There’s a lots of talk about dark mode. Whoopi. I get to read white letters on black background. I did that back in 1980 on a VT100 terminal. There’s talk about Animojis, but I’m not a teen. I use words when I communicate. People love the formatting options in Mail although I still can’t create a URL link to a phrase.
However, there are a few killer features I love that simply aren’t talked about.
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Call Blocking: This was the damn reason I decided to download iOS 13 as a beta in the first place. Previously, you could use Do Not Disturb to block calls not in your contacts. It was wanky, but if you’re getting 40 calls per day and 35 of them are scammers, it was your only hope for relief.
With iOS 13, if a caller is not in your contacts and not in messages and not in any emails, that is if you never ever had contact with that person before, you can send that call directly to voicemail. Peace and quiet achievement earned. -
Block Mail Sender: No one ever mentioned this. I have a MacBook and a $800 standing desk. I have a nice quiet office. My MacBook has an external monitor attached. Yet, handle most of my emails and on my iPhone even if I am standing right in front of my MacBook. For example, I am on my couch in my family room composing this while my MacBook is no more than 30 feet away.
I mention this because there is a feature I like on MacOS’s Mail program that iOS doesn’t have: filtering. Every morning, I have about 20 to 30 spam emails in my inbox. I swipe most of them to delete them. Not a particularly hard or time consuming task, but it’s still irritating. However, not irritating enough for me to get off my duff, go to my Mac and setup filtering.
iOS 13 now allows you to block senders. You can simply mark emails as blocked, is send them unceremoniously to the trash. It’s a bit convoluted to do, but it’s there. First, go into Settings->Mail and select what you want to do with Block email. Here you can specify whether or not you want to send them to the Trash or just make them. When you read an email from a sender you don’t want, click on the Sender’s name in the email. This exposes their email address. Long click on the email address, and there’s an option to “Block this sender”.
To unblock senders, you need to go to Settings->Mail and delete them from the list. Note this works across all email addresses. You cannot block a sender to one address, but allow them at another. However, I doubt this would be a problem.
So what are your killer features in iOS 13 that you might be so anxious to have that you’re willing to download the beta?
And don’t say Animojis.
