iOS 14.5 is the next version of iOS, and it’s almost here, as the company has confirmed that it will roll out from sometime next week the week starting April 26.
While it won’t be as big an update as iOS 15, which isn’t expected to land in finished form until September, it’s still set to add a bunch of new features and improvements.
We know this because iOS 14.5 is already in beta, so developers and members of the public have turned up all sorts of interesting additions. Some of these are handy upgrades, like an alternative to Face ID that lets you unlock your iPhone by wearing an Apple Watch.
Most interest will be the implementation of Apple’s new privacy features, which have caused so many companies to throw their toys far from their prams. The company said that it would add a card, asking users to consent to being tracked using IDFA (IDentification For Advertisers). This is, broadly speaking, a way for companies like Facebook to track what individual users are doing online.
This did not go down well with certain data-sucking companies, who didn’t want to give users any indiciation of what they were doing. The condemnation was so strong that, in September 2020, Apple announced that the measure would be pushed back to 2021. But, despite a fairly heavy PR campaign from Facebook, the feature is now rolling out as part of iOS 14.5.
One thing that has been reported across the internet is the belief that iOS 14.5 will allow you to select a default audio platform that isn’t Apple Music. Given the volume of people using Spotify and other services, that seemed like a good way for Apple to rebut criticism that it preferences its own products over others. Unfortunately, the company responded saying that while Siri can remember what music service you use, you can’t — apparently — set a third party app as your default.
Apple also pledged, as part of this update, to remove a filter that caught searches for “Asian” and flagged them as adult content within child-safe mode. This has been an issue since late-2019, and has gone unresolved until a beta distributed in March seemed to fix things. Naturally, it’s a bad look for a company to have slept on remedying this issue for so long, but making the change is very welcome.
