Apple’s iOS 14.6 Goes Public for all iPhone Users

Apple’s launched iOS 14.6 to the public this week, which includes new features like AirTag, Apple’s Card Family, and paid subscriptions in the Apple’s Podcasts app, among other things. However, it appears that Apple’s has secretly improved the Shortcuts software, which now performs actions faster on iPhone and iPads running the new version of iOS.

According to some users on Twitter and Reddit, actions in the Shortcuts app run smoother with iOS 14.6 and iOS 14.7 beta. One of the findings shows that a 700-action shortcut took about 30 seconds to run on iOS 14.5, but now it takes 13 seconds with iOS 14.6. Other users say that the pace increased marginally after the update, but not significantly.

9to5Mac ran some tests and discovered that both iOS 14.6 and iOS 14.7 beta have some enhancements. However, as we predicted, this becomes even more apparent when it comes to shortcuts of dozens or hundreds of acts. We ran a shortcut with 380 shows in one of our experiments. Although an iPhone running iOS 14.5.1 took 8 seconds to complete the tasks, an iPhone running iOS 14.6 took just 4 seconds.

The experiments were carried out on an iPhone 12 mini and an iPhone 12 Pro Max. Both of which were equipped with the A14 Bionic processor. The iOS 14.6 release notes make no mention of any updates to the Shortcuts app, but it’s nice to see that it’s gotten faster. The new updates to the app have brought several improvements to iPhone users.