Apple WWDC 2021 Day 1 : Five Major Announcements & Key Takeaways

The first day of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) was held virtually on Monday, 7 June, with a two-hour keynote address that showed off a slew of new updates for the company’s major products.

Last year, Apple announced several new devices and updates, including iOS 14, macOS Big Sur and showcased ‘Apple silicon’ chips for its Mac devices.

Here’s are five major announcements the company made at WWDC Event 2021:

iOS 15

Apple on Monday, announced iOS 15, a major software update with powerful features that enhance the overall iPhone experience.

iOS 15 makes FaceTime calls more natural, introduces SharePlay for shared experiences, helps users focus and be in the moment with new ways to manage notifications, and brings more intelligence to photos and search to quickly access information.

iOS 15 also includes new privacy controls in Siri, Mail, and more places across the system to further protect user information.

iPadOS 15

The company also introduced a multitasking feature to iPadOS 15 that is even more intuitive, making features, like Split View and Slide Over, easier to discover and use, and more powerful.

Along with multitasking, iPadOS 15 will also offer Quick Note, a new way to collaborate and organise, whether typing or writing with Apple Pencil.

The new widget layouts for the home screen and app library offer simple ways to personalise the iPad experience and organise apps.

The brand new feature – Translation – will help to translate text and conversations. iPadOS 15 also includes new privacy controls in Siri, mail, and more places across the system to further protect user information.

WatchOS 8

WatchOS 8 has impactful new features that make the wearables operating system even more essential for users to stay healthy, active, and connected.

Updates to the wallet and home apps extend Apple Watch as an increasingly useful tool for convenient access across places users live, work, and visit.

Breathe app has been redesigned to track all the information related to your health and well being. The application also checks your respiratory system while you're asleep.

Advanced Consumer Health

Apple also previewed advanced consumer health and wellness insights for users as well as new tools for supporting your loved ones.

Building on the current innovative health features of \iPhone and Apple Watch, iOS 15 gives users the ability to securely share their data with important people in their life, like a family member or physician, and receive insights into the health trends of their loved ones.

Additionally, the new tools in iOS 15 can be used to identify, measure, and understand changes in a person’s health data.

Privacy

Apple introduced massive new features like app tracking transparency and privacy nutrition labels on the App Store.

For the Mail app, the company announced Mail Privacy Protection, which stops senders/spammers from using invisible pixels to collect information about the user. The new feature helps users prevent senders from knowing when they open an e-mail and masks their IP addresses so it can’t be linked to other online activity or used to determine their location.

Intelligent Tracking Prevention on Apple’s Safari browser will get even stronger by hiding the user’s IP address from trackers. This means websites can’t utilize the user’s IP address as a unique identifier to connect their activity across websites and build a profile about them.

With App Privacy Report, users will be able to see how often each app has used the permission they’d granted access to their location, photos, camera, microphone, and contacts during the past seven days. Users can also monitor where their data is being shared by seeing all the third-party domains.