iOS 14.4 Update: A Balanced Experience

The iOS 14.4 update has arrived, bringing with it several bug fixes and new features to enhance the user experience. One of the most notable changes is the ability to answer phone calls directly from the lock screen using Switch Control. This feature allows users to easily manage their notifications and respond to calls without having to unlock their device. In a previous update, this feature was not available, but it's now been fixed in 14.4.

Another issue that has been addressed in this update is related to Spotify. Many users had reported issues with the app draining battery and randomly stopping music playback. These problems have now been resolved in 14.4, ensuring a smoother listening experience for users.

When it comes to performance, there isn't a massive difference between iOS 14.3 and 14.4. The Geekbench scores for my iPhone 12 Pro Max show a relatively small increase in performance compared to the previous update. However, this may not be noticeable for most users. If you were experiencing bugs or performance issues with 14.3, upgrading to 14.4 will likely improve your overall daily usage.

Battery life is also largely unchanged between 14.4 and 14.3. I've been using the RC build of 14.4 for about a week, which is essentially the final version that developers receive before the public release. My testing has shown that the battery life is still pretty much the same as in 14.3. This may come as a relief to users who were concerned about potential battery life issues with the previous update.

Should You Update to iOS 14.4?

The question now is whether or not you should upgrade to iOS 14.4. If you have a HomePod or if you experienced any of the bugs that were fixed in this update, then yes, it's definitely worth upgrading. However, if you're having an excellent experience on 14.3 with no issues and decent battery life, there may not be enough reason to risk it by updating. In fact, if you're one of those users who always like to keep their device up to date but don't have any problems with the previous update, then it's probably safe to skip this upgrade.

On the other hand, if you have a HomePod or are experiencing issues with Spotify, 14.4 is a no-brainer update. The new features and bug fixes are welcome improvements that will enhance your overall experience. iPadOS 14.4 is similarly unchanged from iOS 14.4, but it's still worth noting for users of the latest iPads.

Conclusion

iOS 14.4 has arrived with several important updates and bug fixes. While there may not be a massive difference in performance or battery life between this update and its predecessor, it's still worth upgrading if you have specific needs or concerns. The new features, such as Handoff on HomePod and Spotify improvements, are welcome additions that will enhance your experience. As always, we encourage our readers to stay up to date with the latest iOS updates by hitting the subscribe button below.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up guys my name is brandon and a little over a month after the release of ios 14.3 apple returns today with ios 14.4 and along with ios 14.4 we also got ipad os 14.4 watch os 7.3 and tv os 14.4 we should also be getting mac os big sur 11.2 pretty soon as well but of course this video is all about ios and ipad os 14.4 so we're going to take a look at what's new in the software talk about the performance the battery life the bug fixes and more so let's first start off with the size of this update you can see here on my iphone 12 pro max the update came in around 395 megabytes and across the board the update should be under 500 megabytes but that size will vary depending on your device and the version you're coming from and if we go and check out the build number into our settings here general about 14.4 you can see the build there is 18 d52 and then if we scroll down a little bit further to the modem firmware you can see we did also get a modem update it's now 1.42.03 so if you're having any type of connectivity issues maybe if you had an issue going from 5g to lte or vice versa that could possibly be solved in this update so now what's new in ios 14.4 and the first thing has to do with the homepod and homepod mini and the handoff feature so if you go into the home application and go to the top left to the little home icon there in home settings and then to software updates you want to make sure that your home pods are updated to ios 14.4 and after that you will notice that there's a new kind of method to the handoff feature so before when you had a homepod and you wanted to hand off the audio from your phone to the homepod or vice versa you would have to physically tap the homepod on top with your iphone but now in 14.4 you don't have to tap it and also you get haptic feedback when it moves closer so i'm going to start moving my homepod mini closer to my iphone here and you'll notice that it detects it right there and it says move closer to and tap for controls so it says move closer or tap for controls and i'm getting a lot of haptic feedback right now so the closer it gets you will start to feel the haptic feedback kind of increase and it gets bigger there and then eventually it pops up just like that and you get these new controls right here and you can see my homepod mini is right here so you get all the controls you have alarms down here you also have when you have a phone call there's an option to transfer the phone call to the homepod or vice versa and it's just a whole new menu here just a whole new way to do handoff with the homepod and homepod mini and it's really something that you just need to experience yourself because the haptic feedback i cannot translate that through video and it's just a really really cool feature if you have a homepod or homepod mini i highly recommend trying this out you can see the animation there just a really cool new feature here in 14.4 now the next feature has to do with dynamic wallpapers via shortcuts so i did make a full video showing you guys how to set dynamic wallpapers on your iphone which basically means that it changes wallpapers automatically every single day if you haven't seen that video i will leave it linked down in the description below but now there is a new toggle for the dynamic wallpaper shortcut so if we go into shortcuts right here and then go to dynamic wallpapers and we go to where the wallpaper section is and again i did make a full video on this so if you're lost just go watch that video but basically if you go to show more right here we have a new toggle for perspective zoom so that was not there on 14.3 or prior versions it only said show preview so now you can have perspective zoom on the wallpapers that are set via shortcuts another new feature in ios 14.4 is that links inside of messages now offer app clips so when you send a link or receive a link sometimes they will show an app clip if it is supported with that application so for example tick tock right here you will see the bottom section here has a setup for app clips so you can kind of see the code right there and it says open and of course app clips are the way that you can basically get into an application without fully downloading it it's kind of like you know you would use for parking applications and things like that but you can use it for tick tocks if you want to watch that video and tick tock without fully downloading the application you could do it via the app clip so that is new now in messages here in 14.4 which is pretty nice another new feature here in ios 14.4 is the ability to classify bluetooth device types so if we go into our settings here and go to bluetooth and if we tap the i on something like let's just say my car for example here you can see we now have a new section in the bluetooth settings called device type and if you go into that you can basically classify this bluetooth device by what it is so for example this is a car stereo so i would have it selected as car stereo but for example if i had like my shower speaker which i actually do have in here let's see down here if i tap on the eye and go to device type at first this was set to headphones but it's not actually a pair of headphones it is a speaker so i can go ahead and select that right there and if you're wondering why this is useful it actually tells you down here with this text it says specifying the type of device can ensure your headphone audio level measurements are accurate so this is going to be mainly beneficial for if you go into your settings and then go to sounds and haptics headphone safety if you have reduced loud sounds enabled and especially if you have like headphone notifications on this will be very useful for that and it will make you know your readings a lot more accurate inside the health application and things like that and you guys can kind of see that feature that i showed off first the handout feature is kind of you know i'm not really that close to my homepod and it keeps popping up like it wants to go ahead and hand off to that device so hopefully that gets fixed in future versions as well because it is quite annoying when you are close to a homepod and it just constantly happens and i keep feeling the haptic feedback and everything but anyways that is a cool new feature the fact that you can classify your bluetooth device types inside of your settings we also get a new voiceover feature in 14.4 so if we go down in our settings to accessibility and then to voiceover and then go down to rotor actions you'll see we have a new menu option there for direct touch apps and you can see it says direct touch allows voiceover to control an app directly without requiring more interaction and if you tap on that you can see you get options for direct touch on all these applications so you can basically select which application you want to have this feature turned on for which is great if you use voiceover another feature in 14.4 is that we now get the ability to scan qr codes that are small so in the past if there was a small qr code and i actually ran into this issue previously basically on like a menu or like on a door of a business sometimes they'll have really small qr codes and you would not be able to scan them like your phone wouldn't pick it up unless you got like directly on top of it but now in 14.4 your phone will be able to scan smaller qr codes which is nice especially since we're living in a time where qr codes are starting to get bigger and bigger there's also a new detection feature built into 14.4 that gives you a notification when the camera on your iphone is unable to be verified as a new genuine apple camera in the iphone 12 series so basically if you got your phone camera replaced like if it broke and you got it replaced and it wasn't through apple you will now get a notification showing that it wasn't you know a genuine part from app or wasn't installed by apple themselves so that's a pretty interesting feature and i have not seen anybody with this notification yet obviously since most people probably have not broken their iphone 12 camera yet and obviously 14.4 just came out as well but hopefully in the future i will be able to show you guys what that notification looks like another feature here which is more of a fix is that the airpods max glyph icon is now accurate so it now shows the accurate color up top when you connect them so i'm going to go ahead and put these on and show you guys what i mean so you can see there it shows the correct color in the airpods max glyph right there so in previous versions it would show like a silver pair of airpods max even though i have the space gray version and it just wouldn't be accurate every time but now in ios 14.4 that issue has been addressed but one thing that has not been addressed is ps5 and xbox series x controller support so for some reason we still do not have support for the next gen controllers on ios 14.4 we also still do not have 5g dual sim support so if you have dual sim you still can only use 5g on one of those sim cards hopefully we get that update in the future where we can have 5g on both sim cards now as for bug fixes apple does list quite a few bug fixes here in the changelog for this update so you should expect a much smoother experience overall coming from 14.3 or any previous ios 14 version so let's take a look at this change log and talk about it so the first thing is image artifacts could appear in hdr photos taken with iphone 12 pro so if you have an iphone 12 pro or 12 pro max and you took photos and you noticed artifacts on those photos after the fact that could have been an issue you could have been facing that bug that has now been addressed here in 14.4 i never faced that myself but i have heard of some people who were we also have a fix for the keyboard lag so a lot of people have been facing issues with keyboard lag over the past few ios versions and now ios 14.4 does address that so you can see here apple says typing may be delayed and word suggestions may not appear in the keyboard so if you're facing either of those issues which a lot of you have been that has been fixed here in 14.4 there's also another fix in messages where the keyboard would sometimes not come up as the correct language and that has now been addressed as well now if you also have the fitness widget on your home screen sometimes it would not display updated activity data now i have not been wearing my apple watch lately so it just shows minus blank anyways but if it was not updating for you that has been fixed here in 14.4 i know that was an issue in 14.3 we also have a fix for audio stories in the news application so if you go to the audio tab down here and you listen to the audio news plus audio and if you try to listen to that in car play sometimes the audio would not resume after being paused for spoken directions or siri but that has now been fixed here with this update there was also a really weird bug with switch control when it came to answering calls on the lock screen so sometimes if you had this enabled and you got a phone call on the lock screen you would just simply not be able to answer that phone call but now that has been fixed and you can use switch control and answer every call from your lock screen as expected and then there was another issue that was not mentioned in the change log but a lot of you guys have let me know in the comments that the issues with spotify have been addressed in 14.4 so a lot of people had issues with spotify draining battery and sometimes they would just randomly stop playing music you know i got many comments about this and that has been addressed here in 14.4 and likely in an update to spotify itself as well now as far as performance goes performance is a little bit better on 14.4 compared to 14.3 for me as you can see here in the geekbench scores on my iphone 12 pro max not a massive difference in the scores and also not a massive difference in just raw overall speed comparing 14.4 to 14.3 but if you were having any of the bugs and 14.3 that were addressed in 14.4 you will notice a nice improvement in just your overall daily usage but don't expect anything major just going from one of those updates to 14.4 unless you're just on like ios 14.0 going to 14.4 because in that case you will see a nice improvement and in terms of battery life it's kind of the same story here so 14.4 feels exactly the same as 14.3 to me and this comes from using the rc build which is pretty much the final build that developers get early before the public i've been using that for about a week and i've been able to test the battery life on the final version of 14.4 here and i can say that it's been pretty much exactly the same as 14.3 to me which is a good thing because 14.3 had pretty good battery life across the board for most devices except for maybe like the iphone 6s and the iphone se those are really the only ones that i've heard having issues with battery life on 14.3 so now should you update to ios 14.4 and i say that if you have a home pod or if you had any of the bugs that were fixed in this update if you were like facing any of those bugs in 14.3 and now they've been fixed in this update then yes you should definitely update to ios 14.4 now i would not expect a massive battery life or performance improvement in this update so if you're looking to update just for that you're going to be pretty disappointed because you're not going to find it you're really going to want to update to this version either a if you just always like updating and you always like keeping your device up to date which is pretty much recommended for most people but then again if you are having you know an excellent experience on 14.3 absolutely no issues and tremendous battery life you may not want to risk it by updating and you know getting some bugs and maybe not having as good of a battery life so that's happened before so if you're having an excellent experience on 14.3 and you don't have a homepod then i can see why you'd stay on 14.3 but for most people i would say go ahead and update to 14.4 you get security improvements performance improvements and of course you get these new features and it's a no-brainer update if you have a homepod or homepod mini because of the awesome new handoff feature now i did also want to mention ipad os 14.4 and i mentioned this last because there's really nothing at all that's different with ipad os 14.4 compared to ios 14.4 but i have been running it on my 2020 ipad pro 12.9 inch and it's been running fine i mean it's pretty much the same situation like i said as ios 14.4 the battery life and the performance are pretty much identical we just get those additional new features there as well so really nothing to talk about with ipad os unfortunately i wish we would get more you know exclusive features for the ipad in these updates but we didn't get any here with 14.4 but yeah guys there you have it that is ios and ipad os 14.4 let me know what you guys think about this update down in the comment section below let me know which device you're using this on along with your favorite feature in this update and of course if you guys want to stay up to date on all the latest ios updates and what's new in them make sure you guys hit that subscribe button down below but anyways guys thanks again for watching and i'll see you soon youwhat's up guys my name is brandon and a little over a month after the release of ios 14.3 apple returns today with ios 14.4 and along with ios 14.4 we also got ipad os 14.4 watch os 7.3 and tv os 14.4 we should also be getting mac os big sur 11.2 pretty soon as well but of course this video is all about ios and ipad os 14.4 so we're going to take a look at what's new in the software talk about the performance the battery life the bug fixes and more so let's first start off with the size of this update you can see here on my iphone 12 pro max the update came in around 395 megabytes and across the board the update should be under 500 megabytes but that size will vary depending on your device and the version you're coming from and if we go and check out the build number into our settings here general about 14.4 you can see the build there is 18 d52 and then if we scroll down a little bit further to the modem firmware you can see we did also get a modem update it's now 1.42.03 so if you're having any type of connectivity issues maybe if you had an issue going from 5g to lte or vice versa that could possibly be solved in this update so now what's new in ios 14.4 and the first thing has to do with the homepod and homepod mini and the handoff feature so if you go into the home application and go to the top left to the little home icon there in home settings and then to software updates you want to make sure that your home pods are updated to ios 14.4 and after that you will notice that there's a new kind of method to the handoff feature so before when you had a homepod and you wanted to hand off the audio from your phone to the homepod or vice versa you would have to physically tap the homepod on top with your iphone but now in 14.4 you don't have to tap it and also you get haptic feedback when it moves closer so i'm going to start moving my homepod mini closer to my iphone here and you'll notice that it detects it right there and it says move closer to and tap for controls so it says move closer or tap for controls and i'm getting a lot of haptic feedback right now so the closer it gets you will start to feel the haptic feedback kind of increase and it gets bigger there and then eventually it pops up just like that and you get these new controls right here and you can see my homepod mini is right here so you get all the controls you have alarms down here you also have when you have a phone call there's an option to transfer the phone call to the homepod or vice versa and it's just a whole new menu here just a whole new way to do handoff with the homepod and homepod mini and it's really something that you just need to experience yourself because the haptic feedback i cannot translate that through video and it's just a really really cool feature if you have a homepod or homepod mini i highly recommend trying this out you can see the animation there just a really cool new feature here in 14.4 now the next feature has to do with dynamic wallpapers via shortcuts so i did make a full video showing you guys how to set dynamic wallpapers on your iphone which basically means that it changes wallpapers automatically every single day if you haven't seen that video i will leave it linked down in the description below but now there is a new toggle for the dynamic wallpaper shortcut so if we go into shortcuts right here and then go to dynamic wallpapers and we go to where the wallpaper section is and again i did make a full video on this so if you're lost just go watch that video but basically if you go to show more right here we have a new toggle for perspective zoom so that was not there on 14.3 or prior versions it only said show preview so now you can have perspective zoom on the wallpapers that are set via shortcuts another new feature in ios 14.4 is that links inside of messages now offer app clips so when you send a link or receive a link sometimes they will show an app clip if it is supported with that application so for example tick tock right here you will see the bottom section here has a setup for app clips so you can kind of see the code right there and it says open and of course app clips are the way that you can basically get into an application without fully downloading it it's kind of like you know you would use for parking applications and things like that but you can use it for tick tocks if you want to watch that video and tick tock without fully downloading the application you could do it via the app clip so that is new now in messages here in 14.4 which is pretty nice another new feature here in ios 14.4 is the ability to classify bluetooth device types so if we go into our settings here and go to bluetooth and if we tap the i on something like let's just say my car for example here you can see we now have a new section in the bluetooth settings called device type and if you go into that you can basically classify this bluetooth device by what it is so for example this is a car stereo so i would have it selected as car stereo but for example if i had like my shower speaker which i actually do have in here let's see down here if i tap on the eye and go to device type at first this was set to headphones but it's not actually a pair of headphones it is a speaker so i can go ahead and select that right there and if you're wondering why this is useful it actually tells you down here with this text it says specifying the type of device can ensure your headphone audio level measurements are accurate so this is going to be mainly beneficial for if you go into your settings and then go to sounds and haptics headphone safety if you have reduced loud sounds enabled and especially if you have like headphone notifications on this will be very useful for that and it will make you know your readings a lot more accurate inside the health application and things like that and you guys can kind of see that feature that i showed off first the handout feature is kind of you know i'm not really that close to my homepod and it keeps popping up like it wants to go ahead and hand off to that device so hopefully that gets fixed in future versions as well because it is quite annoying when you are close to a homepod and it just constantly happens and i keep feeling the haptic feedback and everything but anyways that is a cool new feature the fact that you can classify your bluetooth device types inside of your settings we also get a new voiceover feature in 14.4 so if we go down in our settings to accessibility and then to voiceover and then go down to rotor actions you'll see we have a new menu option there for direct touch apps and you can see it says direct touch allows voiceover to control an app directly without requiring more interaction and if you tap on that you can see you get options for direct touch on all these applications so you can basically select which application you want to have this feature turned on for which is great if you use voiceover another feature in 14.4 is that we now get the ability to scan qr codes that are small so in the past if there was a small qr code and i actually ran into this issue previously basically on like a menu or like on a door of a business sometimes they'll have really small qr codes and you would not be able to scan them like your phone wouldn't pick it up unless you got like directly on top of it but now in 14.4 your phone will be able to scan smaller qr codes which is nice especially since we're living in a time where qr codes are starting to get bigger and bigger there's also a new detection feature built into 14.4 that gives you a notification when the camera on your iphone is unable to be verified as a new genuine apple camera in the iphone 12 series so basically if you got your phone camera replaced like if it broke and you got it replaced and it wasn't through apple you will now get a notification showing that it wasn't you know a genuine part from app or wasn't installed by apple themselves so that's a pretty interesting feature and i have not seen anybody with this notification yet obviously since most people probably have not broken their iphone 12 camera yet and obviously 14.4 just came out as well but hopefully in the future i will be able to show you guys what that notification looks like another feature here which is more of a fix is that the airpods max glyph icon is now accurate so it now shows the accurate color up top when you connect them so i'm going to go ahead and put these on and show you guys what i mean so you can see there it shows the correct color in the airpods max glyph right there so in previous versions it would show like a silver pair of airpods max even though i have the space gray version and it just wouldn't be accurate every time but now in ios 14.4 that issue has been addressed but one thing that has not been addressed is ps5 and xbox series x controller support so for some reason we still do not have support for the next gen controllers on ios 14.4 we also still do not have 5g dual sim support so if you have dual sim you still can only use 5g on one of those sim cards hopefully we get that update in the future where we can have 5g on both sim cards now as for bug fixes apple does list quite a few bug fixes here in the changelog for this update so you should expect a much smoother experience overall coming from 14.3 or any previous ios 14 version so let's take a look at this change log and talk about it so the first thing is image artifacts could appear in hdr photos taken with iphone 12 pro so if you have an iphone 12 pro or 12 pro max and you took photos and you noticed artifacts on those photos after the fact that could have been an issue you could have been facing that bug that has now been addressed here in 14.4 i never faced that myself but i have heard of some people who were we also have a fix for the keyboard lag so a lot of people have been facing issues with keyboard lag over the past few ios versions and now ios 14.4 does address that so you can see here apple says typing may be delayed and word suggestions may not appear in the keyboard so if you're facing either of those issues which a lot of you have been that has been fixed here in 14.4 there's also another fix in messages where the keyboard would sometimes not come up as the correct language and that has now been addressed as well now if you also have the fitness widget on your home screen sometimes it would not display updated activity data now i have not been wearing my apple watch lately so it just shows minus blank anyways but if it was not updating for you that has been fixed here in 14.4 i know that was an issue in 14.3 we also have a fix for audio stories in the news application so if you go to the audio tab down here and you listen to the audio news plus audio and if you try to listen to that in car play sometimes the audio would not resume after being paused for spoken directions or siri but that has now been fixed here with this update there was also a really weird bug with switch control when it came to answering calls on the lock screen so sometimes if you had this enabled and you got a phone call on the lock screen you would just simply not be able to answer that phone call but now that has been fixed and you can use switch control and answer every call from your lock screen as expected and then there was another issue that was not mentioned in the change log but a lot of you guys have let me know in the comments that the issues with spotify have been addressed in 14.4 so a lot of people had issues with spotify draining battery and sometimes they would just randomly stop playing music you know i got many comments about this and that has been addressed here in 14.4 and likely in an update to spotify itself as well now as far as performance goes performance is a little bit better on 14.4 compared to 14.3 for me as you can see here in the geekbench scores on my iphone 12 pro max not a massive difference in the scores and also not a massive difference in just raw overall speed comparing 14.4 to 14.3 but if you were having any of the bugs and 14.3 that were addressed in 14.4 you will notice a nice improvement in just your overall daily usage but don't expect anything major just going from one of those updates to 14.4 unless you're just on like ios 14.0 going to 14.4 because in that case you will see a nice improvement and in terms of battery life it's kind of the same story here so 14.4 feels exactly the same as 14.3 to me and this comes from using the rc build which is pretty much the final build that developers get early before the public i've been using that for about a week and i've been able to test the battery life on the final version of 14.4 here and i can say that it's been pretty much exactly the same as 14.3 to me which is a good thing because 14.3 had pretty good battery life across the board for most devices except for maybe like the iphone 6s and the iphone se those are really the only ones that i've heard having issues with battery life on 14.3 so now should you update to ios 14.4 and i say that if you have a home pod or if you had any of the bugs that were fixed in this update if you were like facing any of those bugs in 14.3 and now they've been fixed in this update then yes you should definitely update to ios 14.4 now i would not expect a massive battery life or performance improvement in this update so if you're looking to update just for that you're going to be pretty disappointed because you're not going to find it you're really going to want to update to this version either a if you just always like updating and you always like keeping your device up to date which is pretty much recommended for most people but then again if you are having you know an excellent experience on 14.3 absolutely no issues and tremendous battery life you may not want to risk it by updating and you know getting some bugs and maybe not having as good of a battery life so that's happened before so if you're having an excellent experience on 14.3 and you don't have a homepod then i can see why you'd stay on 14.3 but for most people i would say go ahead and update to 14.4 you get security improvements performance improvements and of course you get these new features and it's a no-brainer update if you have a homepod or homepod mini because of the awesome new handoff feature now i did also want to mention ipad os 14.4 and i mentioned this last because there's really nothing at all that's different with ipad os 14.4 compared to ios 14.4 but i have been running it on my 2020 ipad pro 12.9 inch and it's been running fine i mean it's pretty much the same situation like i said as ios 14.4 the battery life and the performance are pretty much identical we just get those additional new features there as well so really nothing to talk about with ipad os unfortunately i wish we would get more you know exclusive features for the ipad in these updates but we didn't get any here with 14.4 but yeah guys there you have it that is ios and ipad os 14.4 let me know what you guys think about this update down in the comment section below let me know which device you're using this on along with your favorite feature in this update and of course if you guys want to stay up to date on all the latest ios updates and what's new in them make sure you guys hit that subscribe button down below but anyways guys thanks again for watching and i'll see you soon you\n"