Apple iOS 7

iOS 7 was announced officially at WWDC 2013, and it brings a lot of visual changes to Apple’s mobile OS, plus a host of new features and functionality as well. The official release is still a few months off, but one enterprising developer, Brian Roizen, has posted a fairly extensive collection of screenshots from the new beta out today. The screens really just show a close-up view of what Apple demoed on stage.

Apple’s iOS 7 features a radical visual overhaul, but what does this mean for preexisting apps? The issue is indeed complex, explains Marco Arment in a recent post to his website, and could create space for new, emergent developers to procure success with an audience of hundreds of millions this fall.

 

It isn’t just a new skin : it introduces entirely new navigational and structural standards far beyond the extent of any previous UI changes. Existing apps can support iOS 7 fairly easily without looking broken, but they’ll look and feel ancient.

 

It’s clear that iOS adoption rates are rocketing – indeed, less than a year since iOS 6 launched, the update is already installed on 93 percent of iPhones. Developers who specifically target Apple’s forthcoming operating system therefore need not worry about having a limited audience of iOS 7 users, and shouldn’t have long to wait before countless App Store frequenters have updated their iDevices accordingly.

With iOS 7, iPhone 5 owners as well as the owners of the iPhone 5's successor will gain the ability to edit photos with filters built directly into the Camera app. Within the camera app, the new feature will give users access to nine image types before they take the picture, much like the functionality that has made third-party apps like Instagram so popular. Owners of the iPhone 4 or 4S will have the ability to apply filters after the fact within the Photos app.

Apple also showed off new iCloud photo sharing features, including new support for video sharing in photo streams. The service also now has an Activity view that allows users to see the latest updates from all of their shared streams in one place.