Apple today announced iOS 10, a new major version of its operating system for iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches.

There will be a public beta available in July, and it will be a free upgrade to all compatible devices this fall. There will also be a developer preview available today. Apple made the announcement at its WWDC keynote.

iOS 10 has a redesigned control center with interactive notifications, and improvements to widgets (such as those that show calendar and weather information). 3D Touch can now do more: for example, you can press your screen to clear all notifications at once.

Siri is getting improvements, with the ability to book rides on services like Uber and Lyft, the ability to start and pause workouts, and make payments to send money to friends with Square Cash and other services. Siri will be more intelligent in messaging. For example, if a friend asks for the contact information of another friend, Siri can automatically provide the contact. Siri can also pull up calendar availability in message threads, and let you do multilingual typing without switching the keyboard language.

Apple also promised more intelligent photo management, including facial recognition technology to identify people in photos. The phone and tablet photo tools will help users sort photos by what's in them, such as specific people or objects (like a horse or mountain). Photos can also be sorted by automatically generated topics, like "on the water" or "at the beach." A new "memories" feed in the Photos app will take advantage of the new sorting tools.

Maps improvements include: The ability to pan and zoom further ahead to see traffic conditions, quick controls to see route details, and locations of food and gas stations on your route. Maps will tell you how much longer it will take to go to any of these places.

Apple is opening Maps to developers with Maps Extensions, which lets you make reservations through OpenTable, and will enable other types of integrations.

Music, News, Messages, and more

Apple Music—now with 15 million paying customers—was redesigned from the ground up to make it easier to find music, Apple said. The first tab in the Music app is now your library, where you can navigate between playlists, albums, songs, and downloaded music. Song lyrics will be available in the app as well.

The News app will let you buy subscriptions to publications such as National Geographic and The Wall Street Journal. It will also bring breaking news notifications and break up your articles into sections so you can browse by topic.

There will be an app to let you manage any HomeKit devices you might have in that place you sleep. From this single app, you can adjust your lights, get live feeds from cameras in your home, and more. You can also set up a morning routine that might involve saying, "Good morning, Siri," which would turn on your lights and open your shades.

The iPhone is still a phone, and there's actually some new phone features: voicemail transcription of incoming calls, and improved spam controls.

Messages—the most used app in iOS—got a bunch of new features. Rich links will display artwork and more details about a link that you share in a message. An "invisible ink" feature will let you slide your finger across a bubble to reveal text. Emojis will be three times bigger, and your devices will predict what emoji you might want to add to your message. Messages can even highlight words that could be turned into emojis. For example, it might highlight the word "pizza," letting you choose whether to turn that into a picture of a pizza. You can also add effects like fireworks that appear across the entire Messages screen.

"Children of tomorrow will have no understanding of the English language," said Apple Senior VP Craig Federighi.

But it's not all about emojis: Messages in iOS 10 will support handwritten messages.

Messages will also be opened up to developers, letting them build applications that can be used inside Messages. Users will have an "app drawer" with apps for Messages that they've downloaded. For example, friends ordering food could have a "group cart" in a group message, in which each person can add the food they want to the cart and the message thread. Another app would let users put stickers in Messages.

Several other features were mentioned quickly, but didn't get extended demos. Those include notes collaboration allowing users to work live with multiple people inside of notes, better editing for Live Photos, and a new split view showing multiple websites in Safari on iPad.

Apple promised that the new features won't come at the expense of security, saying that it uses end-to-end encryption by default for each new feature. "Deep learning" features that analyze user information are powered by on-device scans so that personal data doesn't leave users' devices, Apple said.

Besides updates to the OS itself, Apple introduced a new app for iPads called Swift Playgrounds. The app helps people learn how to code in the Swift programming language, with a graphical style geared toward kids.