Samuel Axon
Earlier today, Apple continued its tradition of updating all of its operating systems at once. The day brought major new feature releases to iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS. The iOS, iPadOS, and tvOS updates are numbered 13.4, Apple Watches got watchOS 6.2, and Macs saw the release of macOS Catalina 10.15.4.
For many of its platforms, Apple releases annual overhauls labeled, say, iOS 13, and introduces new features through the year with just one “dot”—hence iOS 13.4. Smaller, bug-fix oriented updates are usually labeled something like iOS 13.4.1.
As the nomenclature suggests, this is a feature update. For the most part, the big features introduced today were already rumored or known to be planned. The big three are arguably full trackpad and pointer support for recent iPad, iCloud Drive folder sharing, and universal app purchases.
As is usual these days, iOS/iPadOS have the most changes listed in their release notes. In addition to the above, the changes include nine new Memoji stickers, a slight change to the Mail app UI to make it harder to accidentally delete emails when you intend to reply to them, improvements to the Apple Arcade experience, audio playback support in USDZ files for AR Quick Look, predictive typing support for the Arabic language, and a whole bunch of bug fixes.
It’s a smaller update for macOS Catalina. Users who download 10.15.4 will get iCloud Drive folder sharing on that platform as well, the ability to import Google Chrome passwords into iCloud Keychain, new features for Pro Display XDR, HDR-10 support for connected TVs and monitors, and a couple of features we’ve already seen on mobile like communication limits for Screen Time.
watchOS 6.2 adds support for in-app purchases in Watch apps (this follows the addition of an on-device App Store in a previous update), a music playback bug fix, and support for ECG and irregular heart rhythm notifications in three new countries: Chile, Turkey, and New Zealand. As usual, tvOS got a tiny update; in this case, it just adds family sharing of TV and movie purchases and tweaks the look of the TV app.
All these updates should be available to download for all users in all regions on supported devices right now. Find the release notes below.
