14 DAY TRIAL // Apple’s upcoming iOS 14 software update for iPhones will come not only with widgets, picture in picture, and so many other features, but also with a surprising change under the hood.
iOS 14 will finally allow users to change some of the default apps, something that’s totally surprising given Apple’s already famous walled garden.
Apple is known as a super-restrictive company that doesn’t allow users to heavily customize iOS, but now it looks like it’s trying to adopt a slightly different approach that would even enable the changing of the default apps on the operating system.
But in typical Apple fashion, iOS 14 won’t just lift these restrictions for all apps, but only for some, such as browsers and mail apps.
Default browsers and email apps
In other words, you’ll be able to replace Safari with whatever browser you like, such as Google Chrome, Firefox, or even Microsoft Edge. Without a doubt, Google is the big winner here, as the adoption of Chrome is likely to be improved – Chrome is already the number one browser, but after this change, more iOS users are likely to enable it as the default browser on their iPhones.
Replacing the default mail app on iOS, on the other hand, is something that’ll certainly make Microsoft happy. Right now, Outlook is one of the most popular email clients on both Android and iOS, and it goes without saying that many replace the default Apple Mail app with Microsoft’s client on their iPhones.
And now that it’s possible to replace the default client, I expect Outlook to become the default email client on many iPhones once the debut of iOS 14 finally happens.
Right now, the new iOS version is in preview, but all supported iPhones (iPhone 6s and newer) should get the final build in September this year.