iOS 16.2 Has 20 Huge Changes You Need to Know About Before Updating Your iPhone « iOS & iPhone :: Gadget Hacks

Apple’s new Freeform app, available for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, is another productivity tool you can add to your arsenal. It’s one big flexible canvas, like a digital whiteboard/corkboard hybrid, and you can add post-it notes, shapes, files, links, scans, photos and videos, audio, typed text, and markups like drawings and highlights to it.

In the Weather app, you can open up a large modal sheet to view the daily summary with bar and line charts for most weather attributes on a particular day. Those bar and line charts are interactive, so you can drag your finger across them to see the data values at different times of the day.

IOS 16.1 and earlier would only show you the measurement changes by the hour. That still applies to the Precipitation bar charts, but the rest of them — Temperature, UV Index, Wind, Feels Like, Humidity, Visibility, and Pressure — are all by the minute on iOS 16.2. So now there’s no guessing what the weather will be like at any given moment between hours, at least for everything but rain.

The Shortcuts app has been constantly tweaked on iOS 16, and the iOS 16.2 update is no different. This time, there are a few differences and new scripting actions available for wallpapers:

• Get Wallpaper (new): Gets all of your Lock Screen wallpapers, and returns them as output so you can use them with other actions. This action can not be run on Apple Watch, Mac, and iPad.
• Switch Between Wallpapers (new): Switches the current Lock Screen wallpaper. If the wallpaper has a linked Focus, this action will set the Focus, too. This action can not be run on Apple Watch, Mac, and iPad.
• Set Wallpaper Photo (renamed): Sets the wallpaper to the specified image. This action can not be run on Apple Watch.

We already had Sleep widgets for the Home Screen and Today View, but now there are some for the Lock Screen that can go beneath the time. The same two widgets are available, listed below, as well as a third option that is simply a shortcut to the Sleep section in the Health app.

• Data and Schedule: See how you slept and review your sleep schedule.
• Sleep: View your most recent sleep session including sleep stages.

Watchlist and Symbol widgets for Stocks are still available on your Lock Screen, but iOS 16.2 brings a third option for Symbol with Chart. It has the same description that Symbol has — “view price quotes and track performance of a symbol throughout the day” — but replaces the current price with a line chart of the present day’s activity (or last known activity when trading hours are closed).

While there are still three Continue Playing widgets for Game Center on the Home Screen and Today View, the three Friends Are Playing widgets available on iOS 16.1 and earlier are now called Activity on iOS 16.2, and they work a bit differently. The game will still open if you tape its name or icon in the widget, but a few more things are going on in the new version.

First, you can tap “Activity” to open up a new full-screen Game Center overlay window with more activity details. Second, you can tap a contact’s name to open up their profile in the same overlay window. Closing either window takes you back to the widget.

If you subscribe to iCloud+ and use iCloud Private Relay to hide your IP address in Safari from the websites you visit — not just known trackers that everyone can enable — you can now toggle the option off per website from the page settings.

Right now, it appears to work per session, so you may have to turn it off again for a site if you refresh the page. A proper toggle switch under Website Settings may be coming in a future update, but nothing is there now or in the Settings app.

The Apple TV app is getting a huge change on iOS 16.2, which also affects iPadOS 16.2, tvOS 16.2, and macOS Ventura 13.1, and it will likely spill over to smart TVs.

Following iOS 16.1’s new support for Matter accessories, an architecture upgrade for the Home app is available for iOS 16.2, iPadOS 16.2, macOS 13.1, and HomePod 16.2. According to Apple, the update will make smart home performance faster and more reliable, especially in homes with many connected accessories.

You will see the option to install the Home update when you open the Home app. If not, you can update via Home –> My Home –> Home Settings –> Updates. All connected devices must run the latest software to view, access, and control a home updated to the newest architecture. If they aren’t, you won’t be able to use them.

In the beta, iOS 16.2 shows a notification when you trigger Emergency SOS on your iPhone. When you tap the notification, it opens the Feedback tool, asking for feedback on Unintentional SOS Calls. If you state that you unintentionally triggered Emergency SOS, you’ll see more questions, including:

• How did you realize that Emergency SOS was triggered on your iPhone?
• Where was your iPhone when Emergency SOS was triggered?
• What were you doing at the time Emergency SOS was triggered?
• Do you know how Emergency SOS was triggered on your iPhone?
• Has Emergency SOS been unintentionally triggered on your iPhone in this way before?

In one of iOS 16.2’s minor updates, the Software Update screen in Settings shows the currently installed iOS version using a big, bold font.

Third-party apps that animate UI elements with SwiftUI instead of UIKit reported issues viewing the animations via the 120 Hz refresh rates on ProMotion displays. While it was never an issue for iPads, it’s now fixed on iOS 16.2 for iPhones.

When you go to Settings –> Display & Brightness, you’ll see that the “Display Zoom” group at the bottom is now called “Display,” and under the new shorter title, you’ll find “Display Zoom” as the menu item instead of just “View.” These small changes might have something to do with the next feature.

• Apple brought back the external display support for Stage Manager on M1 and M2 iPad models, which lets you use up to eight apps simultaneously instead of up to four.