Apple is set to release iOS 16.2 sometime this week or next week. It will include a handful of new features and bug improvements. Here, you can find what is new in the next minor update for your iPhone.
Starting with a big one; a new app called Freeform is coming to your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. It's an endless, collaborative whiteboard app with stickies, text boxes, and drawings. It's sort of like Miro, just specifically designed for Apple's ease of use. You can share it with others and see where they are in real-time. I plan on using this for unit recaps for my upcoming midterms.
Next is a relatively new feature coming to Apple Music. Apple Music sing will allow for karaoke-style listening and adjustable vocals. You can use this to duet with the artist, remix the song, or just turn the vocals off completely and put it on the TV for karaoke night. It also uses more enhanced beat-by-beat lyrics to make it even easier to sing along.
A few quality-of-life updates are coming to the lock screen, with more always-on display customization. You can now choose to hide your wallpaper or widgets when the always-on display is on, making it look more like an Android always-on display. There are also new lock screen widgets, with the sleep widget showing how long you slept last night, and the meds widget showing you when you need to take your next med.
There is also a new privacy feature coming to all Apple devices called advanced data protection. This will make (most) of the things in your iCloud account end-to-end encrypted, which makes sure that even Apple can't see what you do. However, there is a catch; if you turn it on and then forget your password, the only way to recover these things is via an NFC key, which is a hardware device that you can lose.
Game Center also got some cool new features, such as Shareplay support and a new widget for your home screen.
Apple TV now has support for live activities with sports. You can follow a game and get up-to-date updates right on your lock screen.
The bug fixes and minor improvements are as follows:
- Improved search in Messages allows you to find photos based on their content, like a dog, car, person, or text
- Turn Off Hide IP Address setting enables iCloud Private Relay users to temporarily disable the service for a specific site in Safari
- News articles in Weather display information relevant to the weather in that location
- Participant Cursors in Notes allow you to see live indicators as others make updates in a shared note
- AirDrop now automatically reverts to Contacts Only after 10 minutes to prevent unwanted requests to receive content
- Crash Detection optimizations on iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro models
- Fixes an issue that causes some notes not to sync with iCloud after updates are made
(from macrumors.com)