The iOS 13 beta has been pretty uneventful particularly when compared to the Catalina beta but FWIW here is a list of items that have grabbed my attention:
  • HOME has a new and arguably improved UI. Cleaner and easier to understand.
  • SIRI noticeably improved speech recognition as well as improved sensitivity (last night a character on television asked a question and Siri repsonded — even though the key phrase "hey Siri" had not been used)
  • Machine Learning my iPhone is picking up on my daily routines and responding by doing things without being prompted. For example when I turn off the alarm in the morning the phone turns on the lights in the bedroom, displays the day's weather, shows the first calendar event for the day. I am constantly being prompted to add new Siri Shortcuts based on repeated daily routines.
  • REMINDERS has a new and arguably improved UI including creating reminders via Siri. Apparently there are a lot of under the hood improvements that include rebuilding the database, but it won't do that until all the linked devices on my Appel account have been updated to Catalina, iOS 13, & iPadOS 13. Yes it keeps prodding me to update everything as well. (I'm holding off on upgrading my sever until Catalina is a bit more stable and I still boot into a Mojave system on an external drive of my MBP.)
  • FIND MY… while I really have not had the opportunity to put this new app/feature to a full test (hopefully I never will need the full test which includes "bricking" the iPhone) but it really is pretty nice and finding persons works GREAT. You can even specify how long someone can find you!
  • NOTES another new UI with different notes views, improved search capability and shared folders for working with teams.
  • Pages, Numbers, Keynote These are the full featured apps that work the same on iOS, iPadOS, & MacOS the biggest new feature in Pages and Numbers is the addition of Styles like you find in any serious Word Processing or spreadsheet software. Like 'em or hate 'em (they are not my first or even second choice) they have the functionality to actually be useful in a business or personal environment even with the limits the iPhone's form factor. I'v said it before and will likely say it again — these apps are a paean to Apples new "build it once, run it anywhere" development structure. FWIW Pages on the iPhone is only 450.4 MB and Numbers 438.4 MB in size. On Catalina they are 424.1 and 431.8 respectively.
  • STABILITY So far so good. iOS 13 and apps running on iOS 13 have been rock solid, unlike Catalina where Safari has crashed twice while I was drafting this post 😟

If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein