Apple announced a lot of new features during its WWDC 2020 keynote today, including widgets for your iPhone home screen and the ability to change your default email and browser apps. Now we're discovering even more features as Apple rolls out the beta releases of its new updates.
First up, Apple's HomePod is gaining support for third-party music services. Apple snuck this piece of news into a slide that was briefly shown during the keynote, and so far it hasn't said anything else about the feature so we don't have a lot more info quite yet.
The HomePod currently only supports Apple Music if you want to play some tunes using your voice, meaning if you want to stream with Spotify or Pandora, you need to AirPlay to the HomePod from your iPhone. With support for third-party music services, you'll likely be able to ask the HomePod to play music from Spotify or another service and have it work.
Another notable feature confirmed by Apple is 4K support for YouTube on the Apple TV 4K. Right now the Apple TV only supports up to 1080p video playback because the video codec that YouTube uses for its 4K videos isn't supported on Apple's box, but with the update to tvOS 14, the Apple TV 4K looks set to support 4K videos on YouTube as well.
Lastly, the updates to iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 will include emoji search, as noted by MacRumors. iOS 13 will show your frequently used emoij, but if you want something else you've got to scroll through all of the emoji available to find the one you're looking for.
With iOS 14 and iPadOS 14, you'll get a search field on the emoji keyboard that'll let you type a word and get the corresponding emoji. For example, you could type "heart" to get the heart emojis or "smiley face" to get all those emojis.
The updates to iOS 14, iPadOS 14, watchOS 7, and tvOS 14 will launch this fall.