While iPadOS 17 was under most people's radar because of Vision Pro at this year's WWDC, it included a bunch of incredibly useful features. While most people will think that they are just cool quality-of-life changes, it’s one of the best software updates that has ever come to the iPad.
First glances
The two most viewed parts of the iPad experience are now the best they've ever been
The Lock Screen is finally useful
We all know that the current Lock Screen for iPadOS is just a bunch of wasted space. It only shows the time and notifications in the middle, but Apple changed this in one of the best ways possible. By putting the widgets on the left of the landscape Lock Screen, it finally feels like it’s now wasted. You also now have extra information at a glance, making things like quickly checking the weather and seeing upcoming events. Instead of the Lock Screen being something that gets in the way of apps, it feels like an inviting way to use the iPad; glanceable information.
The Home Screen is miles ahead
While interactive widgets were something that was very requested, people didn’t seem to see how this would majorly improve the iPad experience. Because of interactive widgets, you can now have full-on interactions and experiences right on the Home Screen. For example. Quizlet will be adding an interactive widget that allows users to view a flashcard set. Because of the large screen, it still feels like a good experience instead of a minuscule app. Paired with another interactive widget is when it starts to get amazing. If I were to put a reminders widget next to said Quizlet widget, I now have a multitasking experience right on the Home Screen. I can compare this to the windowed app feature on Samsung tablets and foldable, where you click on an icon and it opens a preset windowed feature. However, this is now built into the Home Screen and doesn’t even require you to open the app.
New experiences
While these aren't the spotlight, they are just as important.
The health app on iPad brings a whole new dimension to health viewing
The health app on iPhone is so nice for everyday things: I can see my activity progress, long time trends, and even log my meds and mental state in iOS 17. However, now that all these powerful metrics are on my iPad on iPadOS 17, it feels like an ideal and superior way to view my health metrics. The design of the app still needs some work, but how they ported it to iPad works wonderfully. Being able to quickly access certain categories in the sidebar just works, the graphs and metrics look amazing on the big display, and the Home Screen feels much better than the iPhone’s version. While some will see this as a lazy port, I think that the attention to detail in this was perfect.
PDFs are now the best file to use on iPad
PDF improvements were extremely overshadowed at this year's WWDC, but they received a major improvement, and I think that PDF on iPad is going to be the preferred method of editing PDFs. Autofill in PDFs makes busywork on the PDF so much faster, which is a much-needed improvement. It makes things like filling and signing waivers so much easier and faster. Also, Notes getting inline PDF editing is a much-needed feature and makes collaboration in PDFs finally good. Instead of downloading something like Acrobat and having to tether between my notes and the PDF with my classmates, I can just drop the PDF inside the note and boom! We’re all on the same page. This makes group note-taking and collaborative projects a breeze.
While many other features make iPadOS 17 such an amazing update, these were the major features that stood out. While some people didn’t pay attention to this update, it seems like this will be one of the best iPadOS updates that have come to the iPad so far.
