iOS 11 support and notes
What you didn't know about iOS 11 beta 1
Launched last week at WWDC17, Apple’s new iOS 11 comes packed with upgrades and features that enable AR and complex operations being run on mobile devices. With iOS 11, Apple aims to turn the iPhone and iPad into intelligent personal devices.
The Reincubate team has tried early builds of iOS 11 and discovered a few interesting changes that you probably didn’t know about from the WWDC17 announcement alone. We are sharing a bunch of these changes below, and if you are an Apple iOS data integrator or developer, you might be interested.
iOS 11 fully supported by Reincubate Cloud API and iPhone Backup Extractor
We are proud to be first to offer iOS 11 support to our API clients and support the wider Apple eco-system. We're excited by the advancements we've seen from Apple in this iteration of iOS, and expect significant new changes as Apple centralise data to flow through their hardware.
CloudKit entrypoint redesign
Apple have introduced a new endpoint architecture for CloudKit in iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra. The new structure resembles a CDN, where traffic to services is now managed by a gateway layer and not by the domain name sharing method as before. The changes do not affect access to iCloud backups yet, but will work to simplify and improve performance of iCloud services in the future.
Improved information security
Changes have been made to how sensitive file attribute data is secured in messages from CloudKit services. This means it's harder to access CloudKit files without all of the information necessary.
Enhanced file processing and compression
With the recent push to modernise their file system through APFS we can see that Apple are working to make savings in file storage and data transfer rates. In iOS 11, Apple have introduced an additional layer of processing on certain files. This reduces the size of backups and improves the speed of communication of these files between your devices and CloudKit services.
Stay updated
- A fresh new iOS 11 thread every day on Reddit. Subscribe to them all here.
- Stack Overflow has been the go-to place for engineers for a long time. Most connected threads are about using Xcode with iOS 11. New apps being baked in the oven as we speak!
- This Week in Swift also looks like a lovely curated blog for iOS 11 and beyond.
- And lastly, here’s a 15,000 people Slack community for iOS developers and iOS engineers.
Stay in touch with us @reincubate to learn more about iOS 11 beta findings. If you’d like to take the API for a spin, let us know here.