Apple has released the first developer beta builds for iOS 11.3 and tvOS 11.3. The latest beta builds offer new features like Animoji, Business Chat for iMessage and mainly the support for Airplay 2 and multi-room playback with the iOS 11.3 and the tvOS 11.3. The AirPlay 2 was first announced at the WWDC 2017, however, until now, we didn’t see any AirPlay 2 feature rollout.
The AirPlay 2 made an appearance in iOS 11.2, but again it was more of a placeholder for the upcoming feature. With the multi-room support in place, you can stream to multiple Apple TVs from your iPhone or any other device running iOS 11.3. Additionally, Apple has also hinted that the multi-room support will be coming to HomePod and will launch alongside peer-to-peer AirPlay streaming.
Needless to say, the AirPlay 2 on the beta does come with some bugs, and I am pretty much sure that Apple will iron out the issues in the forthcoming beta versions. The AirPlay feature was first announced seven years ago and the new beta is the biggest update since then. Apart from the new features, Apple has also promised that it will reduce the lag and latency. Meanwhile, the AirPlay 2 speakers are also on the horizon, and the makers of Sonos have announced that they will support AirPlay 2 later this year.
That said, Apple also has in store some changes meant for the iPhone X. As we all know, Apple has ditched the Touch ID in favor of FaceID, and this has lead to some confusions. For instance, at the payment page, Apple has incorporated a new interface for checkouts. On iOS 11, the prompt would say “Double Click to Install” in the upper-right corner, once done the Face ID process would fire up. This design feature didn’t go well with users who apparently felt the “lack of intuitiveness.” The new iOS 11.3 beta tries to fix this problem by adding a new prompt that appears before the Face ID process begins. Henceforth, users will see a “Confirm with Side Button” along with an illustrative graphic. It’s quite likely that we would come across other new features with upcoming betas.