on older devices. Performance can change substantially between the first beta and the final version of the software, and while my experience playing around with iOS 10 on an iPhone 5 and 5S has generally been pretty good, we’ll need final software before we can make any definitive statements about speed or stability.

Lock screen

Andrew Cunningham

The lock screen. Note the little lock icon at the top of the screen and the absence of the "slide to unlock" prompt.

Andrew Cunningham
The lock screen. Note the little lock icon at the top of the screen and the absence of the "slide to unlock" prompt.
Andrew Cunningham
After being unlocked with TouchID. The phone is still at the lock screen, but it says "unlocked" at the top and I can hit the Home button at any time to jump into the phone.
Andrew Cunningham
The Today view and Spotlight as accessed from the lock screen.

“Slide to unlock” has been a fixture of the iOS lock screen for as long as iOS has been a thing, but no longer. Now that the majority of iDevices include TouchID, Apple has tweaked things to reflect the fact that most of its users rarely, if ever, actually run into the “slide to unlock” prompt anymore. (Apple’s slide-to-unlock patent was also recently invalidated, though the timing there could just be a coincidence.)
Sliding your finger across the lock screen now does a couple of different things. Slide from left to right and you’ll see your widgets and the Spotlight search field (collectively referred to as the “Today View,” which we’ll talk about more in a minute). Slide from right to left to activate the camera. Spotlight aside, this is all stuff you could access from the lock screen before, but shuffling things around arguably makes it all easier to access. In particular, the motion to launch the camera is more reliable and less finicky than the “slide up from the lower-right corner” motion used in iOS 9 and older versions. And, as before, you can control the amount of information that’s visible from the lock screen via the “TouchID & Passcode” screen in the Settings app.
The biggest difference isn’t necessarily what you can do from there lock screen, but rather in how it works. iOS 10 introduces what is essentially a second stage in the unlocking process for devices with TouchID, a step between a fully locked phone and a fully unlocked one. Let’s walk through it.
Wake up your phone or tablet (the automatic “Raise to Wake” feature only works on the iPhone 6S, 6S Plus, and SE at this point) and you'll still see the time, date, and a list of notifications you've received since the last time you looked. The way your device unlocks depends on whether you have TouchID or whether you're using an iPhone or iPad.
If you have an iPhone and you wake the screen without pressing the Home button (pressing the power button instead, for instance, or using Raise to Wake), resting your finger on the TouchID button unlocks the iPhone but doesn’t actually dismiss the lock screen. You can see a small “unlocked” badge appear at the top of the screen to denote that your fingerprint had been accepted. On an iPhone, if you wake the phone by pressing down on the Home button in the first place, you’ll automatically be taken to your home screen; if you’re using an iPad, this “pre-unlock unlocking” feature is the default behavior no matter how you wake your tablet up.
Once your phone has been unlocked, you can tap the Home button again to bring up the Home screen, or you can continue to use features from the lock screen. When you’re using this unlocked lock screen, the biggest difference is that the phone now has access to all your data. You can see notifications or widgets even if you normally opt to hide them while the phone is locked, the Camera app can access your full photo library, you can quickly reply to prompts from Messages and other apps, and so on.
If you don’t have TouchID or just aren’t using it, you now need to tap the Home button to bring up the passcode screen. There doesn’t appear to be a way to do the same kind of pre-unlock unlocking that TouchID devices can do. And if you want to revert to the previous behavior where resting your finger on TouchID just automatically bounces you to the Home screen, that’s available from the Accessibility menu in the settings—the Accessibility screen is still a mix of actual accessibility features and a dumping ground for weird toggles that have no other place.
It takes time to get used to the way the lock screen now works after years of sliding to unlock, especially if you don't or can't use TouchID—that muscle memory is deeply ingrained at this point. But all of these tweaks are an interesting way to address complaints that the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus’ version of TouchID is actually too fast, and that it makes the lock screen vestigial or less convenient to use. And while it's not set up this way by default, you could conceivably use it to enhance your privacy, hiding notifications and widgets when your phone is truly “locked” but displaying them once the phone has been unlocked.

Today View, widgets, and Spotlight

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The new Today View.

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The new Today View.
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Older widgets have darker backgrounds than updated ones to avoid legibility problems; these should go away once developers are targeting iOS 10.
Andrew Cunningham
Apps with widgets can now display those widgets when 3D Touched alongside the rest of their quick actions.
Andrew Cunningham
Some apps just show a widget without any other quick actions.

iOS 7 introduced the “Today View” in the Notification Center. It gave you context-sensitive information about your day and the next day based on data pulled from your calendar and some other sources. iOS 8 introduced widgets that you could use to customize the Today View, giving you quick access to snippets of information from various apps. And iOS 9 introduced a new “Intelligence” screen that blended context-sensitive app, location, and contact suggestions with the standard Spotlight search bar. iOS 10 blows up the Today View as we know it and that Intelligence screen in favor of more widgets.
The new Today View—still tucked away to the left of the Notification Center, though the notification view is now the default—is now a list of widgets, and that list of widgets is identical to what you’ll see if you swipe from left to right from the Home screen. Old Today View and Intelligence mainstays like the weather, transit information, upcoming appointments, and app and location suggestions have all been given their own individual widgets that can be added, removed, and rearranged as you wish.
Widgets and notifications both get a rounder, lighter design, and they actually look sort of like traditional app windows—title bars floating above content. Third-party widgets that work in iOS 8 and 9 should continue to work here, but Apple distinguishes them from new updated-to-target-iOS-10 widgets by using a subtly darker shade for their translucent backgrounds. This is presumably to prevent any odd visual problems, since the background of the old Today View screen was a bit darker than the new one.
Finally, if you’re used to swiping downward to bring up a quick Spotlight search field, that gesture still works, and as in iOS 9 it still brings up a short list of Siri-suggested apps—there are no widgets or other changes here. And when you swipe down from the top of the screen to pull down the Notification Center, you’ll find that Apple has tucked yet another Spotlight search field away up there. At least it’s not hard to find.
Overall the move toward greater customizability serves the Today View well—you don’t really lose any functionality, and you can move some things around that haven’t been movable since they were introduced in 2013. The one potential frustration for some current users is that the Today View is the exact same screen as the Siri suggestions screen, and any changes you make in one place will be reflected in the other. If you actually used those two different screens to do two different kinds of things, you’ll need to rearrange your widgets until you have one screen that does everything you need.

The new Control Center

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The new Control Center.

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The new Control Center.
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List of AirPlay devices.
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Some Control Center icons get Quick Actions now. You can set flashlight intensity.
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Or set quick, common timers.
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Or copy the last thing you did in the Calculator.
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Or do the standard camera stuff.
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The media playback page is bigger and easier to poke at than before.
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Tap that menu to see a list of all AirPlay and Bluetooth audio devices you can play back to.
Andrew Cunningham
The Control Center on an iPad.
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On an iPad, the other audio interfaces aren't hidden behind a drop-down.

The Control Center was one of iOS 7’s best features, but it’s been a while since Apple did a whole lot to it aside from minor design tweaks and the odd button addition. iOS 10 changes the Control Center into a bubble with a multi-page design and some more splashes of color.
The first page looks mostly like the current Control Center, minus the music playback controls. You can still change screen brightness; toggle Airplane Mode, wireless, Do Not Disturb, the rotation lock, or Night shift; control AirPlay and AirDrop settings; and launch a handful of convenient apps. On 3D Touch-capable iPhones, that row of buttons across the bottom of the screen picks up a Quick Action menu like the one you get on apps. Setting quick timers and choosing different intensity levels for the LED flashlight are the most interesting additions.
Swipe from right to left and you’ll find a second page devoted entirely to media playback. You’ll see playback and volume controls along with album or podcast art or a video thumbnail as provided by the app, and if you're watching video you’ll get the name of the app that’s handling playback.
Most interestingly, there’s an entire drop down menu (on iPhones) or separate box (on iPads) for controlling where video and sound is going—your device’s headphones or internal speaker plus all AirPlay and paired Bluetooth headphones and speakers in range. Not to stoke the flames at the rumor foundry, but if Apple really were looking to replace the next iPhone’s headphone jack with a wireless headset, a quick and easy way to change playback devices would prove especially useful.
The third page of the Control Center will only pop up if you’ve configured some HomeKit devices in the Home app. It will allow quick control of individual accessories or complete “scenes” made up of multiple accessories, and appears to be centered mostly around toggling things on and off. If you want more complex controls, that’s one of the things the Home app can help with.

New notifications

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Notifications on the lock screen.

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Notifications on the lock screen.
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Apps can still use the same quick button-based notification responses as before.
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You can listen to voicemails and other audio right from a notification now.
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The expanded Messages notifications offer many of the same capabilities as the full app.
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On a non-3D Touch phone, swipe and then hit View to expand notifications.
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On a 3D Touch phone, you 3D Touch a notification to expand it but can still swipe to clear it.
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3D Touching the X button in the Notification Center can finally clear away everything, if just for an elite few iPhone owners.

Like its widgets, iOS 10’s notification design gets tweaked to look more like a bubble or small window rather than stretching all the way across the width of the screen, something that’s especially appreciated on an iPad where incoming notifications can currently block off a big swath of the screen.
The biggest change to notifications in iOS 10 is that you can do more with them. Notifications have been tweaked to make it so that you can spend more time in them—you can see and do more in an iOS 10 notification without having to jump out into another app. Expand a notification from Messages and you’ll see a surprisingly full-featured mini-version of the app complete with iMessage apps, read receipts, and indicators that the person on the other end of the conversation is typing. You can view snippets of your calendar when you open up a calendar invite or listen to a voicemail without diving into the Phone app.
Apple is providing developers with a new “Notification Content” extension that will let them define their own custom UI for similarly rich notifications beyond the basic message replies and quick button-based reactions they can currently use. Public beta users aren’t going to see any of these show up during the beta period, but if the past is any indication they should begin to arrive shortly after the final version of iOS 10 ships.
To take advantage of any of this stuff, you have to expand the notifications. On an iPhone 6S or 6S Plus, this is accomplished by 3D Touching any given notification, either when it comes in or from the list of them in the Notification Center. 3D Touching the little X button at the top of the Notification Center will clear them all away, and swiping from left to right and hitting “clear” will get rid of it.
There’s an extra step on devices that don’t include 3D Touch support—swipe from right to left and you’ll uncover a second “view” button that you can hit to expand the notification. It’s just one of the things Apple is doing in iOS 10 to make 3D Touch feel more essential, even if it sometimes seems like an odd choice.

Other 3D Touch additions

3D Touch does a bunch more things in iOS 10 than it did in iOS 9. More of Apple’s first-party apps have 3D Touch Quick Action shortcut menus that you can pull up by pressing down on their home screen icons, and apps that already had shortcut menus can do more things. The Control Center icons for the flashlight, timer, calculator, and camera all get their own 3D Touch shortcut menus. These are all logical extensions of the way the feature was already being used.
The most interesting of the new stuff (notifications aside) is the ability to pull up widgets when you access Quick Actions. These are exactly the same widgets you normally see in the notification center, and they give you the same information and options: create a quick note, see your next couple of calendar appointments, and so on. Some apps (Activity is one) just display a widget in lieu of a Quick Actions menu.
Apps don’t appear to get this for “free”—at least, existing apps that support both 3D Touch shortcuts and widgets don’t display those widgets when 3D Touched—but Apple tells us that apps that support both widgets and 3D Touch should support it automatically once they’re built to target iOS 10. It’s a neat way to reuse a few basic iOS building blocks that people are already familiar with.
All of that said, I still find the line between 3D Touches and long presses to be arbitrary and ill-defined in places, especially given that most iOS 10 hardware doesn't support it. Things like the Control Center shortcuts and all of the notification features seem like they'd work fine with a long press, and there are actions like saving a photo or opening a link in a new tab that are still a little harder to do on an iPhone 6S because the phone occasionally reads long presses as 3D Touches.
I don't think this is likely to happen, but I wish 3D Touch was used as a quicker alternative to a long press rather than an entirely different kind of interaction. iOS 10 does a good job of making 3D Touch more desirable, baking it into the OS in all kinds of little places. But the fact that the feature is available exclusively on the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus (and presumably the next-generation iPhones but not on other new products that have been introduced since, including the iPad Pros or the iPhone SE) rankles.

App and API highlights: Messages

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Once you start adding stickers and reactions and emoji to everything the Messages window can get a little chaotic.

Andrew Cunningham
Once you start adding stickers and reactions and emoji to everything the Messages window can get a little chaotic.
Andrew Cunningham
Links get expanded with image previews and everything, which looks way better than a long garbled link.
Andrew Cunningham
Adding reactions to a message.
Andrew Cunningham
The new photo picker is good. Take a new picture with your camera using the little live thumbnail, swipe left to see images in your photo library, and swipe right to see launch shortcuts for the full Camera and Photos apps.
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Searching through images and GIFs.
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You can draw and use small figure gestures to send messages to other people—this is a lot like the comparable feature in the Apple Watch.
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Writing a longer message.
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The iMessage app store is pretty sparse right this second.
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Apps aren't added to your app drawer automatically to avoid cluttering iMessage. You can enable apps manually or toggle that behavior.
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The iMessage app drawer. You'll see apps you've enabled here, and you can go to the Store to download and enable more.
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Full-screen balloon effect. These screens are all fully animated.
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Confetti effect.
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Laser light show effect.
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Fireworks effect.
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Shooting star effect.
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And you can tweak the way the bubbles themselves look, too.

Of all iOS 10’s built-in apps, the one that is the most radically transformed is Messages. Over the years it hasn’t strayed far from its roots in the old Mac OS X iChat app, a low-to-no-frills communication app that eventually merged into/was replaced by Messages many years later. But iOS 10 remakes it in the mold of newer, busier apps like Facebook Messenger, and it picks up a whole lot of new visual frills alongside its new features.
Messages can now automatically expand links when you send them, much as Facebook or Slack does—your recipients will now see a clean thumbnail with a bit of preview content rather than a big messy blue link. And the interface for selecting and snapping pictures to send to people has been streamlined, too—hit the arrow button to the left of the text field and then hit the camera, and you can easily swipe horizontally through your camera roll or use the thumbnail-sized camera preview to take a new picture. Tap on that thumbnail or swipe all the way to the left to open the classic full screen photo album and camera views.
iMessage apps are one rung down the usefulness ladder from those first two changes, but as pitched they still sound sort of promising. They're supposed to do app-y things without actually making you jump into another app, and for chats where transactions or social scheduling are going on this could prove interesting. Apple’s examples include sending someone money through Venmo or some Venmo-esque service, or agreeing on showtimes and then buying movie tickets through Fandango.
Apps that the person on the other end of the conversation will need to download to use will be offered up for download if both parties don’t already have them. Mac users running Sierra ought to just get a link—remember, Messages for Sierra can view most of the stuff that the iOS app can send (stickers included), but macOS can’t send most of this stuff.
And then we get to the other kind of iMessage app: stickers. Stickers you’ve bought can be stuck to any message that your or your recipient has sent to add and add some personality to the conversation. If you send stickers to an iOS 9 user or someone who isn’t on iMessage, they’ll just go through as regular old images.
Hit the App Store icon to bring up the UI for iMessage apps, which can also be delivered as extensions within regular apps. They’ll have their own Apple Watch-esque app store, which is currently populated with a handful of Apple-made sticker packs but not much else. As with widgets or Share extensions, iMessage apps you download won’t automatically show up in the main app by default to prevent it from getting too cluttered. Go to the “manage” tab of the store to toggle iMessage apps on and off (or change this behavior, if you just want all of your apps to show up all the time).
Once you have a few apps selected, go to send an iMessage and then hit the App Store icon again. Swipe left and right to change between apps or sticker packs and up and down to scroll through a particular app or sticker pack.
For adding personality to messages without adding apps, start typing a message and then long-press the blue “send” button that appears to the right of the text field. From here, you can select several different bubble styles and background effects, most of which are demonstrated better in the pictures above than they would be in text.
Other cosmetic additions that don’t require App Store purchases include “reactions,” brought up by long-pressing on a message bubble and adding one of six canned pre-defined reactions; handwriting mode, in which you flip your phone sideways and then scrawl something out with your finger; larger emoji for when you’re sending messages with just one-to-three emoji in them; and an Apple Watch-esque mode for drawing pictures and messages and sending little animations out to your friends. There’s also a distinctly Facebook Messenger-esque image searching feature that makes it easier to find choice reaction GIFs when you need them.
Most of the changes in Messages could reasonably be described as “juvenile,” insofar as they’re a departure from the Messages app’s heretofore straightforward just-the-basics design. But they reflect the kinds of features that are showing up in competing messaging apps and the things the users of those apps are actually using. Once any given group of people—whether that’s a group of friends in Facebook Messenger or a group of coworkers in Slack–discover the goofy little things that their messaging clients will let them do, they’ll start using those features. Apple has done a pretty good job giving Messages some goofy little things to do, and hopefully more “serious” iMessage apps will make actually getting things done a bit easier, too.

Mail

Andrew Cunningham

Viewing folders from the top level of the Mail app. Expand and collapse your accounts as you need to.

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Viewing folders from the top level of the Mail app. Expand and collapse your accounts as you need to.
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The filter icon in the lower-left corner (filled in blue when enabled, as pictured).
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Different quick filter options.
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The top message in a new e-mail thread.
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Scroll up and down to see other messages in the thread. But you can see below Sam's e-mail that Mail isn't always great at collapsing quoted replies, which can make scrolling a problem.
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A properly collapsed e-mail.
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Swipe left to view the same quick actions as you had before.
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Ditto for swiping right.

I’ve always been a stalwart user of the iOS Mail app—I’ve tried other clients as they’ve come out, but I prefer to handle all my mobile e-mail from the same app (making Google’s Gmail/Inbox and Microsoft’s Outlook apps less-than-desirable). Besides, the best third-party e-mail apps are either getting bought by Google or shut down and Apple doesn’t let those clients do everything that the first-party client can do anyway. It’s easier just to stick with something safe.
Mail in iOS 10 doesn’t get any huge overhauls but it does make a handful of tweaks, some of which are immediately useful and others that might one day be useful if Apple can address some irritating corner cases.
On the “useful” end of the spectrum: the Mailboxes view now shows all the folders in a given mailbox at the top level of the app rather than making you dig through separate screens when you have multiple accounts set up; tapping the name of each account expands or collapses the list if you prefer a cleaner view or just don’t want to scroll through all the folders in every one of your accounts.
Also useful is the new quick filter, the circular icon with three lines in it that you can see in the lower-left corner of the screen. It’s a quick toggle for a few common filters that you could already use at the top level of the app. By default, you can quickly filter out all but your unread messages. Tap the “filtered by” label at the bottom of the screen to filter e-mails that have been flagged, those that are addressed to you directly, those on which you have been CC’d, and to toggle sorting by attachments and sender VIP status.
The Mail app offers a new threaded view that mirrors the one in Mail.app for macOS. Instead of poking through one message at a time, you can scroll up and down to see all messages in a thread (including your replies).
As much as I like the move to a threaded view in theory, in practice I ran into a few problems. The first was with how the app handles quoted messages included in replies. The app tries to collapse quoted messages automatically, allowing you to click a button to expand the quotes if you want but otherwise hiding them from view. The main problem is that it doesn’t always hide the quotes, and that all or part of old e-mail threads are sometimes included with each new message. (There is, of course, no help for those hopeless people who choose to reply inline, but that’s not Apple’s fault.)
Based on my limited data, I can say that quotes from my Gmail messages were more reliably collapsed than quotes from the Office 365 Exchange server that Ars uses. And the behavior appears to differ based on the e-mail client on the sender’s end and how it handles quotes—some quotes from Exchange messages were collapsed properly, and others weren’t. Based on some brief chats with co-workers and my own testing I'm inclined to blame Outlook for Mac as the main problem, but Mail may struggle with messages sent from other clients as well.
This is all annoying enough that I'll probably end up turning off threading in the settings unless Apple or the developers of third-party e-mail clients can tweak the behavior as the betas continue to roll out. Otherwise it can consume way more time than it saves.
The other problem I had was that all messages in a thread aren’t loaded up automatically when you open that thread. Messages load as you scroll, which even on a fast Wi-Fi network introduces some lag (and some scrolling confusion, since you’re not sure how long a given message will be until it’s loaded).
This makes some sense as a bandwidth-saving measure—you won’t necessarily want to reload every single message in a thread just to see the most recent reply. But some kind of option to automatically download and display all messages in a thread while the phone is on Wi-Fi could help improve the app’s responsiveness.

Siri’s API

Apple is providing developers with a Siri API in iOS 10, though admittedly it’s pretty limited in terms of what apps can use it and what those apps can use it for. I'll quickly recap how it works in theory and we’ll take a closer look at how it works in practice when the final version of the software is released.
SiriKit provides developers of certain kinds of apps access to Siri while still holding them at arm's length with clearly defined rules and limitations. Third parties can use Siri in six different kinds of apps, though those applications encompass a wide range of common and popular App Store offerings: audio and video calling apps, messaging apps, payment apps, apps that allow searching through photo libraries, workout apps, and ride-booking apps.
That covers a lot of ground, but there's a lot that's missing: music and video apps like Spotify and Netflix, mapping apps like Google Maps, and third-party to-do list apps don't fall under any of these umbrellas, possibly because they conflict too directly in some cases with Apple apps and services like Apple Maps and Apple Music (Apple Maps in particular is becoming more deeply integrated into the OS with every new update). Hopefully Siri will become more useful to a wider variety of apps later on, much as Apple has done with the extensions system it introduced in iOS 8. But for now the first-party apps are definitely still in a privileged position.
The backend for Siri handles the speech-to-text translation, and Apple provides its default Siri UI for responses and confirmation messages (though developers are free to customize their own). Developers can define custom vocabulary for their apps to improve Siri’s ability to understand what you’re asking for or to interpret names of contacts from within your app.
For those of you more interested in the technical underpinnings of SiriKit, we’ve got an explainer here and Apple’s developer documentation is here.

Home

The Home app is the friendly face that the HomeKit framework has been crying out for since it was introduced. It gives you a UI for controlling individual devices, grouping those devices into rooms, defining presets based on activities (“going to bed,” “watching a movie,” etc.), managing multiple homes, and inviting other users to view and manage those homes and devices. The “automation” option can control devices and groups of devices based on what time it is and where you are—maybe you want to confirm that your blinds are closed and your door is locked once you’ve arrived at work, or you want to turn on the air conditioner once you’re within a few blocks of your house.
If you want to communicate with your smart accessories while you’re away, you’ll need to have a device on your home network that serves as a bridge between that network and your device. An Apple TV signed into your iCloud account is the preferred hub, since it’s always connected to power and always available on your network. But head into the Home settings on any iPad running iOS 10, and you’ll also be able to use tablets as hubs as long as the tablet is at home and on the network.
As of iOS 10, HomeKit can support compatible air conditioners, air purifiers, humidifiers, cameras, and doorbells. Previously supported devices like fans, garage doors, lights, locks, outlets, security systems, motion sensors, thermostats, and window shades are still supported, too.
Until now, communicating with HomeKit accessories has primarily been accomplished via Siri. Now there’s a fairly elegant app for it that ships with iOS. It feels like a recommitment to HomeKit on Apple’s part, and for the sake of the hopelessly fragmented security-flaw-ridden garbage-y Internet of Things ecosystem, I hope Apple is able to bring more manufacturers and devices under its banner.
I’m hoping to outfit the house we just bought with (a sensible number of non-terrible) HomeKit-compatible smart accessories. By the time the full version of iOS 10 is available, I should have more firsthand information to share with you about how the Home app works.

Grab bag: iPad stuff (or lack thereof)

Andrew Cunningham

Dragging a tab to the right of Safari will enable Split View, which works differently here than it does anywhere else in the OS.

Andrew Cunningham
Dragging a tab to the right of Safari will enable Split View, which works differently here than it does anywhere else in the OS.
Andrew Cunningham
You can't adjust the split here, nor can you switch secondary apps.
Andrew Cunningham
In fact, you can bring in another app via Slide Over...
Andrew Cunningham
...and activating Split View merges your Safari tabs back into one window.

iOS 9 was a bigger release for the iPad than it was for the iPhone, so it’s perhaps not surprising that the iPad feels like it’s riding shotgun to the phone again in iOS 10. If you were hoping for a rethought multitasking interface or wider support for that iPad multi-user mode Apple is currently trying out in classrooms, you’ll be disappointed. iOS 10’s iPad-centric additions are mostly minor.
A couple of changes fall into the “fit and finish” category—for instance, the iOS setup wizard will finally display properly in landscape mode, something that currently makes it pretty weird to take an iPad Pro out of the box, hook it up to a Smart Keyboard, and attempt to set it up.
Another major addition falls into the “welcome-but-quirky” category. Safari will let you display two browser tabs side-by-side rather than making you rely on another browser like Chrome or a hack like Sidefari, but it’s completely separate from the rest of the Split View and Slide Over features.
To enable it, start from a full-screen Safari app on an iPad that supports Split View—an iPad Air 2, iPad Mini 4, or either iPad Pro. Long press a tab as though you’re going to drag it to reposition it in your list of tabs, but drag it to the right edge of the screen instead. When the Safari window visibly scoots over to make room for the new tab, let go, and you’ll be looking at two Safari windows side by side. You can open new tabs and navigate around in either one, much like you’d be able to in regular Split View mode.
But the side-by-side Safari mode is decidedly not the same thing as Split View mode. Though it looks vaguely similar, it works very differently: you can’t swipe down to open some other app, nor can you adjust the split between the left and right sides of the screen. In fact, you can still use Slide Over and Split View to bring up another app—if you do that, all your Safari tabs from both windows will be merged back into one window until you close the secondary app again.
I’ve been asking for the ability to load Safari windows (and other apps, for that matter) side by side for a while now, so I don’t want to complain too much. Apple’s solution is better than nothing. But if the logical conclusion of iOS 9 and the iPad Pro is a tablet that can do more of what a Mac can do, then this feels like a band-aid. Eventually, we should be able to open two instances of the same app next to each other. In the meantime, we have this.

Universal clipboard

Like macOS Sierra, iOS 10 supports the “universal clipboard” features that lets you copy text on your phone or tablet and paste it on your Mac or vice versa. As long as all the devices are signed into the same iCloud account, it should work automatically—all iDevices that will run iOS 10 ought to be able to use universal clipboard, but not all the Macs that run Sierra are able to. If it doesn’t support the other Continuity features (Airdrop, Handoff, etc.) it won’t support the universal clipboard.
After using the feature to copy and paste text between multiple devices, here's how we think it works:

Text or some other item is copied on one Mac or iDevice. The device then advertises over Bluetooth that it has something in its clipboard, the same as it would do if it had content available via Handoff. Unlike Handoff, though, there's no visual indicator on other Macs or iDevices that there's anything that's ready to copy.
Hit paste on another device. There's a pause that accompanies the action—nearly unnoticeable for a snippet of text or a link, long enough to prompt a little progress bar popup on the Mac for larger images or big chunks of text—during which Device #2 requests the contents of Device #1's clipboard, and Device #1 sends it over.
It’s not obvious how the devices resolve which data was copied the most recently so as to avoid pasting old stuff, but it doesn’t appear to be a problem. The software is either smart enough to either use the most recent copy operation, or devices discard the contents of their clipboards when they see a fresh Bluetooth advertisement from another device.
Though both of your devices need to be signed into the same iCloud account to trust each other, your data never appears to touch Apple's servers—like Handoff, all communication is local. This means that Bluetooth and Wi-Fi have to be enabled on both devices and both devices need to be within range of each other for copying and pasting to work, but you won't necessarily need an active Internet connection if you don't have one.

For whatever reason, if you don't want universal clipboard to work, you can head into the settings app and disable Handoff. As best as we can tell, there's no way to keep Handoff but not the universal clipboard.

New "back" button design

iOS 9 introduced a context-sensitive “back” button in the upper-left corner of the screen that let you jump back to the previous app if you opened, say, a link in one app that opened up in another one. This was useful, but the design of the button didn't make it immediately clear that it was a button and it hid the network indicator icons when it appeared.
iOS 10 fixes both problems. There's now a small square with a “back” arrow in it to indicate what the button is and where it's going to take you, and the network indicators just get shoved to the right. Aside from its still-tricky location (putting a tiny button in the upper corner of a 4.7 or 5.5-inch screen doesn't make it super easy to use), Apple has addressed all of the complaints we had.

CallKit, Apple’s VoIP API

Apple’s CallKit allows VoIP apps like Skype, Google Hangouts, WhatsApp, and others to look and act in the same manner as standard phone calls and FaceTime calls already act.
Annoying as it can be that Apple doesn't allow third-party apps to be set as defaults for phone interactions, stuff like CallKit is heartening. You can’t straight-up replace the phone dialer app, but deeper integration for third-party communication apps is the next best thing.

Notes collaboration

Andrew Cunningham

Click the plus button at the top of the screen to share the note with other Apple IDs.

Andrew Cunningham
Click the plus button at the top of the screen to share the note with other Apple IDs.
Andrew Cunningham
Adding people to a shared note.
Andrew Cunningham
Sending the invitation via iMessage.
Andrew Cunningham
A list of people who can currently access the note.

The main change in Notes is a real-time collaboration option. Hit the button at the top of the screen and enter some Apple IDs to invite others to view and edit the note with you. You can send anyone you’ve invited a link via one of many different apps or services, including Mail, Messages, AirDrop, Twitter, Facebook, and more.
This feature, more rudimentary than the equivalent collaborative editing in Google Docs or Microsoft Word or Apple’s own Pages, seems designed to replace a certain kind of casual Google Docs usage. Sometimes you just want a basic scratchpad you can share with one or two other people while you’re trying to plan things—a place where you can dump links and notes without doing a bunch of fancy formatting. You’re still going to want Google Docs or even Pages for anything much more complicated than that, because compared to both of them Notes is missing a lot of features.
Documents refresh when a new save is detected on the server, but you don’t see real-time changes. Apple offers no interface for leaving comments, you can’t view a document’s revision history, there’s no way to let someone view a note without also granting them editing privileges, and you can’t set a separate password on any of the stuff you share. But sharing things in Notes does seem like a decent way for small groups of Apple-centric users to handle simple shared notes and tasks.

Clock app and “bedtime”

Andrew Cunningham

Bedtime is a rudimentary sleep tracking feature new to iOS 10.

Andrew Cunningham
Bedtime is a rudimentary sleep tracking feature new to iOS 10.
Andrew Cunningham
Tell it when you'd like to wake up.
Andrew Cunningham
Tell it which days of the week you care to be told when to go to bed.
Andrew Cunningham
Tell it how much sleep you'd get in an ideal universe.
Andrew Cunningham
Tell it when you'd like to be nagged.
Andrew Cunningham
The styling is reminiscent of the Apple Watch Activity app.
Andrew Cunningham
A visual representation of your sleep cycle.
Andrew Cunningham
A new analog stopwatch view.

The Clock app gets a nifty new white-on-black design and an analog-style stopwatch to go with the digital one, but the biggest new addition is a sort of rudimentary sleep tracking feature.
“Bedtime” borrows its general look and feel from the Activity app you get when you hook up an Apple Watch. It’s based entirely on timing—you tell it when you want to wake up, how much sleep you want in a given night, when you want to be reminded to go to bed, and what sound you want to wake up to, and that’s pretty much all it does. Its data gets dumped into the Health app, where it can be accessed by other HealthKit-compatible apps.

Settings tweaks

Andrew Cunningham

Security recommendation about an unprotected Wi-Fi network.

Andrew Cunningham
Security recommendation about an unprotected Wi-Fi network.
Andrew Cunningham
Remember when you could always count on some unprotected network named "Linksys" for free public Wi-Fi?

Apple has shuffled a handful of settings around in iOS 10 and added a couple of other little tweaks. You now head to the “Display and Brightness” screen when you want to set the amount of time after which the display automatically locks (this screen also lets you control Raise to Wake, Night Shift, and True Tone settings on the hardware that supports it; this isn't new to iOS 10 but it’s worth noting how much busier this part of the Settings app has gotten).
Another relatively minor tweak gives you an explicit warning when you connect to any unsecured Wi-Fi network. For routers you control, iOS offers up configuration tips and a recommendation to use WPA2 encryption. If you don’t happen to control the router you’re trying to connect to, the point may just be to scare you away from mindlessly connecting to it.

32-bit shaming

Enlarge / 32-bit apps running on 64-bit devices are starting to get singled out.

Andrew Cunningham

Apple’s first 64-bit iPhone came out in 2013, and since then it has been updating all of its hardware and its app submission requirements to make the transition to the inevitable 64-bit future easier for users to manage.
iOS 10 still supports some 32-bit hardware, but this may well be the last version of the operating system that does. Apple has required all new apps and app updates to be 64-bit since June of last year, and iOS 10 adds a pop-up for apps that haven’t been updated. Users of 64-bit devices are now being warned that 32-bit apps “may affect overall system performance.” You won’t see this prompt on 32-bit iDevices running iOS 10.
32-bit apps are in fact no more likely to affect performance than they have ever been, but now that the majority of iOS apps are 64-bit Apple is calling attention to the fact that 32-bit versions of the system libraries and frameworks need to be loaded to run 32-bit code. In the early days of 64-bit iOS, this overhead was an acceptable way to boost compatibility. These days it’s relatively rare, so pulling up those libraries eats up RAM that could be used elsewhere.
iOS 11 will almost certainly drop support for the last 32-bit iOS hardware. It may well drop support for 32-bit iOS apps, too.

Removing default apps

iOS 10 lets you to get rid of most of Apple’s first-party apps, totally removing them from the Home screen rather than making you hide them away in some inconspicuously labeled folder on your second or third page of apps.
“Deleting” a first-party app breaks all of its associations, which can cause problems since iOS still doesn’t allow third-party apps to fill in those gaps. Delete the built-in Mail app, for instance, and tapping an e-mail address will prompt you to reinstall the app rather than letting you use a third-party alternative. First-party apps can be re-added via the App Store.
Removing first-party apps doesn’t actually free up space, and Apple isn’t actually updating its first-party apps through the App Store like Google does with the Play Store. The ability to “delete” these apps is mostly cosmetic—a concession to people who complain about the ever-growing number of icons that get dumped on their home screens with each successive update.

A promising public beta

Some of my favorite operating system updates are ones that rethink longstanding parts of the user interface in intelligent ways, and iOS 10 seems to be shaping up into that kind of update. The lock screen has been newly modeled around TouchID, which was brand-new three years ago but practically omnipresent in iDevices today. The Today View has been broken up into a bunch of configurable widgets and merged with the Siri suggestions screen. Notifications are more versatile and pleasant to interact with. And Messages' improvements, while they won't be to everyone's taste, bring Apple's built-in app more in line with the current zeitgeist as represented by Slack or Facebook Messenger.
There are more new features in iOS 10—improvements to core apps like Photos, Music, and Health, tweaks to how the keyboard works, Apple Pay on the web, and a bunch of other minor changes—that we'll have more time to look at in our final review. But so far the majority of the changes are for the better. Old hardware is getting dropped, but that frees developers from worrying about actively supported devices with 512MB of RAM. The iPad isn't getting nearly the amount of love that it got from iOS 9, but in recent years Apple has been happy to dole out feature updates throughout the year in large point releases like it did in iOS 9.3. If performance on older devices and battery life are both up to snuff in the final release, most of my complaints will end up being pretty minor.

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