Clock
It took this long for Apple to let you set the volume of alarms and timers hitting zero seconds separately from your ringtone volume. Go to Settings > Sounds & Haptics and, under Alarms and Timers, disable Match Ringtone Volume.
Find My
The native Find My app on all platforms has two changes related to duration or availability when you share your location with other people:
- Previously, you could share your location for an hour, until the end of the day, or indefinitely. Now you can set a custom period of time.
- If you’re sharing your location with someone, you can hide your location from your end until the next morning (at 4 a.m.), and they’re not notified. They’re also not told when you resume sharing, or “unhide” your location. They simply see you with a “location unavailable” label.
This is widely seen as another tool for people facing family or intimate-partner abuse to hide their whereabouts without an abuser knowing.
Health and Fitness
The big news in the Health app for iPhone is that, if you have periods, Cycle Tracking supports perimenopause and menopause by notifying you when it identifies patterns consistent with perimenopause.
Other changes worth noting include:
- Health now has a Browse button (instead of a search icon), which better identifies what the action is. The design has changed from a list to a series of small color-coded cards.
- iPhones now support GymKit, which was available only on Apple Watch before this. You can now pair an iPhone directly with supported treadmills, bikes, and other gym equipment.
Home
The Home app now supports 4K resolution video for live streaming and recording from cameras designed for HomeKit Secure Video and with any tier of iCloud+ and that, of course, have 4K output. (Apple still uses the HomeKit name there, even though the concept has been renamed Apple Home.)
If you have more than one camera, Home used to require awkward navigation among them. Now, you can see the previews in the main Home view, but tapping any camera brings up an aggregated view with a unified set of detected events.
With Apple Intelligence, Home reduces the amount of “attention noise” that motion-detecting cameras can generate. Home will combine related activity notifications to prevent a series of motion events from resulting in a constant stream of alerts. It can also stitch together video from multiple cameras, allow natural-language searches for recorded events, and provide summaries you can read without watching the video.
To use Apple Intelligence features, you must subscribe to the 2 TB iCloud+ plan or higher. Your home hub must be a HomePod (2nd generation or later), HomePod mini, or Apple TV updated to the latest release, such as tvOS 27. The Home app and Home accessories must have access to location services.
Podcasts
If you navigate to a podcast’s view of all of its episodes by tapping the podcast and then tapping Episodes, you can now search against the title and show notes of all listed episodes.
This doesn’t search transcripts, which Podcasts generates for some shows. It searches only the per-episode notes published in the podcast feed.
