Apple frees up additional storage and “improves” performance with iOS 10.3

Apple just released a brand new version of iOS, version 10.3, and it comes with a whole list of improvements and optimisations. One of the biggest ones is the fact that this new operating system apparently frees up additional storage on your device.

This freeing up of additional storage has to be the biggest piece of good news for the end consumer, especially those on the 16GB iPhones. This is possible because, with iOS 10.3, Apple is migrating supported devices to a new file format dubbed Apple File System (APFS). This new system is supposed to take advantage of the SSD or flash storage in your devices and improve performance as a whole as well as freeing up some storage for users.

Apple Insider, for example, managed to free up 7.8GB of additional storage on their 256GB iPhone 7 Plus.

On our iPhone 6s Plus (16GB), we got about one and a half gigabytes of extra storage — which is no small amount.

Other performance-based improvements include a tightening of the animations, which should help the phone feel snappier, though on our iPhones we don’t really notice it that much because they were never sluggish, to begin with. Still, this will undoubtedly be felt on older devices.

Besides that, iOS 10.3 has also added a bunch of new features including a new “find my AirPods” feature that will let users locate their RM850 AirPods and cause them to make a sound wherever they are. Users can access this via Find My iPhone.

iOS 10.3 also improves Siri and increases her integration within the phone and its applications so you can tell her to do more stuff like schedule rides via ride-sharing applications.

Here’s a full list of the new features (click on the image to enlarge):