If you've used Microsoft productivity suites this millennium, you're in for a big change... visually, at least. After 15 years, Microsoft is replacing the default font in 365 and Office apps, Calibri, with something new: Aptos. It may look like a simple sans-serif font (and it is in default form), but Microsoft is betting that you'll like it thanks to its sheer flexibility.

Aptos works with many languages. There are four different font weights, and serif variants if you need something less hypermodern. Creator Steve Matteson (who made Windows' first TrueType fonts) waxes poetic about Aptos including a "little bit of humanity" and evoking the personalities of Carl Kasell and even Stephen Colbert, but the end result is a font that will theoretically be easy to read and eye-catching whether you're writing a school essay or prepping a company presentation.

Microsoft

The font has already been available as Bierstadt as part of a feedback gathering effort, but is rolling out as the default font in Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Word for hundreds of millions of people starting today. Everyone will see it within the next few months. It'll still be available under its old name, as will the four fonts that didn't make the cut (Grandview, Seaford, Skeena and Tenorite). Like Calibri, Aptos will be pinned to the top of the font picker but won't be mandatory.

Yes, it's just a font — like those redesigned Office icons from 2018, Aptos will have zero impact on your ability to get things done. As one of the most noticeable elements of any app, though, the new default font will change the look and feel of tools you might use every day. And like Apple's San Francisco font, it reflects an evolving technological landscape where a typeface has to be le on a wide range of devices and screen sizes.

Meta’s Twitter rival, Threads, has unquestionably had the best first-week imaginable. After immediately racing to the top of app store charts, it became the fastest growing app of all time. In just five days, it grew to more than 100 million users, beating out chatGPT and TikTok which both previously held the record.

That’s even more impressive considering the app isn’t available in the European Union, one of Meta’s most important markets. And while Threads clearly borrowed some moves from Meta’s growth-hacking playbook, like sending would-be users notifications on Instagram and pre-populating their feeds with content and followers, Mark Zuckerberg called most of the early growth “organic.”

“That's mostly organic demand and we haven't even turned on many promotions yet,” he wrote in a celebratory post on Threads. However you spin it, it's clearly bad news for Twitter.

While it’s too soon to know if Threads’ early success will translate in the long term, it has succeeded in utterly dominating Twitter in its first week. Every available metric suggests that Threads is not just a viral hit in its own right, but is doing so at the direct expense of Twitter.

Just days after Threads launched, Matthew Prince, CEO of DNS service Cloudflare, said that Twitter’s traffic was “tanking.” He shared a graph showing that visits to twitter.com had sharply dipped since the end of June, around the time Elon Musk began restricting how many tweets users could view, and a few days later when Threads launched.

Data from analytics firm SimilarWeb suggests the same pattern. According to the company, traffic to twitter.com dipped 5 percent in the two days following Threads' launch, compared with the same period the previous week. The firm notes that this is in addition to an “overall decline” in traffic that predates Threads.

There are other signs that Threads may be succeeding in luring away current Twitter users. A recent poll from Ipsos found that 58% of American Twitter users said they were likely to try, or have already tried, Threads.. And 46% of American Twitter users said they were “likely to move or have already moved the activity they used to do on Twitter to Threads.”

It’s worth noting that these are all very early metrics. Early virality for an app doesn’t necessarily equate to long-term success or sustained growth. Google+ was once praised for “meteoric” growth when it hit 100 million users less than a year after its launch more than a decade ago. In the more recent past, social audio app Clubhouse was heralded as a sensation when it grew to a few million users in its first months of existence. Both eventually fizzled out. 

And there are signs that Twitter does have a core group of dedicated, blue-checkmark-buying users. The same Ipsos poll found that more than half of American Twitter users were uninterested in migrating to Threads, at least in the near term. And data recently released by app analytics firm Sensor Tower suggests that Twitter’s engagement held steady in the days following Threads’ launch, while average time spent in Threads actually dipped.

Elon Musk and newly-installed Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino seem eager to bolster this narrative. The two touted their own — somewhat dubious — metric following Threads' launch, claiming that the same week saw the “largest usage day since February” on the platform. “Cumulative user-seconds per day of phone screentime, as reported by iOS & Android, is hardest to game,” Musk wrote. (It’s unclear how he was measuring “cumulative user-seconds” of screen time as neither Apple or Google report screen time metrics to app developers.)

Twitter’s leadership has more than enough reason to be rattled by Threads’ overnight success. While a wave of Twitter alternatives has cropped up in the wake of Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter, none have come even close to 100 million. Mastodon, its most entrenched rival, reports 2 million monthly users. Bluesky, the much-hyped invite-only service, has about 300,000 sign-ups. 

Even more importantly, Threads has succeeded in nabbing a key demographic many of its predecessors haven’t: brands. Threads has been an all-out brands bonanza. And as much as that’s made for cringey, milquetoast content on the app, it’s very, very good for Meta. For now, brands are getting the kind of organic engagement most social media managers only dream about. As Website Plant recently pointed out in a report, big brands are attracting significantly more engagement on Threads, compared with Twitter. This is true even for brands that have far more followers on Twitter than on Threads.

According to the report, 87% of brands got more likes on Threads posts than on Twitter. “The vast majority of the posts we went through generated significantly higher engagement on the new platform — no matter if the content itself was the same as on Twitter,” the company wrote.

Again, these are early stats. It’s entirely possible that users on Threads are engaging more with brands simply because that what was shoved into their feeds, not because Meta somehow made the content more appealing. But that kind of early engagement will certainly make brands more willing to give Meta ad dollars whenever they do open advertising on the platform.

Zuckerberg has said the company won’t introduce ads to Threads until there’s a “clear path to 1 billion people” on the app. But that doesn’t mean Threads will be ad-free for long. According to Axios, the company has already begun to work on branded content tools for the service, and “is working to quickly make them available.” It should come as no surprise, then, that Wall Street analysts are also enthused about Threads’ prospects. The week-old platform could add up to $8 billion in revenue for Meta by 2025, according to an estimate from one analyst, reported by Bloomberg.

All this is especially bleak for Musk and Twitter, which is facing a financial outlook so dire the company has stopped paying numerous bills. According to a report from The New York Timeslast month, Twitter’s ad sales — its primary source of revenue — have plummeted 59% compared with last year, with performance “unlikely to improve anytime soon.” And, now, Meta has swooped in, pretty much overnight, with a huge new platform poised to gobble up Twitter’s missing ad dollars and then some.

While this likely brings some satisfaction to Musk and Twitter’s biggest critics, it’s worth noting that there are significant implications to an online ecosystem where yet another Meta-owned platform dominates its closest rivals. Meta, and Instagram specifically, has very different norms and standards about what kind of speech is acceptable on its service. And there are still more questions than answers about Meta’s plans to integrate Threads into the broader Fediverse.

But it’s impossible to ignore just how much momentum Threads has gained in its first week, and how much of it has come at the direct expense of Twitter.

Apple just launched its iOS 17 public beta, meaning you can test out the latest iPhone software if you’re willing to live with a bug or two. I’ve been using iPhone 14 Pro with the developer beta for the last few weeks and there are plenty of features and upgrades to dig into. While some of the more exciting features weren’t available until mere days ago, some nice quality-of-life improvements are here from the get-go. If you’re intrigued by Apple’s new Journal app, though, I’m afraid that won’t arrive until later in the year.

But if you want machine learning to transcribe your friends' voice notes, or turn your iPhone into a smart display, then you might be willing to dip your toe into the public beta. You can access the iOS preview by enrolling on Apple’s website, which will nudge the beta to your iPhone’s Software Update section. As always, remember to back up your iPhone first and ensure it’s compatible. (iOS 17 will work on 2018’s iPhone XS and newer devices.)

A note on Developer betas

This year, instead of releasing the iOS 17 public beta in July, Apple released its developer beta for iOS, iPadOS and macOS Sonoma for anyone with free developer accounts. Normally, to access betas right after the WWDC keynote you’d have to pay $100 a year for a paid developer account. This means anyone (yes, even you) could have dabbled with this early build starting in early June. Not that we’d advise doing that. Early releases of iOS, including its public beta that’s out now, are often rough around the edges, while apps are prone to restarting or not working as they should on Apple’s very latest mobile OS. The developer version is that, times five.

Messages and FaceTime

Photo taken by Mat Smith / Engadget

Apple continues tugging me toward Messages, yet I’m stuck with WhatsApp because all of my friends and family are on it — even those with iPhones. iOS continues to make being a WhatsApp user a challenging decision to stick with.

I’m already in love with audio message transcription. The next time that certain friend leaves a lengthy 12-minute monologue, the iPhone’s machine learning tricks will auto-transcribe the contents of that voice note, audio quality (and accent) permitting. In my experience, it was accurate with both my British voice and my colleague Cherlynn’s American accent.

Photo by Mat Smith / Engadget

Most of Messages’ biggest upgrades are siloed away behind the plus button, which helps keep the interface tidy. Check-In is Apple’s take on automating the “text me when you get home,” doing half the work once your iPhone detects you’ve returned. If your phone detects that you’re not headed in the right direction, Check In will even notify you that you might have made a mistake.

Apple has integrated a lot of settings to make Check In work how you want it to. You can use it when your destination isn’t your home, or even set it up for a timed period when perhaps you’re home alone, but are expecting visitors. More information from your phone can be shared when you're delayed, including battery levels and signal levels.

Apple has now consolidated its stickers into one drawer, encompassing live stickers, memoji, emoji and third-party stickers. Live Stickers, which you can make by tapping to ‘lift’ subjects out of photos (it can still be a person, a pet or an object, as long as it’s visually distinct enough), get archived in their own sticker drawer. With iOS 17, you can also apply some sticker effects, like “shiny” and “puffy” that undulate when you move your phone, taking us back to pencil cases of the ‘90s. Or maybe that’s just me. Beyond Messages, stickers can be applied directly from the sticker drawer to your photos and documents.

FaceTime has received a few updates this year, but the most notable one is video voicemail. While you could send videos on Messages, you can now leave spontaneous video (or voice) messages in FaceTime when someone doesn’t pick up your call. In iOS 17, thanks to further refinement of Apple’s Continuity Camera, across Apple devices. You can now display your FaceTime video calls on Apple TV, tapping into the cameras already in your iPhones, iPads or MacBooks. Any recorded messages you receive will be stored in FaceTime’s Recent tab, along with your missed calls. You can even take FaceTime calls — audio-only — on your Apple Watch.

You can record FaceTime video messages through both the front and rear cameras and amp up the visual pizazz with Portrait mode and Studio Light. Apple has opened up these video effects to Zoom, Microsoft Teams and more. Gesture-based AR effects are along for the ride too, including fireworks (two thumbs up), confetti cannons (double peace signs) and when you make a devil horn sign? Laser beams. Of… course. I soon learned you’ll have to hold these poses for a little too long in order for your iPhone to recognize and trigger the AR effect. It’s a delight when they happen, though.

StandBy

Photo by Mat Smith / Engadget

Apple hasn’t launched a smart display (yet), so it’s making your iPhone into one. With StandBy, you'll get a different view when your phone is horizontal and charging. This consists of widgets, calendar info, music, your photos, news, sports scores and more. If you have an iPhone 14 Pro, it’ll always be visible due to the always-on display. You’ll have to tap to wake it on other devices.

Itl even transitions into a low-light smart display later at night so you can use it as an alarm clock. Given the strides Apple has made with its widgets on iPhones and Apple Watch, I’m intrigued to see whether this is a useful new feature for when I’m not actively using my iPhone. I’ve loved seeing my photos on my Nest Hub, but let’s be honest – I’m looking at, and nearer to, my phone, pretty much most of the day. The iPhone will automatically separate your photos into places (and its own photography) and people recognized in your own contacts. You’ll also get music and podcast controls for audio playback, which looks a lot like CarPlay.

Apple has folded its Smart Stacks into these StandBy widgets, so you can swipe between smart home controls, calendars, weather and more, customizing what information is a swipe away. Incoming calls will also feature a nice landscape version of iOS 17’s new Contact Posters.

Contact Posters

Photo by Mat Smith / Engadget

Contact Posters are the most significant visual upgrade to iOS 17. It’s a new way to show your contact’s incoming calls, contact profiles, FaceTime and Messages. You can edit your profile from the top left corner of most of those native apps, mixing together different fonts, photos, and color options – I like the monochrome photo filter paired with a pop of color, like it’s a fictional magazine profile headshot. There are almost infinite options here, and it does help to make calls from your favorite people seem, somehow, more glamorous. You don’t have to have taken photos in portrait mode either to make the cutout outline of your head and name; as long as the iPhone detects the object, like stickers, it’ll do the rest.

NameDrop

This has been a long-time coming, right? NameDrop, using the same AirDrop transferring tech, can share your contact details (and your gorgeous new Contact Poster) just by bringing two devices close together. You can fine-tune what contact details are shared, like your work or personal email, or even choose to receive only. Photos and even links on Safari can also be shared through this method, and AirDrop will even continue transferring content even if you step away, through the internet. This is all done through the usual share button on both native and compatible third-party apps.

Everything else

If you recall from Apple’s WWDC keynote last month, these are just some of the major highlights of what iOS 17 has to offer. Apple says its enhanced keyboard language model ushers in an improved Autocorrect, while any corrections should also be easier to fix. Any autocorrected words are temporarily underlined so you know what was changed. If you tap on an autocorrected word, you’ll see the original version pop up and you can tap it to put it back. Duck yes.

Regarding voice assistant Siri, it can now handle back-to-back commands if you want to both set a timer and turn off a smart light. Siri can also be summoned even while you’re on a call with someone.

The Fitness app now has a trophy case to show off your best workout runs, custom workout plans if you pay for Fitness+ and the ability to adjust the sound mix of workouts, prioritizing either music or trainers’ voices. Meanwhile, News+ subscribers will now be able to tackle crosswords, while News+ audio stories will now also be available in the podcast app.

Photo taken by Mat Smith / Engadget

Inline predictive text, a la Gmail, is also built in, so iOS will occasionally nudge your messages along with predictive single- and multi-word additions before you even type them. Thankfully, it’s a very light touch so far. Then again, maybe it’s just learning how I type – I’ll circle back once the OS officially launches in the fall. And you can turn it off in settings if it’s not working for you.

What’s still to come

The iOS 17 beta gives you a taste of what’s coming to your iPhone later this year. There are a few tempting features not available to test just yet. That includes the third-party journaling app killer, Apple’s own Journal app,. Where you can “write about and reflect on everyday moments and special events in your life.” The company says it’ll tap into on-device machine learning to personalize what you might like to write about, including photos, locations, music and even workout data. I’m waiting to see how it all works in practice. And if you’re going to be writing about your deepest, darkest thoughts and feelings, you will be able to lock your Journal from prying eyes.

There are other features I’m still waiting to try, including new auto-generated song suggestions for your own existing playlists and Conversation Awareness, which is coming to second-generation AirPods Pro. When you start talking to someone while still wearing your buds, the device will lower playback volume and enhance the voice of people in front of you, while still minimizing background noise.

Wrap-up

Photo by Mat Smith / Engadget

Yes, there are still a few mysteries to iOS 17 ahead of its full launch, but plenty to test out in the beta. I’m still getting to grips with StandBy. It might not be a smart display killer, but it’s possibly a free alternative. Other highlights include a revitalized FaceTime experience, a streamlined Messages app and a long-overdue solution for sharing contact details. But some of the most exciting parts are still to come, making this a less essential beta than some recent years. Most of us can wait for the fully-formed public release, arriving later this summer.

The immensely popular online game creation platform/thingamajig Roblox is coming to VR, thanks to the Meta Quest platform. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement, which was followed by an official Roblox blog post. A beta version of the app launches in just a few weeks, according to Zuckerberg, which will be accessible via the Quest platform’s dedicated App Lab.

The beta will be available for the Quest 2 and Quest Pro headsets, so OG Quest owners are out of luck. The recently-announced Quest 3 wasn’t mentioned, but that’s likely because it won’t be out in time for the beta release. A finished version of the game, however, would make for an extremely compelling launch title for the Quest 3, as Roblox boasts more than 66 million daily users across multiple platforms.

To that end, this is going to be a fully cross-platform title, so anything you interact with or make on your phone or console should be accessible in VR, though it depends on the developer. The Roblox team is actively encouraging developers to make experiences in VR with a forthcoming toolset accessible via the Creator Dashboard. You’ll soon see VR as a new device type on this dashboard, along with desktop, mobile, tablet and console.

Meta recently lowered the minimum age to operate a Quest headset from 13 to ten, but this change will not impact Roblox. You have to be at least 13 to use the app in VR. That’s probably for the best, given the addictive nature of the title and associated child safety concerns.

Just a year ago, Apple announced the biggest software update the iPad has ever seen. iPadOS 16 ushered in Stage Manager, a completely revamped multitasking mode that brought overlapping, resizable windows to the iPad, along with robust external display support (provided you had compatible hardware).

There were a host of other new features, as usual, but Stage Manager in particular brought the iPad closer than ever to a Mac or Windows PC experience. iPadOS 17, on the other hand, is a more subtle update. That’s usually the case, with one year bringing big new features and the next offering tweaks and stability improvements. And while there isn’t one singular headline feature in iPadOS 17, the totality of myriad smaller changes definitely adds up. I’ve been using iPadOS 17 in beta for a few weeks, and now that the public beta is live, you can do the same.

A note on stability: Even though this is a public beta, the “beta” still applies. It’s probably not ideal to install on a machine you rely on for daily use, as you’ll surely run into some bugs and crashes. And it’s always a bit of a crapshoot how well third-party apps work on a beta. All that said, I haven’t run into anything particularly severe. Occasionally, an app will just toss me back to the Home Screen, or you might find some weird UI issues where apps haven’t quite been optimized yet. But over the last few years, Apple has gained a reputation for releasing public betas in solid, usable states, and that’s the case here as well. Just remember that “downgrading” to iPadOS 16 final releases isn’t exactly a simple process.

Stage Manager updates

While Stage Manager opened up some major new multitasking features for the iPad, it was also a lot more rigid than the windows management system you’d find on a Mac. This year, Apple has tweaked things to make it easier to set up your ideal workspace. Previously, apps would snap to a handful of predetermined sizes to fit your display, and the specific placement of each individual window was up to iPadOS to decide. Now, app windows have a lot more granularity in how you can size and place them. For example, I can make the Notes app that I’m typing into right now a tiny window half of my screen’s height and about a quarter of its width. From there, I can make it as tall or wide as I want; there are still specific sizes that it snaps to, but there’s far more flexibility than there was last year.

iPadOS 17 is also a lot more flexible about how you arrange multiple apps, something that wasn’t the case last year. When you added a second app to a space, iPadOS automatically decided where the two windows should go. You could resize them both as you wanted, but it was basically impossible to show two apps side-by-side without any overlap, for example. That’s no longer the case. Now, it’s a simple matter of grabbing the top of a window and dropping it where you want.

These basic controls have been available on Windows and macOS for decades, but it’s still a new paradigm for the iPad. I’m definitely glad that Apple seems to be trusting its users more by giving them more flexibility rather than letting iPadOS make major decisions about how you lay out your screen. Stage Manager is still somewhat of a niche feature, given that lots of iPads can’t run it, but people who want to push their iPads further will definitely appreciate these updates.

Lock Screen and interactive widgets

Probably the most obvious user-facing update is the revamped Lock Screen. It should also be very familiar, because Apple first introduced it on the iPhone a year ago. Basically, you can now set up multiple lock screens, each with its own wallpaper, widgets and design elements (like fonts and color filters). To jump between different styles you’ve set up, you can just press and hold on the Lock Screen and then choose what suits you. Finally, you can also set a specific Focus setting for each Lock Screen, so you can set up a whole profile for work mode or vacation time.

There’s also a great new wallpaper picker – this, too, borrowed from the iPhone. There are some new styles here specifically for the iPad, though, including striking views of every planet in the solar system stem. And in a nod to the iPad’s history, they brought back the original Pyramid Lake wallpaper (shot by photographer Richard Misrach) from the first iPad back in 2010. I’m a sucker for nostalgia and love the photo, so Apple won me over here.

Beyond the aesthetics, having widgets on the Lock Screen makes the iPad’s large display more useful — there’s a ton of space, so why not show more than just the time and your notifications? But widgets are getting a big improvement beyond just being able to drop them on the Lock Screen. At long last, they’re interactive. That means if you have a Reminders widget, you can tap a specific item to check it off without having to open the app. Or, with the Apple Music widget, you can automatically start playing an album or playlist.

Previously, widgets let you tap specific parts to jump to that place in the app, so they weren’t just static information displays, but this takes their functionality a lot further. We’re going to need third-party developers to add this functionality to their widgets to really take full advantage of the feature, but I’m looking forward to seeing how apps incorporate it when iPadOS 17 is out in the wild.

Health

There aren’t many Apple apps on the iPhone that you can’t also get on the iPad. Health was one, but that’s been remedied this year. It’s just what you’d expect: Health data tracked from your iPhone and Apple Watch is available for you to review on the iPad, with a design that’s better suited to the larger screen. While there’s nothing revolutionary here, the Health app can include so much data that it’s actually a bit easier to dig through everything here.

Everything syncs from your iPhone, but so far that sync process hasn’t been the most reliable. Even though the Health app on my iPad says it synced two minutes ago, it hasn't pulled in updated steps data since 7AM this morning. My activity rings from my Apple Watch are similarly hours out of date. I wager this will get settled before iPadOS 17 is finished, though.

Apple announced a handful of features relating to mental health as part of the latest iPad and iOS updates, including a dedicated journaling app and mood trackers in the health app. While the journal app isn’t coming until “later this year,” sometime after iPadOS 17 and iOS 17 officially launch, the mood tracking features are available in the Health app. I’ve long been in the habit of tracking my daily mood, and this isn’t a bad place to do it. It’s pretty simple, with a slider to pick your overall mood and a few follow-up questions, but the idea is for it to be quick and painless so you do it repeatedly. There’s also a mental health questionnaire you can take that claims to assess your anxiety and depression levels that reminds me of questions I’ve answered from a doctor in the past. I did reach out to Apple to find out where they’re sourcing this set of questions from so we can know more about their validity and approach.

Safari, Messages, Notes and more

As always, Apple’s core apps are getting lots of little but potentially meaningful updates. Safari’s biggest new feature is arguably the ability to set up multiple profiles. Each profile can access all your bookmarks, saved passwords and reading list, but it keeps things like logins to sites and tab groups separate. I did the basic “personal and work” profiles, with logins to work-specific tools kept separate. It’s also pretty easy to move things between profiles if you accidentally open windows in your personal profile that you’d rather have with your work tabs. And, of course, this all syncs via iCloud to other devices — I have the macOS Sonoma beta installed as well, and things were shared seamlessly.

Messages is possibly Apple’s most important app, and every year it gets usability tweaks and new features. A bunch of those are focused around audio messages, which I haven’t really had a chance to check out much. One thing I do like, though, is that replying in a thread is a lot easier than it used to be. Now, swiping right on a message opens the reply interface, which is definitely quicker than holding down on a message, waiting for the menu to pop up and selecting the “reply” option.

The search experience has also been upgraded with filters. For example, you can first search for a specific contact, and then search just their conversation for keywords. The results naturally include specific messages as well as relevant links, images and more.

But the update I’ve had the most fun with so far is definitely Stickers. You can now easily create your own stickers from images in your photo gallery. If you tap on a subject in a photo, you can pull it out from the background and save it as a sticker, so you can easily use it again. Live Photos can be turned into live stickers — and let me tell you, the live sticker I made of my dog laying down is adorable and I will spam everyone with it.

Your own stickers can live alongside sticker packs from other apps, emoji and Memoji. And the stickers you’ve created will be available to use in third-party apps, as well. Basically, stickers you create as well as those from apps should be easier to share outside of just Apple’s Messages app, which is a nice change from the previously walled-off approach Apple took.

Notes, quietly one of Apple’s most useful apps, has gotten more improvements this year too. You can now embed PDFs right into a Notes doc and they display full-width, so you can easily browse through a PDF and make notes on it below. You can also naturally mark it up with an Apple Pencil or collaborate on it in a note shared with other people.

PDF support system-wide has been improved. For example, opening a PDF document from the Files app will open it in its own window, provided you’re running Stage Manager. This makes it easier to put a PDF side-by-side with another app while still having full access to the Files app. Auto-filling fields in PDFs has also been improved system-wide; Apple says it’s using an on-device neural network to identify documents that have fields that need to be filled in across the system, and you’ll be able to AutoFill details like names and addresses the same way you can on websites.

Another useful trick is the ability to link directly to a specific note in your library. Other note-taking apps like Bear have had this feature for a while, but it’s undeniably handy to link related notes together so you can easily jump between them instead of having to go back to the sidebar and search for the one you’re looking for.

The rest

This just scratches the surface of iPadOS 17. Lots of new features, like the changes to Messages, work best when other people you know are also running the new software. And other things, like the journal app, won’t be available to try for months to come. Finally, there are plenty of iOS 17 features like Facetime updates and a smarter keyboard will be in iPadOS 17 as well. If you want to give this all a shot months before Apple finalizes everything, you can install the iPadOS 17 public beta now. But as always, think hard about whether you’re up for some instability before you take the plunge.

Gone are the days when you contort yourself to try the latest iOS version before its official debut. Apple has released the iOS 17 public beta, and it’s easy to install the preview on your iPhone. So long as you know what you’re getting into, you can explore major features months before the finished software arrives this fall. These instructions should also work for the iPadOS 17 beta, too.

Before you start: iOS 17 beta requirements and risks

Apple

To begin, you’ll need to be sure your hardware supports iOS 17. Apple requires at least a 2018 or newer iPhone, including the XR, XS and second-generation SE. Notably, this release ends support for the iPhone 8 and X — if you own one of these older models, you’ll simply have to buy a new handset to run the updated platform.

The iPadOS 17 public beta clearly has different requirements. You’ll need at least a sixth-generation iPad, third-generation iPad Air, fifth-generation iPad mini, the 10.5-inch iPad Pro, any 11-inch iPad Pro or the second-generation 12.9-inch iPad Pro.

Whatever you’re installing, remember that this is pre-release code. The iOS 17 public beta is better-suited to everyday use than earlier developer versions, but you may still run into bugs, odd behavior or app compatibility issues. You’ll want to wait for the finished software if your phone has apps or data you simply can’t afford to lose. If you’re willing to accept the risks, it’s still a very good idea to backup your data through iTunes or a cloud service (such as iCloud) in case you need to restore your phone at some stage.

How to install the iOS 17 public beta

Apple

Be sure you’ve updated to iOS 16.4 or newer, as you’ll need it to walk through the public beta installation process. You can upgrade through the Settings app, choosing General, and then tapping Software Update. This screen will also tell you which version you’re running.

Once ready, you’ll want to sign up for the Apple Beta Software Program using the Safari web browser on your iPhone. Membership is free; you’ll need to log in using the main Apple ID you use on your phone and enroll that device in the program. Follow prompts, and be sure to read the agreement when it appears.

After that, installing the iOS 17 test is almost as simple as installing ordinary updates. You just have to visit Settings, tap General, tap Software Update and then select a new Beta Updates item underneath Automatic Updates. Be sure that the Apple ID displayed at the bottom is the one you used to join the beta program. You should see the option to install “iOS 17 Public Beta” from that screen. Go back one screen and you should get an offer to download and install the beta.

As with any other iOS upgrade, the installation may take a few minutes to complete and will involve restarts. At the end, the beta will add a Feedback Assistant app to your home screen that helps report bugs.

What you do (and don’t) get with the iOS 17 public beta

Apple

Apple revealed many of iOS 17’s features at the WWDC 2023 keynote in June. However, not all of those elements will be available in the public beta.

Most improvements are intact. Notably, there’s a redesigned phone experience that includes custom contact cards and live voicemail transcripts. A Messages app revamp includes a new sticker interface, simpler replies, audio message transcripts and location-based check-ins. Sharing is easier as well. You can share content just by bringing iPhones close together, and you can now share contacts. The keyboard has improved autocorrection, predictions and voice dictation. You can document your mood in the Health app, and StandBy turns your iPhone into an ad hoc smart display.

However, a few features won’t be present until after iOS 17 arrives. The life-logging Journal app isn’t in the public beta. You’ll also have to wait for AirDrop transfers that continue over the internet, and collaborative Apple Music playlists aren’t yet ready. We’d also expect Apple to make minor interface tweaks and additions in later revisions, and it won’t be surprising if one or two iOS 17 features will only be announced alongside future iPhones that use them.

There's something exciting about trying out new versions of an operating system, especially when it's a test build. Suddenly a device you've gotten to know well becomes fresh again and useful (or at the very least entertaining) in all new ways. Now is that time for eager Apple users, with the company's iOS 17, iPadOS 17, watchOS 10 and macOS Sonoma public betas finally available to download.

The new iOS 17 will include a slew of updates from design to practical. You can customize what people see when you call them — whether it's a cute cartoon or your favorite selfie, put the call to voicemail with a live transcription across your screen and send someone a video or audio message if they don't pick up your FaceTime call. Plus, you can mute and unmute yourself right from your AirPods. "Ducking" should also be a thing of the past on iOS 17 with an improved autocorrect and you can utilize sentence predictions for quicker responses. Additional features include automatically checking in to let your friends know you've arrived home, locating real-time charging stations along your route on Maps and the ability to say how you're feeling on the Health app (so and so is pleasant does feel very early Facebook days).

iPadOS 17 is, to a degree, a catch-up release that adds a customizable lock screen, the Health app and interactive widgets. WatchOS 10 is a substantial Apple Watch revamp that revives the emphasis on widgets while overhauling core apps and improving fitness features. MacOS Sonoma, meanwhile, brings widgets to the Mac desktop while upgrading Safari, video calls and gaming.

Apple first announced these upgrades at its Worldwide Developers Conference and subsequently released the iOS 17, iPadOS 17 and macOS Sonoma betas for developers. Unlike in previous years, though, the developer betas were available free for anyone to try — developer accounts typically cost about $100 per year. The iOS 17 public beta should be a bit more polished than the developer builds, given the extra time to work out bugs and compatibility problems. The official versions will launch this fall, but you can sign up for the Apple Beta Software Program if you want to try the previews now.

Proton, which is best known for its end-to-end encrypted email service, is launching its cloud-based storage solution on Windows starting today. Up until now, Proton’s Drive service was available via the web and on mobile via its iOS and Android apps. The company rebranded itself last year from ProtonMail to just Proton, an indicator that it has ambitions beyond just email. Earlier this year, the company also launched a password manager.

The key difference between Proton Drive and other cloud-based storage options is that it will offer free, encrypted file storage by default. The service will also offer all of the essentials such as multi-device syncing, offline downloads and version history. Proton says that it saw beta Windows users upload five times more data than its mobile and web app users combined. It says that over 65 percent of its overall users access the service from a Windows device, which probably explains why a Windows app came before a Mac one. Proton claims that all files are encrypted before they’re uploaded to its servers so “not even Proton can access these files.”

Proton

For $12.99 per month or $119.88 per year, users gain access to unlimited email, 500GB of total storage, and access to the company’s VPN, password manager and calendar services. The company also has a family sharing option for up to six users that gets you 3TB of storage for $29.99 per month or $287.88 per year. For those that don’t need the extra storage or all the extra bells and whistles, Proton offers a $4.99 per month or $47.88 per year option for 200GB of storage, while a free tier that gets you up to 1GB. All paid plans have additional savings if you decide to pay for two years upfront.

With today’s announcement, Proton Drive now has native applications on Windows, iOS and Android. The company says that a native Mac application is coming soon, though it seems to have missed its plans to offer early access in the first half of 2023.

Tumblr could be the latest platform to borrow from TikTok’s playbook. The company is planning a major revamp of its platform that will bring algorithmic recommendations to users’ feeds, according to a memo published on the Tumblr Staff blog.

The memo is notably frank about the reasons for the upcoming changes and what it describes as Tumblr’s current shortcomings. “The underlying problem is that Tumblr is not easy to use,” the company writes. “Being a 15-year-old brand is tough because the brand carries the baggage of a person’s preconceived impressions of Tumblr.”

While Tumblr doesn’t provide exact details about new features, it offers some pretty big hints about what’s to come. The company says that one of its primary goals will be to “deliver great content each time the app is opened” and refers to its current “following” feed as “outdated.”

To address this, the Automattic-owned platform says it’s working to “improve our algorithmic ranking capabilities across all feeds” and “make it easier for users to understand where the vibrant communities on Tumblr are.” The company also notes that building more creator-friendly features, including improvements to the way replies and reblogs work, will also be key to attracting new users.

“Being a new creator on Tumblr can be intimidating, with a high likelihood of leaving or disappointment upon sharing creations without receiving engagement or feedback,” the company writes. “The lack of feedback stems from the outdated decision to only show content from followed blogs on the main dashboard feed (“Following”), perpetuating a cycle where popular blogs continue to gain more visibility at the expense of helping new creators.”

Taken together, the changes Tumblr is describing sound a lot like TikTok (or even Instagram): algorithmic recommendations in users’ primary feeds, creator-friendly features that encourage sharing, and more streamlined commenting and conversation tools. As a strategy, that all may sound pretty straightforward in 2023, when users increasingly expect these kinds of features from social platforms anyway. But considering Tumblr’s core interface hasn’t changed that much in its decade and a half of existence, the new direction could bring significant changes to the overall dynamics of the platform.

The coming redesign isn’t the only way Automatic has tried to breathe new life into the platform it acquired in 2019. The company has also experimented with subscriptions and other paid features, introducing Post+ in 2021, though there was some backlash against the feature from longtime users. More recently, the company began selling “completely useless” checkmarks to users soon after Elon Musk’s botched rollout of Twitter’s new paid verification.

Meta's Twitter competitor is off to a flying start. Within just four days of the app going live on Wednesday evening, Threads already has more than 100 million users according Quiver Quantitative's Threads Tracker. It helps that Thread is a sibling app to Instagram and it's easy for the image-sharing platform's billion-plus users to sign up — unless they live in the European Union, where it's not yet available.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's CEO, has provided several updates on Threads' user numbers. The app had 10 million users in the first seven hours and more than 30 million by Thursday morning. Around 24 hours later, that figure had more than doubled. 

It’s very, very early days for Threads, as the app is missing basic features that many users see as essential. It has minimal accessibility options at the minute, with no way to append alt text to an image for those who use screen readers. Search is limited to usernames, there’s no hashtag support and you can't post to Threads from the web.

Perhaps most gallingly of all, Threads doesn’t yet have a chronological feed of posts. The algorithmic feed is full of brands, influencers and celebrities, making it difficult for users to keep up with what friends and family are posting. A chronological feed is on the way, but Twitter may still be many people's app of choice for up-to-the-minute news.

"Politics and hard news are inevitably going to show up on Threads — they have on Instagram as well to some extent — but we're not going to do anything to encourage those verticals," Instagram head Adam Mosseri wrote, noting that the aim of Threads isn't to replace Twitter.

"Politics and hard news are important, I don't want to imply otherwise," Mosseri added. "But my take is, from a platform's perspective, any incremental engagement or revenue they might drive is not at all worth the scrutiny, negativity (let's be honest), or integrity risks that come along with them. There are more than enough amazing communities — sports, music, fashion, beauty, entertainment, etc — to make a vibrant platform without needing to get into politics or hard news."

Quiver Quantitative's Threads Tracker uses data taken from Instagram users' profiles, according to the person who built the tool, co-founder Christopher Kardatzke. "By viewing the profiles of people who joined the platform, I can see where they were in line and get a general idea of how many users have signed up," he said. He added that the estimates appear to line up with Zuckerberg's Threads posts about user milestones.