Dynamic Podcast Widget

The Podcast widget catches up to the Music widget and add supports for dynamic background colors. The widget color will change based on the artwork of the podcast you’re currently listening to.

Apple News

The Apple News app gets some love in this update, especially if you’re a News+ subscriber (which I am whenever I get a free trial).

New Game: Quartiles (News+)

Apple has been leaning into word games as way to entice people to subscribe to Apple News+. They recently added crosswords, and in this update, theres a new game called Quartiles. The thrust of this game seems to be to take smaller pieces of words drag them together to form larger words. I really suck at word games, but it seems like this would be fun if you’re into this type of game.

Leaderboards & Game Center (News+)

The next logical step after adding games to the News app, I guess, is to integrate Game Center, complete with Leaderboards. Tapping on the star icon launches the Game Center page for News App, and you’re able to view the leaderboards for each of the News games.

Here’s another vote for Apple to revive the standalone Game Center app. Its obnoxious that every game has to provide a different way to access your Game Center stats instead of having them all in one place.

Offline Mode (News+)

The News app adds offline caching support for the following sections:

• Recent Stories
• Saved Stories
• Individual Magazine issues
• Puzzles

These sections are can be individually toggled from the Settings app

New Pride Wallpaper

iPadOS 17.5 provides Apple’s year Pride wallpaper variation. This wallpaper is customizable with a few different styles you can swipe between, and has a nice animation as you unlock your device.

Cross Platform Tracking Notification Support

Google has recently launched its new Find My Device network, which is a crowdsourced network of devices, much like Apple’s Find My network. In a rare act of collaboration, Apple and Google have teamed up to implement tracking notifications across iOS and Android. This way, users can be notified if a unknown tracker is travelling with them, regardless of the network its using.

Battery Health for New iPads?

This one is going to be hard to verify until either the review embargo is lifted (which could have happened before this goes live), or we get the iPads in hand. Code strings were found that indicate that the Battery Health features in iPhone and Mac today, will be coming to iPad. When Apple has added this to other platforms, it was only for newer devices, and I’d expect the same thing to apply here for the new iPad Pro and Air.