It has been nearly three weeks since Apple unveiled iOS 9 at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference and, as developers continue to experiment with the new operating system, we continue to learn about new features and tweaks. The release of iOS 9 beta 2 this week brought to light a new update process for iPhones with limited storage space, increased user data privacy, and a host of smaller tweaks to the operating systems design and functions.

No space for the iOS 9 update? No problem

Developers running iOS 9 beta 1 discovered an interesting feature when they attempted to update to iOS 9 beta 2.

iOS 9 requires 1.3 GB of free space on an iPhone to install. If a user’s phone does not have enough free space, iOS 9 can temporarily delete some apps and automatically reinstall them – presumably with all data intact – after the update is completed.

This is good news for owners of 16 GB iPhones who often suffer from a lack of onboard storage.

iOS 9 apps get tweaked

The second iOS 9 beta revealed a few smaller, but notable, tweaks to apps, including layout changes for Podcasts, Search settings for individual third-party apps, new Safari options, Apple Watch app is renamed to just Watch, and more. Here is a complete list of iOS 9 beta 2 changes.

Advertisers cannot spy on installed apps

Apple furthers its effort to protect user privacy and data in iOS 9 and, among other privacy enhancements, are preventing apps from scanning users’ iPhone for other installed apps.

A report this week detailed how companies like Twitter Inc. and Facebook are exploiting an iOS API designed to improve inter-app communication to gather data on what apps users’ have installed on their iPhone. This data is then used to serve users’ highly targeted ads for other apps and services.

iOS 9 is due to be released as a public beta in July (see our ‘How-To’ guide to sign up for the iOS 9 public beta) and will arrive as a general release sometime in September.

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