Five key iOS 10 Features

The upcoming iOS 10 has sparked great interest among app developers owing to it’s rich, better-than-ever features. The beta version of iOS 10 SDK includes new APIs and services that will power a whole new generation of apps. You can now extend your app capabilities to Phone Messages, Siri, VoIP, Maps, Apple Pay and much more to provide enhanced functionalities and enjoyable experience to your users.

Here are a few great features you can add to your apps:
 

Notifications

 
With iOS 10 you can create rich, interactive, and powerful notification experiences for your apps. The users can not just view photos, and listen to audio, but they’ll also be able to watch videos from inside a notification, view live information such as map updates in real time. As demonstrated at the Worldwide Developers Conference, you can even use 3D Touch to open a notification and respond to it directly from the lock screen.
 

Siri

 
You can create apps with extensions that work with Siri. Users will be able to access content and services using just their voice. The extensions developed using the new SiriKit will support new services such as booking a ride, managing workouts and sending or receiving payments, along with existing features like audio or video calling, messaging, and searching photos.
Maps: Apps that offer ride booking, restaurant reservations, and other location-related services are accessible from within Maps, allowing users to book, track, and pay. The Maps even suggest relevant apps for services in a user’s current location.
 

VoIP

 
The CallKit framework lets VoIP apps integrate with the iPhone UI. The framework lets users view and answer incoming VoIP calls on the lock screen and manage contacts from VoIP calls. CallKit also introduces app extensions that enable call blocking and caller identification. You can create an app extension that can associate a phone number with a name or tell the system when a number should be blocked.
 

Apple Pay Enhancements

 
In iOS 10, users can make easy and secure payments using Apple Pay from websites and through interaction with Siri and Maps. For developers, iOS 10 introduces new APIs you can use in code that runs on both iOS and watchOS, the ability to support dynamic payment networks, and a new sandbox testing environment. The new APIs will help you incorporate Apple Pay directly into your website. When you support Apple Pay in your website, users browsing with Safari in iOS or OS X can make payments using their cards in Apple Pay on their iPhone or Apple Watch. iOS 10 also introduces a new testing environment that lets you provision test cards directly on the device. The test environment returns encrypted test payment data.
 

Speech Recognition

 
iOS 10 introduces a new API that supports continuous speech recognition. The Speech Recognition API allows you to build apps that recognise speech and transcribe it into text. Using the APIs in the Speech framework (Speech.framework), you can perform speech transcription of both real-time and recorded audio.

These are the key developer-related features introduced in iOS 10. There are some more like interesting ones like Interactive Messages App, App Search Enhancements, Widget Enhancements, found in What’s new in iOS 10.

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Here’s a quick video: