In 2013, Apple announced iOS 7, a dramatic overhaul of its mobile operating system. For the first time, it ditched its faux-real-life skeuomorphism—the felt poker table in Game Center, the yellow legal pad in Notes—for a flatter, simpler design. Design chief Jony Ive explained the change like this: “[W]e understood that people had already become comfortable with touching glass,” he said,” they didn’t need physical buttons, they understood the benefits.” The idea came down to this: you already know how to use a smartphone.

Sure, we know that a note-taking app doesn’t have to look like the one we had on our desk three decades ago, or that a podcast app can look like something other than a cassette player. But the world has changed. There are billions of people coming online who don’t already know how to use an iPhone. And, for those of us who do, our priorities have shifted. We know how to use apps. We know how to open them and close them and occasionally double-tap the home button to switch between them. But our smartphones are becoming more cohesive, more like a single whole than a collection of parts shoved in a box. The challenge Apple now faces is this: How do you make the software do more and more, while also improving the feel and fluidity of the user experience?

Apple’s new mobile operating system, iOS 9, which today began hitting hundreds of millions of iPhones around the world, is all about answering that question. (I’m not talking about the iPad here, which is actually a far more dramatic functional change—we’ll get to that in a later article.) You won’t see incredible, heretofore unimagined features. You won’t be forced to learn novel behaviors, or remember how to launch the cool new app. Instead, Apple spent the last year connecting dots between the disparate pieces of its operating system. The next phase of technology is all about it learning our behavior and adapting to our needs, not forcing us into its pre-determined ideas about how the world works. iOS 9 isn’t here to change your life. In fact, it’s here to do the opposite: The goal of iOS9 is to help you change as little as possible.

Take Notes, for example. Notes may already be the most underrated app on the iPhone; everyone uses it, but hardly anyone talks about it. In iOS 9, it’s even more central to the user experience. It’s where you’re meant to keep all your web clippings, your documents, your maps—everything. You can draw on a note, or turn it into a checklist, or add a photo to it. You can send almost anything to Notes, from almost any app, and then access it from basically any device. With this added functionality, Notes has become the answer to a hundred of the iPhone’s most vexing interface questions. How do I send this file/link/set of directions to my computer? How do I make sure I can find this thing again later? How do I keep ten apps’ worth of stuff in one place? With iOS 9, Apple has built several new, more direct bridges between apps—and Notes, in many ways, is the central island where all those roads converge.
Aaron Wojack for WIRED
The whole point of the new operating system is to simplify the way you navigate your phone, no matter where you’re going. You’ll appreciate that simplicity the moment you decide to download the update (it’s one quarter the size of the last one, so you won’t have to delete half your apps before installing it), and later, too, when you want to attach a file to an email, or save one to your phone. (How insane is it that attaching and saving email files wasn’t a thing on iOS until now?)

While we’re on the subject of long-awaited updates: iOS 9 addresses hangups across the operating system. Maps now comes with transit directions. The back button, a left-facing arrow found in the top left corner, will now help you find your way back to whatever you were doing before that notification came in. Your notifications, themselves, will now appear chronologically. Another smaller, but no less important, update: the hilariously overdue ability to see when your keyboard is CAPITALIZED or not. The list of improvements is extensive: Things that seem like they should have always been this way, are this way.

The New Tools of the Trade

The biggest change in iOS 9 is Siri. The virtual assistant is more powerful, and more seamlessly integrated into the UI, than ever before. For new features like Homekit and CarPlay, Siri is the centerpiece. It’s telling that Apple didn’t build a HomeKit app where you’d control everything, for instance; Siri is the universal remote for your iPhone. It can look through your photos now, too, and even see what you’re looking at and help you remember or handle it later.

This is a big bet for Apple: From now on, if Siri sucks, the iPhone sucks. Granted, Siri has a history of sucking. But it’s gotten better fast, and it takes another big leap forward in iOS 9. And when it’s good, Siri’s the most natural, most efficient way to do almost anything; all you have to do is ask.
Apple
And sometimes, Apple hopes, you might not have to ask Siri anything at all. You’ll just swipe your home screen to the right, access the Proactive window, and go from there. Apple’s using your location and the time of day—that’s it for now, but there are many more cues it could use—to figure out what apps you might be looking for, which people you might want to contact, and what news stories you might want to read about. They’re constantly updating, and presented for you every time you look.

Plenty of things about iOS 9 still aren’t quite right. The new, card-based multitasking window is big and clunky, and it’s not like more people will figure out how to use it just because the icons are humongous. The new font, San Francisco, is going to take a lot of getting used to. And in a few spots—like the “Today” tab in the notification window, and, well, notifications in general—there’s still plenty of room for improvement.

But the best parts of iOS 9 boil down to this: Your iPhone can do a lot of things, but you probably don’t know how to do them all—not efficiently, at least. (You can imagine Jony Ive watching people open an app, use it, tap the home button, open another app, tap the home button, open the first app again, tap the… and just going through the roof.) Siri, Proactive, even, ultimately, things like 3D Touch and multitasking—they all exist to help you do the things you do just a little more quickly. That’s not something you’ll read on any Apple billboards, but it’s a pretty worthy goal. Not to mention, a really good reason to upgrade.