iPadOS 17 Unveiled: Customizable Lockscreen, Health App, Improved Stage Manager

During yesterday’s WWDC 2023 opening keynote Apple unveiled its first AR/VR headset, but also iOS 17. iPad owners weren’t left behind and they got the iPadOS 17, which is available now as a developer beta and soon as a public beta. There will also be a final release in September. Let’s see what’s new.

The brand new iPadOS 17 brings forth a customizable Locks Screen, which actually premiered in 2022 on iOS 16. It lets you customize the wallpaper, choose a variety of widgets and play with font styles. The lockscreen can now also show live activities widgets, like an Uber heading towards you, a food order, travel plans or soccer game results.

Apple also promised improvements for Stage Manager, the feature which lets users open multiple app windows at once, now with improved flexibility when it comes to window resizing and positioning. Apple also brought the Health app to the iPad now, complete with the new Mental Health features and taking advantage of the large diagonal to display health data.

There’s also the improved Find My from iOS 17, plus the brand new Journal app, which serves for improved mental health and accountability. One of the core novelties for iPads is definitely the interaction of the Notes app with PDFs. Using machine learning models, the Notes app will identify fields in a PDF and let you take notes on it with the Apple Pencil.

Apple software boss Craig Federighi clams that iPadOS 17 will bring new ways to organize, annotate and collaborate on PDFs in the Notes app.

These are the iPads getting iPadOS 17:

• iPad (6th gen and later)
• iPad mini (5th gen and later)
• iPad Air (3rd gen and later)
• 12.9-inch iPad Pro (2nd gen and later)
• 10.5-inch iPad Pro
• 11-inch iPad Pro (1st gen and later)