Apple Officially Releases iOS 13 – Here Are the Top 11 Most Exciting New Features

After three months of beta testing for developers and public beta testers, Apple has now officially released iOS 13 to the public, bringing a nice collection of new features and improvements to all of Apple’s recent iPhone models.

To be clear, it’s been a strange year for iOS releases, and today’s release of iOS 13 doesn’t include all of the features that were announced back in June. A few significant but smaller features like ETA sharing in Maps and shortcuts automations have been pushed off to iOS 13.1, which has already been in beta testing since last month and is scheduled for release about two weeks from now. Several other features like AirPods audio sharing won’t be coming until iOS 13.2 later this fall.

Similarly, now that Apple has split off the iPad version of iOS into its own iPadOS, the latter has been put onto its own schedule. This means that iPad users will also have to wait until September 30th for the release of the next major release of iPadOS, although it’s not yet known whether Apple will call it iPadOS 13 or iPadOS 13.1. It will also be interesting to see if this is the first sign of a divergence between the two now-distinct operating systems.

Either way, however, this means that all we’ll be seeing today for iOS is an update for iPhone (and iPod touch) devices. Apple is also only including the iPhone 6s and later and the brand-new seventh-generation iPod touch released this year. For older devices, it looks like iOS 12.4.1 is the end of the line, although it’s possible we may still see one or two minor security updates for iOS 12 in the future.

So now that iOS 13 is out, what’s new and exciting? Read on for the coolest new features that we’ve been looking forward to in iOS 13.