Apple Inc on Wednesday (6 March) released iOS and iPadOS 17.4 - the fourth major update to the operating systems that launched in September last year.
iOS 17.4 is a significant release, bringing major platform changes to iOS in Europe as part of Apple’s response to the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), as well as a handful of new features, including transcripts in Apple’s Podcasts app, new emoji, multilingual updates to Siri among other things, reports MacStories.
As part of Apple’s response to the EU’s DMA, iOS 17.4 comes with three major changes to comply with the new rules.
The first change one will notice after updating to iOS 17.4 is a new “About Your Default Browser” screen that will appear the first time they open Safari, prompting to pick a new default browser.
While it was already possible to set an alternative default web browser on iOS, the DMA now requires Apple to prompt all of its EU users to actively make this choice.
This screen includes a small explainer that lets user know about their ability to choose a different default browser at any time.
For each EU member country, the list of alternate browsers contains the 12 most popular browsers from its App Store storefront, and is displayed to the user in a random order.
Third-party browser engine support in iOS 17.4 effectively means that browser makers are now allowed to launch a version of their web browser that does not run on Apple’s WebKit engine, and runs on their own browser engine instead.
In practice, Google is now allowed to launch a version of Chrome for iOS running on their own Blink engine, and Mozilla a version of Firefox running on their own Gecko engine.
However, since support for third-party browser engines does not include iPadOS, and is only available in the EU, Google and Mozilla have been highly critical of the conditions of this change.
As part of its effort to add support for third-party browser engines — and because Home Screen web apps can currently only be powered by the WebKit engine — Apple initially announced that iOS 17.4 would remove support for Home Screen web apps in the European Union in order to comply with the DMA.
However, following online protests, and reports that Apple would be facing investigation from the EU regarding this move, the company announced last week that they were walking back this decision.
Just like third-party browser engines, users are yet to see alternative app marketplaces launch on iOS in the EU, and we will be checking those out as soon as they become available.
During the iOS 17.4 beta cycle, however, users had a preview of the confirmation screen that will appear when installing an app from an alternative app marketplace.
The confirmation screen would appear upon installing any app from the iOS App Store in the EU, but Apple has since confirmed that this was a bug, and that users should not see this screen when they download an app from their default app marketplace.
There are many more technical changes in iOS 17.4 that relate to Apple’s response to the DMA, including the ability for developers in the EU to use NFC to offer contactless payments without using Apple Pay, and the ability for developers to publish game streaming apps in Apple’s App Store (not limited to the EU).
In iOS and iPadOS 17.4, Apple now offers automatic transcriptions in the Podcasts app.
Listeners are now able to follow along their favorite podcasts with their transcripts highlighting in sync with the audio. In practice, the feature feels a lot like real-time lyrics in Apple Music, and works amazingly well.
From the Now Playing screen in the Podcasts app, in the bottom-left corner, one can now see if a transcript is available for the currently playing podcast. If a transcript is not available, the new button is simply greyed out. If it is available, though, a user can tap it to open the real-time transcript view in fullscreen.
This is where words and sentences will highlight in sync with the audio. If a user waits for a few seconds, the player controls will fade away, and reveal a “Search” button, letting them search through the entire transcript.
But that’s not all. On the Now Playing screen, if a podcast episode has chapters, they will appear directly inline in the transcript. Blocks of text in the transcript can be scrolled through, and tapped to jump to a specific segment of the podcast.
A user can also long-press a block of text to start selecting text in the transcript.
The full details of the new update can be found here.