The new iOS 11 beta (developer v3) has a whole bunch of neat tweaks, but the best might be the changes made to Control Center. It has a new animation, a new way to kill running apps, and a big improvement to the interactive widgets, including brightness and volume.
New Control Center animation
Let’s start with an easy one. When you swipe up to access the Control Center from the Home screen, you now get this neat new animation:
It’s much slicker than the previous animation, with the “Mission Control”-style windows flying in from the left, and the Control Center widgets appearing from the left. The new animation also makes it possible to partially swipe into the Control Center to access its widgets:
Adjust screen brightness and volume on-the-fly
In the previous betas, if you swiped into Control Center and then tried to use a widget to, say, adjust the screen brightness, then Control Center would snap into full-screen. It was a little jarring. Now, you can grab the brightness and volume sliders as soon as you can see them, as well as tapping any of the other Control Center buttons.
This is way better. It feels like you’re sliding the current app (or Home screen) over a little to make a quick adjustment, before sliding it back. The difference is small in theory, but significant in practice.
Swipe up to kill apps
Another small but significant change is that Apple restored the old way of killing an app in Control Center view — you now swipe up on the app to force-quit it, just like you do in iOS 10. The first couple of betas introduced a clunky, Windows-like way to do it, where you had to swipe into Control Center, then long-press an app’s thumbnail to make it enter the familiar jiggly-icon edit more, and then hit a tiny x at the top corner of the thumbnail. Now you just enter Control Center and swipe up on the app you want to kill. Easy.
Other improvements
The rest of the widgets are slowly gaining functionality as we progress through the betas. The camera widget now gets a full range of 3D-Touch controls (selfie, video, slow-mo, take photo), even on the iPad (although the 3D Touch is simulated, it feels like the real thing). The Screen Mirroring function also works now, letting you send your iDevice’s screen to an Apple TV, and the Screen Recording widget now allows you to mute the mic, and to “Start Broadcast.” This last one does nothing new right now — it just records the screen — but it sounds pretty exciting.
So we have a few new features, a few reversions to older, better ways of doing things, and a few things cleaned up around the edges. And that’s just Control Center. The rest of iOS 11 is also getting a similar treatment.