At the Apple event being held today in the Town Hall auditorium at Apple’s Cupertino headquarters, Craig Federighi, SVP Software Engineering, briefly detailed iOS 8.1’s upcoming features, namely support for Apple Pay and iCloud Photo Library. The software is coming out on Monday.
Federighi also briefly went through 8.1’s support for iCloud Photo Library, including iCloud pricing plans which start out with the first 5GB for free, and then go up to $0.99 for 20 GB, and $3.99 for 200 GB. Tiers are also available up to 1 TB, he says.
And, another welcome change for those confused by the Photos app’s new interface in 8.0 is the re-emergence of the “Camera Roll” gallery in iOS 8.1.
iOS 8.1 will also introduce into public beta of iCloud Photo Library, which is what will sync photos and edits to your photos across all your Apple devices. And the new software will include Continuity, which is what allows users to move between tasks started on one Apple device and finish them on another, whether desktop, laptop, mobile or tablet. Users will also be able to accept phone calls on their Macs, thanks to Continuity.
[Update: the launch date has now been announced to be Monday, and the post was changed to reflect this.]
Federighi even joked that Apple received complaints about this change, which led them to make “improvements” in 8.1, referring to the return of the Camera Roll.
In case you missed it, Apple customers have been lamenting the reorganization in the Photos app, and the changes introduced in 8.0. They’ve been looking for their Camera Roll and Photo Stream galleries and, not finding them, have blown up Apple support threads with inquires and complaints. Instead of Camera Roll, in iOS 8.0, Apple had added a section called “Recently Added” for your most recently snapped photos. But old habits die hard, and the changes were disorienting.