The main feature of iOS 17.2, arriving Monday, is the new Journal app, which provides a secure and encrypted way to write about the events of your daily life. It uses on-device processing to suggest locations, events, photos, music and more to complement your entries. It also includes a new Logging Suggestions API that allows developers to add “custom logging suggestions” to third-party logging apps.
But if you’re not interested in logging, you’ll still want to download iOS 17.2 right away. There aren’t any other really huge new features, but rather lots of small quality-of-life improvements spread across common apps and services.
Take Weather report, For example. Weather is easily one of the most popular home screen widgets, but you don’t have many options. With iOS 17.2, you get several other great options like next hour’s precipitation, daily forecast, current conditions, and sunrise/sunset times. There’s also a new wind map and lunar calendar, plus seeing actual precipitation amounts (not just percent chance) for any day in the 10-day forecast.
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Apple Music hasn’t received its planned collaborative playlists yet, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t received some nice additions. Instead of “liking” songs, you now “favorite” them. There’s a new Favorites playlist that also includes all the songs you’ve marked as favorites. And if you love listening to music to fall asleep to, study, or whatever, but are tired of all those highly focused tracks messing up your suggestions and history, Apple has added a Focus Filter for Apple Music that lets you allows you to turn off the music. history in this Focus mode.
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Are you tired of entering your weight, blood pressure, body fat, or anything else you track into the Health app every day? You don’t want to buy a fancy, expensive smart scale (with yet another app and poor battery life), so every day you open Healththen touch BrowseSO Body measurements Or Cycle trackingthen a category, then Add data…well, all that song and dance is disappearing in iOS 17.2. Now you can just tell Siri. You can even use your Apple Watch to do this when updating to watchOS 10.2. You can record your weight, menstrual cycle, body temperature, body fat, blood sugar, blood pressure, etc. And you can also ask Siri for data from the Health app, which is much faster than searching for it.
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Have you ever wondered why Apple Clock are the widgets all analog? U.S. too! And apparently everyone else did too, because Apple has now, for the first time (in one way or another), added a digital clock widget in iOS 17.2.
THE Action button is a handy feature of the iPhone 15 Pro, and you can now set it to Translate, where your iPhone will automatically listen and detect a spoken language, translating it to English (or your system’s default language).
Speaking of the iPhone 15 Pro (and Pro Max), auto focus now works faster when focusing on a small, distant object using the telephoto lens.
New messages The interface in iOS 17 is controversial to say the least. Apple has hidden all of iMessage’s functions behind a drop-down menu next to the text entry area, which frees up space but takes some getting used to. (Pro tip: You can drag items in the Messages menu to reorder them!) The new menu isn’t going anywhere, but iOS 17.2 adds some cool new features to make things easier, including a top-right arrow to go back backward. your first unread message in a thread, body shapes and poses on Memoji, and the ability to add a reaction sticker.
Oh, and you can now Airdrop things like movie tickets, boarding passes and other tickets/passes. It works with the “Hold the Top of Your iPhones Together” feature introduced in iOS 17.
In recent years, it has become clear that the latest version of iOS begins to shine after the dot-two version, and iOS 17.2 is no exception. Apple is certainly not finished – we’ll have new releases with important features over the next year – but iOS 17 is finally starting to get really polished.
