Last night Apple took to the stage for their annual Worldwide Developer Conference to announce details of iOS 12. The changes weren’t as big as we’ve seen in previous years, however, there was one update which publishers should be aware of;
Push Notifications: Apple announced a few updates to the way that push notifications will be displayed and can be managed across their devices. Users will be given more control over when and how they receive notifications by using the ‘Manage Notifications’ feature. Users can either  completely stop receiving notifications or can opt for them to be delivered ‘quietly’. The latter option means that notifications won’t appear in the lock screen, but instead will appear within the notification center.
Another change will see notifications being grouped together which some argue will make it easier to see specific notifications as alerts from iMessage wont ‘clutter’ the feed.
Apple are also calling upon Siri to help intelligently detect when users are not interacting with notifications. When Siri sees that users are not engaging with particular notifications they will ask the users if they want to disable notifications from that app altogether which makes it more important than ever to make sure that your notifications are engaging!
As well as the new push notification features, here’s some other key announcements;

• One of the main announcements was the arrival of ARKit 2 and the introduction of a new file format, USDZ, which Adobe also announced they would be supporting. This will reduce some of the challenges associated with the early AR releases and will make it more accessible. We’re sure our sister company, SixPorts, will be looking forward to getting their hands on ARKit 2!
• In an attempt to enhance Siri and compete with the likes of Alexa and Google Assistant, they announced ‘Siri Shortcuts’ which enables users to create command prompts for specific apps. It will also intelligently make suggestions based on your usage and previous activities.
• A new Screen Time feature will allow users to manage the amount of time they spend interacting with their phone. It will create daily and weekly activity reports, analyse how often you interact with your phone and also enable you to limit the time spent within specific apps, creating a warning when your ‘allotted’ time is about to expire. Do Not Disturb will also receive some enhancements meaning that it can be automatically controlled by time or location.
• Facetime can now handle 32 parties!
• There will be new Animojis and a new ‘Memoji’ feature which lets you create a cartoon version of yourself…