What is Apple iOS 8 ?

 iOS 8 was introduced during Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference on June 2, 2014 and was released to the public on September 17, 2014.

  Designed for use with Apple’s multi-touch devices, iOS 8 supports input through direct screen manipulation. The system retains its familiar control scheme of user gestures, such as pinching, tapping and swiping. iOS 8 focuses on under-the-hood updates, largely retaining the major visual updates of iOS 7.

iOS 8 was a major release for Apple introducing several new major user facing features. iOS 8 in addition to mopping up some of the outstanding issues, also brought together Apple’s iOS devices and Mac computers by introducing Hand Off and Continuity features. Allows tasks started on one device to be picked up seamlessly on another. Answer a phone call on an iPad or Mac or send and receive SMS/MMS messages on an iPad or Mac. Apple Pay launched and supported by the iPhone 6/6 Plus. Later releases of iOS 8 would bring support for the Apple Watch and the launch of Apple Music.

Apple also introduced Metal, a low overhead 3D hardware accelerated API providing improved performance for graphically rich games and applications.

Version History

iOS 8.0 - 8.0.2

iOS 8.1 - 8.1.3

iOS 8.2

iOS 8.3

iOS 8.4 - 8.4.1

 features in iOS 8 include:

• Handoff: A feature that lets one pass documents, texts and phone calls from iPhones to Mac computers and between other Apple devices.
• Health app: A centralized app for recording and interpreting all exercise and health data and connecting to health professionals.
• Family Sharing enables sharing among up to six Apple IDs within a household. It also offers the options of purchase requests rather than having a child's account fully enabled with credit card details, allowing the parent to make the final decision.
• Photos offer enhanced searching as well as albums to better organize photographs. iCloud library automatically stores all photographs, making them accessible from all of the user’s Apple computers and devices.
• Predictive text suggests likely words as you type, long a feature on Blackberry and Android. Apple claims the feature is implemented in a superior way, as the software is contextually aware of what you might say to each individual.
• Messages can include voice and video to easily send an audio message or share what you are seeing with friends.
• Enterprise benefits from the option of fingerprint ID as a second authentication factor (2FA), which Improves security, reduces frequency of password requests.
• Better single sign-on support, allowing enterprise certificates to be used transparently to log users into enterprise apps.
• Always-on VPN support.
• Data at rest is protected by encryption, including all app data and iOS native calendar items, contacts, email, messages, notes and reminders.
• Protection for data in transit is increased with always-on VPN and per-message S/MIME encryption for email.