It’s now over a month since the launch of iOS 12 with numerous minor updates rolling out ever since. And as initial excitement has subsided, developers are taking a long hard look at the platform to access how it would shape the course of their development efforts and by extension the areas in which they need to focus in the coming year. Generally, each new update comes with a few flagship features that developers exploit over the course of the year until new features are introduced.

With iOS 12, things seem to be a bit different. Apple has maintained a kind of continuity with its AR and AI related efforts. That is, instead of launching shiny new features, it has enriched the tools- ARKit, Siri, Core ML, among others using which developers themselves can build cool new apps. Let’s take a look at few of those iOS 12 features and how they might shape app development in 2019:

ARKit2

Apple last year rolled out the ARKit that ushered a new era of AR-enabled app development and with iOS 12, it has further augmented numerous features into its AR SDK. For starters, it has rolled out support for multiuser AR applications that open a whole new world of multiplayer AR games. Further, ARKit2 can now also be used to detect objects- effectively giving it markerless AR capabilities.

Health Records

Apple is one of the vocal champions of user and data privacy and for that reason; ios developers have to adhere to stringent privacy policies- almost cutting them from private user data. For health application, iOS 12 brings good news- they can now access user’s clinical data from HealthKit. This means applications would have now much more reliable data to work with that won’t only improve their services but also gradually train their algorithms. Of course, they would have to adhere to the same level of data privacy as HealthKit once they get onboard.

Interactive notifications

Updated notification center was a major feature of iOS 12. This allows grouping of notifications to offer a cleaner and better manageable notification panel. This allows them to:

   ·   Customize the placement of items

   ·   Style the interface elements

   ·   Display app-specific data

   ·   Add custom images

Siri shortcuts

Siri has been recently updated to predict shortcuts and make suggestions to users based on those predictions. This presents an opportunity for iOS app developers to integrate these newfound capabilities into their app as well. For instance, they can specify actions for numerous actions that users would be able to access right from the lock screen or the Siri watch face.

Natural Language

Core ML has been a major tool for iPhone app development to incorporate artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities into their apps. With iOS 12, they can perform on-device Natural Language Processing with features like language recognition, tagging, tokenization, and more. It also works with custom Core ML models that mean the potential of Natural Language framework is virtually limitless at this point.

As you may already know, iOS 12 was largely an incremental update with fewer new features and more focus towards polishing the existing platform. And though that leave ios app developers high and dry for major experimentation, it leaves ample room through subtle changes in AR, Siri, notifications, and more to fine-tune their existing apps for enhanced user experience.