iOS 13 support — and WWDC ’19

My annual update on iOS 13 compatibility, and what I saw at Apple’s 2019 Worldwide Developer Conference.

The short version is this: iPhone Backup Extractor supports iOS 13. We shipped an update on June 6th (whilst WWDC was still ongoing) to cover that, and we’ve continued to ship updates here and there whilst Apple make adjustments in the Developer Preview and public beta builds. It’s exciting to see iPadOS emerge — and of course, we have full support for it, along with macOS Catalina’s Finder-managed iOS backups.

Apple’s continued focus on security and privacy

When I wrote last year, I praised Apple for their approach to privacy, and it seems over the last twelve months that the rest of the world have caught on to this. Apple’s user-first privacy approach is the right one, and their progress deepening it with true 2FA on the Watch, biometric iCloud access, in-app single sign-on and securely partitioned BYOB device management.

Of course, there are times when this is unhelpful to our users, and makes life difficult for us where we seek to access the full extent of their data, but on balance we feel it is better than the alternative.

2019’s WWDC experience — and iTunes news

I was particularly excited by a number of the new releases Apple announced at the event. WatchOS’ step to greater independence, and the developments with Catalyst — allowing app makers to run their code on both iOS and macOS — are both profound. I love the AppleTV and was pleased to see it gain a multi-user mode.

iTunes was due a change, and on macOS its functionality has been broken up into a number of separate apps. Most importantly, macOS itself now gains the ability to control backup and restore of iOS (and iPadOS) devices, and that process is managed by Finder. A number of minor changes have been introduced to the structure of backups, but it's common for larger changes to appear later in the beta releases, and in the case of iCloud, closer to or even after the September release date.

In past years we've written about the team's favourite features or new releases, and this year it's clearly a single thing. Most of the team at Reincubate run three screens, and we particularly love the 5K iMac for its screen quality. The new Mac Pro is likely overkill for our office -- at $15,000 for the start of a decent spec -- but the new Pro Display is pretty exciting.

Last year marked Reincubate's 10th year helping users recover data from iOS devices. It's a privilege to be here a decade later, and still going strong with iOS 13. Thanks for your support. ❤️