On October 24, iOS 16.1 and iPadOS 16.1 were publicly released with quite a lot of bug fixes, new features like the iCloud Shared Library, a battery percentage indicator that now depletes eventually instead of staying static and showing the percentage, Live Activities, Apple Fitness Plus, ability to uninstall the Wallet app, etc. iPadOS 16.1 brought the headline feature, Stage Manager, Shared Tab Groups on Safari, a Weather app for the first time, live text & visual lookup, iCloud Shared Photo library, etc.
When will iOS 16.2 and iPadOS 16.2 be Released?
- Apple released iOS 16.2 and iPadOS 16. beta 1 on October 27. IOS 16.2 and iPadOS 16.2 official versions are rumoured to be released in December 2022.
Nearly two weeks into the launch of 16.1, Apple is already testing 16.2. The software has a tentative release date and brings some new quality-of-life updates. It is rumoured to come out Mid December by Mark Gurman. Developers & Beta Testers already have access to this upcoming software.
iOS 16.3 and iPadOS 16.3 Rollout Timeline Also Surfaced Online
After the roll-out of iOS 16.2 around mid-December, Apple plans to launch iOS 16.3, iPadOS 16.3 & Ventura 13.3 updates sometime in February or early March. These two software updates are rumoured to be accompanied by new 14″ and 16″ MacBook Pros powered by new M2 Pro and M2 Max chips. They were initially scheduled to be released in 2022 but were pushed back to Q1 2023 for unknown reasons.
What’s New in iOS 16.2?
An in-house Freedom Whiteboard app, a Sleep widget for the Lock Screen, live activities integration to a select few games, etc. Apart from the Free Form Whiteboard, iOS 16.2 also offers the option to prefer silent responses for Siri instead of using AI to determine when and when not to speak.
The Parallax Effect (Wallpaper motion), which has been missing since the release of iOS 16, has still not been added back. Live activities can now be started from Spotlight search. There’s city-related News for the weather app, and you can also view updates every minute to your weather. To the lock screen, Shortcut Options and Sleep Widgets have been added.
You can also add the stocks widget to your lock screen. A medication widget is reported to be coming soon. There have also been updates to the UI of the Game Centre widget. The 16.2 Beta also adds News to the Weather app, so you can view Local News and Top Stories right from the Weather app instead of separately opening the News app. News has also been popping up in the Stocks app, making it more convenient and easy to view.
What’s New in iPadOS 16.2?
iPadOS 16.2 has a prominent new feature added back: support for using the Stage Manager connected to an external monitor. This enables multitasking that couldn’t have been done before, with a true multi-window experience that takes advantage of all the power iPads to have. The feature is still not as good as DeX Mode from Samsung, and it is quite the resources hog, consuming a lot of RAM and battery, but the feature is excellent and has lots of potentials.
Conclusion
If you are updating to the Beta, let us know the experience. Before updating, this link details the issues and bugs people face in these Betas so that you can be cautious. The first betas have already rolled out, and active testing aiming at a Mid-December launch is currently going on. To summarise, iOS 16.2 brings a lot of quality-of-life updates to the iOS experience and enriches the multitasking experience of iPadOS even further.
