iOS 9 vs iOS 8: What's Different?

Apple announced the iOS 9 at WWDC 2015 and rather than adding new features, the company said that the update would concentrate mainly on performance and battery life enhancements. Here we compare the older and newer version and find out what are the biggest changes..

Home Screen

The home features the same look as in iOS 8, with Passbook now being called Wallet in iOS 9.  Newsstand is will be replaced by Apple News and there's a new iCloud Drive app.

Performance and battery life

The prime focus of iOS 9 was to improve functionality and performance of the operating system.  For users having small capacity iPhones will have no issues upgrading to iOS 9 as the update won’t be as large as those in iOS 8. In fact, you’ll only need 1.3GB of space to install iOS 9, 3.28GB less than what was required to install iOS 8. Apps will also be smaller in size all thanks to new behind-the-scenes processes that occur when downloading an app from the App Store.

Apart from this the company has built in a battery saving mode, which will disable things like animations and push email to give you an extra three hours of battery life. You can also see apps that are using most power. It also lets you manually enable a power-saving mode. The Low Power mode automatically kicks in when the battery is below 20 percent, and disables when it charges above 80 percent full.

Proactive Personal Assistant

In iOS 8, you used Search to search Wikipedia, find the latest news, nearby places, apps from the App Store, songs from the iTunes Store and suggested websites, as well as your contacts, messages, emails and notes. Siri and Search are much smarter than in iOS 8. The Apple wants to offer additional information and features depending on the users habits and an understanding of context, making your iPhone a "proactive assistant".

Now you’ll be able to ask Siri things like “Hey Siri, can you show me videos I took at James birthday party?” and Siri will find the exact videos that you’re looking for. It can also be commanded to remind you to do things at specific times.

The updated search interface can be accessed by swiping down at the home screen and will also display categories of nearby places including food, drink, shopping and fun. You’ll also be served with trending news story based on your current location so you’re always updated.

Recent Apps

Double tap on the home screen take you to the recent app section. In the new iOS 9, recent callers are not shown on the top instead apps are shown overlapping one another and you can swipe left or right and drag up in similar fashion as earlier to close an app.

Notes

Apple pays a lot of attention to Notes has it claims most people use Notes and has therefore added lots of new features. Apart from formatting text, adding headings, bullet lists and checklists have debuted on iOS 9. It allows you to list down everything you need and strike them off the list one by one.  You can also sketch in the Notes app in iOS 9 by tapping the draw icon at the bottom of the app and it offers a variety of brush styles and colors. The sketching tool comes handy and the ability to paste in links from other apps via the sharing mechanism is very useful.

Search in settings

Now search is integrated into setting tab also and you can swipe down to enable search, making quicker to find a desired setting rather than trying to remember which sub folder a particular control is in.

iCloud

You can see all your files stored in iCloud and open them on your iPhone with the necessary apps.

Final Thoughts

iOS 9 has a host of new and updated built-in Apple apps. Usability has also been improved. New search options like Settings search and Siri-powered proactive Spotlight search make it easy to find exactly what you're looking for. It also improved overall battery life, which is never a bad thing.