After what appears to be a successful iOS 9.1 rollout including stability improvements a few months ago, Apple has now released another major update that focuses on improving and adding new features to its native apps. The update size is 271 MB (could vary with your device).
Although improvements and new tricks can be found throughout iOS 9.2, the main area of focus seems to be on the Apple Music and Mail apps.
Apple Music gets a whole lot of minor improvements, ones that would not make much sense to an Android user, but will mean a lot to an iOS user. You can now create a new playlist while adding a song. In addition, your most recently modified playlist appears on the top when adding new tracks to playlists. Downloading songs got a lot more organised and Apple has finally added support to download albums or playlists from your iCloud Music Library. iOS 9.2 users will also now be able to view works, composers and performers while browsing Classical music in the Apple Music catalog.
Another new feature comes to the default Mail app. Apple has now added support for Mail Drop, a service that first appeared on OS X El Capitan, that lets you attach massive files of up to 5 GB in size as an attachment in your composed email. Apple also fixed an issue that caused mail attachments to be inaccessible for some users with POP email accounts.
Other improvements come to Apple’s iBooks, while stability improvements have been delivered to Safari the Podcasts app. Apple now also adds support for the USB Camera Adapter to import photos and videos. Apple Siri also gets support for Arabic, while its just announced refresh of the Apple Lightning to SD Card Reader also gets support with iOS 9.2.
Overall it is a big update, but we have yet to test it out thoroughly for unknown stability bugs that are now commonplace with every new Apple update. For now, things seem to be running pretty smoothly.
You can have a look at the complete changelog below:
Apple Music improvements:
You can now create a new playlist when adding a song to a playlist
Your most recently changed playlist is now listed at the top when adding songs to playlists
Download albums or playlists from your iCloud Music Library by tapping the iCloud download button
See which songs have been downloaded with the new download indicator next to each song in My Music and Playlists
See works, composers and performers while browsing Classical music in the Apple Music catelog
Accessibility improvements
Fixing issues with VoiceOver when using Camera face detection
Adding support for VoiceOver to wake up the screen
Adding support for VoiceOver to invoke app switcher with 3D Touch gesture
Fixing an issue with Guided Access when trying to end phone calls
Improved functionality for Switch Control users when using 3D Touch
Fixing an issue with speech rate of Speak Screen
Other improvements include:
A new Top Stories section in News so you can stay up to date with the most important news of the day
Mail Drop in Mail for sending large attachments
iBooks now supports 3D Touch to peek and pop pages from the table of contents, your notes and bookmarks, or from search results inside a book
iBooks now supports listening to an audiobook while you browser your library, read other books, or explore the iBooks Store
iPhone support for the USB Camera Adapter to import photos and videos
Improved stability of Safari
Improved stability of Podcasts
Fixing an issue that caused mail attachments to be inaccessible for some users with POP email accounts
Resolving an issue for some users that caused attachments to overlap text in mail
Fixing an issue where Live Photos could have turned off after restoring from a previous iCloud backup
Addressing an issue that could cause search in Contacts to display no results
Resolving an issue that could have prevented Calendar from displaying all seven days in week view
Fixing an issue where Camera screen on iPad could be black when attempting to capture video
Addressing an issue that could cause instability in the Activity app when viewing the day of Daylight Savings Time transition
Fixing an issue that could prevent data from appearing in Health
Fixing an issue that could prevent Wallet updates and Lock screen alerts from displaying
Addressing an issue where updating iOS could prevent an alarm from going off
Fixing an issue where some users were unable to login to Find my iPhone
Fixing an issue that prevented some manual iCloud Backups from completing
Addressing an issue where using the iPad keyboard could unintentionally trigger text selection mode
Improved keyboard responsiveness when using Quick Reply
Improved punctuation input on the 10-key Chinese (Pinyin & Stroke) keyboards with new expanded view of punctuation symbols and better predictions
Fixing an issue on Cryllic keyboard where caps lock would be enabled when typing in URL or email fields
Siri support for Arabic (Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates)
