SAN FRANCISCO—Apple officially announced iOS 9 at WWDC in June, and adventurous users could start playing with the public beta in July, but today the company announced a public release date for the finished version of the operating system: Wednesday, September 16.
The software update will arrive a couple of days ahead of Apple's latest iPhones, which was to be expected given Apple's past behavior. An unexpected benefit of this release is that it won't drop support for any device currently running iOS 8—iOS 9.0 will run on iPhones as old as 2011's 4S, iPads as old as 2011's iPad 2 or 2012's iPad Mini, and both the fifth- and sixth-generation iPod Touch.
The new operating system is mostly about refinements, at least on small-screened iDevices. iOS 7's Helvetica Neue system typeface has been replaced by San Francisco, which first showed up in the Apple Watch. The default software keyboard switches between lower- and uppercase letters, fixing the ambiguous Shift key. Spotlight can now tap into third-party apps and attempts to present you information proactively based on your habits. Siri and the multitasking switcher have new looks, the Settings app has a search function, and there are other small visual and functional changes sprinkled throughout the operating system.
The best changes are under the hood, though. App Thinning will reduce the size of applications installed on your iDevices, since they'll just be able to download the files they need rather than the files for every supported device. System updates require less free space to install, and they can temporarily delete and re-download apps to make space for new updates. The Safari View Controller will bring better performance and visual consistency to Web views in other apps and will allow saved passwords or sign-ins from Safari to be used in Web views.
The most significant changes are reserved for newer iPads. The iPad Air, Air 2, Mini 2, and Mini 3 (along with the new 12.9" iPad Pro) all support a multitasking view called Slide Over, which lets you quickly open a secondary app on the side of your screen, work in it, and dismiss it without leaving your current app. They also support picture-in-picture video viewing, which creates a small video view that hovers over your current app. And all iPads support new hardware keyboard shortcuts, blurring the line between tablets and Macs.
Finally, newer iPads' faster hardware (like the A9X in the iPad Pro) allow for true multitasking: two apps open side-by-side that can be used simultaneously. Apple has been laying the groundwork for multitasking and resolution-independence for a long time, and developers that are already following the company's development guidelines should have relatively little trouble adapting their apps to use the new features.
Look for our in-depth review of iOS 9 to run next week, and we'll also be examining its performance on old devices like the iPhone 4S and iPad 2. You can check our liveblog for a recap of the announcement as it happened.
Listing image by Apple
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