iPadOS 14 is coming later this year with all sorts of new capabilities and features that will change the iPad experience. While there are a handful of significant new features, there are even more, smaller additions to iPadOS that you might have missed, either because they flashed on screen for mere moments or because they ended up buried on a webpage somewhere.
In any event, these are some of the great little features that are coming to the iPad later this year.
- Family subscriptions
- VoiceOver upgrades
- App Clips
- Quick toggles for video
- APFS encrypted drive support
- Date picker
Family subscriptions
Starting this fall, you will be able to share subscriptions with your family if you have Family Sharing set up. One caveat with this is that developers will need to opt-in to allow this functionality, so don't expect it right away, and don't expect every developer to necessarily support it.
VoiceOver upgrades
Apple's VoiceOver accessibility feature is getting a lot of upgrades in iPadOS 14. While a number of apps have done a good job supporting VoiceOver, on iPadOS 14 on-device intelligence will attempt to compensate when an app or web experience isn't optimized for accessibility by identifying text within images, reading image descriptions that have been added to an image, and automatic interface control recognition to help aid in navigation.
App Clips
While App Clips got a lot of attention in the iOS portion of the keynote, they're coming to the iPad, too. While Apple made a big deal about using App Clips with features like NFC, they'll still have a lot of life on the iPad. You can launch app clips in a lot of different ways; by tapping certain links in Safari; scanning an app code; opening them from Messages. And of course, if you liked using the Clip, you can download the full app to use any time.
Quick toggles for video
With iPadOS 14, all iPads will gain quick toggles for video resolution and frame rate in the Camera app. Previously, you need to dig around in Settings to change these parameters. Now you'll just need to tap your way through the options in Camera itself.
APFS encrypted drive support
If you encrypt a portable drive with APFS on a Mac, you can now read that drive on your iPad. You just need to connect the drive, enter the password when prompted, and you're good to go.
Date picker!
This is a very teeny tiny minor feature, but the date picker has been much improved. Instead of a rotating dial of times and dates, the picker is now presented as a calendar that's easy to navigate to find the date and set the time that you want. That's a big 'finally' from me.
What are you excited about in iPadOS 14?
Do you have any features, big or small, that you're excited to try out in iPadOS 14? Let us know about them in the comments.
