iOS 17.1 Has 22 New Features and Changes for iPhone You Won’t Want to Miss « iOS & iPhone :: Gadget Hacks

In addition to the new song suggestions at the bottom of each playlist in Music, there’s a new “+ Add Music” button as the last “track” in the playlist. Tap that, and the search window will open. You can type to search, browse, or choose from the Suggested Songs, From Replay, or Recently Played recommendations.

Before iOS 17.1, you could only favorite artists in the Music app, but now you can also favorite songs, albums, and playlists. These new favoriting options replace the old “Love” system. There are numerous ways to favorite something in Music, including but not limited to:

• Long-press an artist, song, album, or playlist from any list view, and then select “Favorite.”
• Tap the star next to a song in the Now Playing full-screen view.
• Tap the ellipsis (•••) next to a song in the Now Playing full-screen view, and then select “Favorite.”
• Tap the star at the top of an artist’s page.
• Tap the ellipsis (•••) at the top of an artist, album, or playlist page, and then select “Favorite.”
• Tap the star next to a song on the Now Playing activity on your Lock Screen, Dynamic Island, Notification Center, or Control Center.

Since you can now favorite songs, albums, and playlists in the Music app in addition to artists, you need a way to find them. The iOS 17.1 update provides a way to see just favorited media in your library via the Artist, Albums, Songs, and Playlists collections in the Library tab. Tap the Filter button at the top, then narrow the results by “Favorited.”

For custom playlists in the Music app, cover images were always limited to auto-generated album grids or custom images from Photos or Camera. With iOS 17.1, Apple gives a cover art collection with various colored designs that “change colors to reflect the music in your playlist,” according to Apple.

With iOS 17.0 or later, AirDrop lets you initiate sharing or a SharePlay session when you bring your iPhone close to another. It also lets you exchange contact info in the same way with NameDrop. Another highly anticipated AirDrop feature that wasn’t included with the others is finally here with the iOS 17.1 update, and it lets file transfers continue over the internet in full quality when you’re no longer in range.

There’s no option to turn off out-of-range AirDropping, but you can go to Settings –> General –> AirDrop and toggle off “Use Cellular Data” if you don’t want to continue transfers over wireless data. That means you’ll need to be connected to Wi-Fi to continue transfers out of range.

On iOS 17.1, StandBy has fine-tuned Always On controls for the iPhone 14 Pro, 14 Pro Max, 15 Pro, and 15 Pro Max. Instead of enabling or disabling Always On and that’s it, you can open the new “Display” menu to turn your display off automatically, after 20 seconds, or never. Apple says, “When set to automatically, the display will intelligently turn off when iPhone is not in use and the room is dark.”

Those who like the Photo Shuffle wallpaper for the Lock Screen will be glad to know that iOS 17.1 adds an option to choose from any of your albums. It defaults to the Favorites album, but you can tap that to pick another album in your Photos app. This sure beats the People, Pets, Natures, and Cities categories we could choose before, and it’s a lot easier than picking individual photos one by one to shuffle.

Whenever you choose a photo for your wallpaper that’s too small for your iPhone’s display, iOS will enlarge the image so it fills the screen, which can lead to lower-quality backgrounds. On iOS 17.1, an “Extend Wallpaper” option fills in some of the space with a matching color so the image doesn’t have to be as blurry.

If you live in the UK, credit cards issued by Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, RBS, Monzo, and Starling will begin showing your credit card balance and entire transaction history directly in Apple Wallet. This is thanks to the Open Banking API, which is unavailable in the US. Seeing this data in Wallet will help you keep track of balances and histories to help determine if you can afford a purchase or not.

In the US, you can only see account balances and complete transaction histories if you have a Discover card. Tap the card in Wallet, tap “Get Started” on the “See Balances and Full Transaction History for This Account” message, follow the prompts to authenticate yourself and connect to your Discover account, and enjoy seeing your balance and history without opening the bank app.

For some reason, you can only see the flashlight’s status in the Dynamic Island on the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max, but iOS 17.1 fixes it so that it also shows up in the Dynamic Island on the iPhone 14 Pro, 14 Pro Max, 15, and 15 Plus. So now any of these models can quickly turn off the flashlight from Dynamic Island without having to open Control Center.

Smart locks that support Matter, a newer smart home connectivity standard supported by Apple Home, Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Samsung SmartThings, can now give you home keys on iOS 17.1.

You may have noticed that YouTube and other streaming video sites would max out at 720p when playing in Safari and other web browsers, but iOS 17.1 unleashes higher-quality videos, going up to 2160p (4K) now.

I don’t know why Apple was so late to implementing this, but you can now double-tap the “Search” button at the bottom of the App Store to place the cursor in the search field. That way, you don’t have to stretch your finger up to the top of the screen or use Reachability to tap the search field first — you can just double-tap and begin typing.

Apps like IMDb have had this for a long time now, and you could already do it in other Apple apps such as Music and Photos.

On iPhone models with Dynamic Island, whenever you use Reachability, the color on the top half of the screen will be black on iOS 17.1 instead of a blurred version of your wallpaper to keep the Dynamic Island from showing twice.

If you have PowerBeats Pro or Beats Fit Pro, you can now press once to mute or unmute your microphone on a call. Pressing once during a call used to end the call prior to iOS 17.1, but now you must press twice to end it.

Apple Books has a few minor interface changes on iOS 17.1. Here are some of them:

• The “Reading Now” tab has been renamed “Read Now.”
• “Current” and “Recent” at the top of that tab is now just “Continue.”
• The book covers below “Continue” are now much smaller and inside a rounded box with the title, author, type, and completion percentage.
• The ellipsis (•••) menu in that box now has a new option to “Remove from Continue” in case you don’t want to finish reading it.

With iOS 17.1, iPhone 12 models in France will reduce their power when detected off the body on a static surface. This is in response to testing in France that showed the iPhone 12 exceeded the Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) limit — the measure of RF (radio frequency) energy absorption by the human body — when resting on a table or otherwise off the body.

As with any iOS update, there are patches for bugs and other issues plaguing previous software, as well as behind-the-scenes improvements, including the following:

• An issue that may have caused the Significant Location privacy setting to reset when transferring an Apple Watch or pairing it for the first time is fixed.
• An issue where the names of incoming callers may not have appeared when you were on another call is fixed.
• An issue where custom and purchased ringtones may not have appeared as options for your text tone is fixed.
• An issue that may have caused the keyboard to be less responsive is fixed.
• An issue that may have caused display image persistence is fixed.
• Crash detection on all iPhone 14 and iPhone 15 models is optimized.

With almost any new iOS software update, you can expect security improvements to patch vulnerabilities and zero-day exploits to lessen the chances of a cyberattack. We won’t know for sure what’s been addressed until the stable iOS 17.1 release comes out, but we’re expecting at least a handful of patched security issues.