Apple Releases iOS 16.4 and iPadOS 16.4 With New Emoji, Bug Fixes, Security Updates, and More

I re-opted into the beta program with the 3rd update to the iOS 16.4 beta specifically to see if heading navigation had improved. I was not disappointed. now I can actually use apps like Amazon Prime Video and Disney+ comfortably.

I just wanted to let people know that if you don't see the new voice isolation feature, it probably means that you have wifi calling turned on. I noticed this when the RC came out, but of course I couldn't bring it up until now. I can only see the voice isolation option when my wifi calling is off. I just wanted to put it out there in case others can't find the voice isolation feature.

Tested with a friend while I was on a paratransit van and she said it sounded like I was at home. The lift came out as a bit of static.

I am very happy that the headings are working as I expected. Was very frustrated by this very strange bug.

Under the listen tab in the music app, headings doesn't work consistently.

Neat! Anyone know if this works with AirPods, or is it just when using the ear piece or speaker phone?

VO still doesn't recognize the Dolby Atmos icon in the now playing screen in the music app unless you turn on screen recognition. VO still sees the lossless icon when playing music on my homepod though. Kind of seems silly to email Apple accessibility about a small thing like that but I may do it anyway. Would've reported it if I were still on the beta.

Safari seems a little bit snappier after the update though, so yay for that.

After updating both an iPhone 8 and 11 to 16.4, I've noticed VoiceOver has become more sluggish. Is anyone else noticing this? I'm using the American female Siri voice which is identified as number 4 by the system. I've also noticed VoiceOver will randomly crash and restart itself.

What ever happened to that custom accessibility feature that Apple hinted at before 16.2 was released?

It was supposed to be a simplified way to use the phone.

I guess they're saving it for iOS 17.

Hello, my friend. I think this is a bug. Someone from Applevis, sorry I don't remember who laughs is, taught me how to switch to any Eloquence voice and then go back to the voice you want to use to resume performance

I thought you needed to turn map to help you in accessibility and voiceover. Nothing there regarding maps.

As for Maps, they have become accessible in the Weather app. Now if you press a finger on the Map area and move around without removing your finger from the screen, VoiceOver will announce the location, its relative position to your selected city in the app, and its general weather forecast. You'll also hear beeps to assist with the process.

I thought it was in Map also. Oh well.

Hello. I updated to iOS 16.4. I've found strange VoiceOver behavior while typing. Even when haptic signal are turned off when typing on the keyboard, haptic signal are played when typing with VoiceOver. However, if the same letter is touched more than twice, then there is no haptic signal. Normal behavior only occurs when the keyboard is switched to numbers and symbols mode and when punctuation characters such as periods, commas, and so on are entered.
I have the keyboard response set to sound only, and in the VoiceOver settings I tried to remove haptic signals, the behavior when typing letters is preserved anyway. Everything works fine without VoiceOver.

AM trying to find how can i isolate the voice while i am in a call.
steps please?

I knew that arabic voices receive 2 new voices in siri, but they are not present.
any ideas?

Does anyone have a list of the new emojis?

Thanks

@Blind angel 444 Check here: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/ios-16-4-brings-these-new-emoji-to-your-iphone

I can definitely confirm haptic feedback appears to be enabled even though I have it disabled in settings.
I tried to enable it then disable it again with no difference.

I do not do the beta program for iPhone, but I understand that there is a new setting in iOS 16.4. I understand that you now have a different wa yto update your beta versions if you are in the beta program. Here is a link to a very short video about the same. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-PKuhLikxbE

Ever since I updated, VoiceOver will randomly crash. i never know when it's going to do it. It's been happening on a lot of my apps. I have screen recognition and caption pannelling turned off.

Glad that the heading navigation issue is mostly fixed. Also, the bottom toolbars in Safari are also not disappearing, as was happening since a few updates earlier.

Hi I am still on 15.7.1 as I heard a lot of bad bugs with 16 is it worth upgrading yet or should I still hold off?

I have the new software on both IPhone and IPad. Now when in podcasts, I’m not able to navigate by chapter. The list of chapters appears to be hidden. If you have scene this, have you found a fix? Voiceover is only mentioning the Hide button.

I just saw this in the podcasts app. VO just tries to describe a logo. I can see some of the chapters with screen recognition on. Weird.

For anyone who "creates" a new contact, when you get the emergency bypass switch, 0 is no, 1 is yes. As for the upgrade question, only you can decide that so without pulling my beautiful tresses out, as ing, why? I'll just walk off here. :) I understand confusion and concern but, asking almost every minor or major update, It's your choice. sir/madam I just don't get why everyone asks, how do we know what you are using? We don't so... Enjoy your day.

Just wanted to let everyone know that navigation in the books app has been restored. There is once again a page picker in the books interface. This is a bug that has persisted since the redesign of books in IOS 16.0, and getting it fixed is a huge quality of life improvement.

Regarding the chapters in apple podcasts, you can still hide and show chapters, but when they're shown, voiceover doesn't see it.

The only way I managed to get it to work is to use screen recognition.

You should always upgrade as they have security fixes and no software or OS will be bug free so if you are waiting for that Never use any technology again. Bug free doesn't exist.

Denis has a good point, no software is bug free, ever. I'd recommend upgrading, for what it's worth, but yeah. If you want completery bug free software, then steering clear from all technology is the answer. Having had ios16 since the beginning, most bugs have been ironed out, however you might still encouter some depending on your use case, i.e: if you use podcasts app as others here have said, but over all, its pretty stable with no bug i'd call device breaking, but that's from my experience, other's will very as no two people use software or devices in the same exact way.

anyone know that how to use the Voice Isolation for cellular calls ?
when I am in the phone calls it seems can not find the button or anything to activate it in the control center

This was happening to me almost constantly throughout the beta cycle, but has been reduced to only a couple of times a day at most. It's still really annoying though. What I've found is that it only seems to happen when you use an Eloquence voice. I might be wrong about that, but while the crashes were at their worst, I switched back to Samantha and everything stopped. Unfortunately whatever is happening, it's serious. I sometimes find that when VoiceOver goes unresponsive, it crashes the other apps that are playing audio, including phone calling apps and music or other media.

My VoiceOver is also noticeably more sluggish than it was in 16.3 though, and I'm not super happy about that. That doesn't seem to be fixed no matter which voice I switch to. I still have a backup from November and am strongly considering reverting to that and sticking to 16.3 for now, but with the major crash bug fixed I'm not sure it's worth trying to reconfigure 4 months of changes to my phone.

well,
this voice over issue,
llosing focus and jumping around when reading things still didn't fix.
especially in chinese languages.

To turn it on, you need to be on a call. If you have hearing aids, disconnect them and do the call on speaker. Once the call starts talking, go to control center. Find airplane mode. To the left that you will see mic mode. Double tap. You will see three options: wide spectrum, standard (which is default) and voice isolation. Double tap that. And now it is on. you can reconnect your hearing aids at this point. The next time you are on a call, you will notice a difference.

I spoke with Apple accessibility yesterday. It is a very big bug. they ran a diagnostic on my phone and everything looks fine. however, they did say that they have enough hard evidence to take to their engineers. The only workaround is to turn VoiceOver off for about 20 seconds then turn it back on. (Very annoying.) Mine will work for 20 minutes then start crashing. It does this on all voices. Hopefully, there will be a fix soon.

Hello,
My intention is not to govern the topic, but I am simply posting this as a word of advice.
I see a lot of questions were being asked about voice isolation. @Earl posted a comment, (#2 in the list), explaining why this is happening. It is because it is only visible with WiFi Calling disabled.
So my advice, make sure to browse the topic, because a question that you might have has probably already been answered.
Have a good day.

As sad as it is, I only have luck using Alex or Samantha Compact. This is an iPhone 12 running 16.4, and for some reason, all the other voices crash, especially in apps with lots of content on the screen.
I used to use Karen Premium, but it would cause VoiceOver to crash quite consistently. I believe it is probably because the voices take up a lot of RAM on the phone, but I could be wrong, so take this with a grain of salt.

I just got a bug or something els. In the past when I got a span call, and I was not close to the phone, I cover my watch face with hand to end call. I did it this time and phone kept ringing. Maybe apple took it out or broke it when stopping alarm from ringing in watch when covering face. Now that is gone.

I upgrated to ios 16.4, using elequence reed, iphone 12, and haven't experienced any crashes at all. When do these crashes occur, in the main os or in specific apps, or places with a lot of content in them I.e, web pages? Could rebooting help? I don't get it though, why do these bugs seem to happen to some but not others? Could it be a configuration thing such as the voice your using causing this, or a specific app or something?
Would it help if we did a survey and see if we could figure out what could ba causing it?

One way to tell for sure if VO crashes is to turn on your screen curtain. When VO says Screen Curtain On, VoiceOver just crashed and has restarted. You can also tell by your cursor jumping back to the top, although that is not fool-proof.

Updated using Nicky voice. No crashes like you've described. Turned the screen curtain on and off a few times, no crash. I guess this is good for me :) but I really am sorry you're experiencing this, and glad Apple could take the issue to their engineers.

I am glad to report that the issue which caused any connected braille display to become unresponsive upon opening the notification center has been fixed, at least for me.

Not sure if it is this release but an issue in the home app that stopped me adding accessories like Sonos speakears seems to be fixed. At least i can see them now. Will try setting them up when i have a bit more time.

So happy headings are working better. Only tried google app so far but seems back to normal now.

In the day or so since I've updated it seems as though the bugs involving the braille display's editing commands not working and the enter key bringing up a menu of these items instead of making a newline seems to be fixed!Anybody else noticed that?

Friends, I have an iPhone 11 Pro Max. Since iOS 16. Two, I realize that VoiceOver crashes in some cases. One situation that always made it crash was to open the photo application and browse my library, it would crash a few times, when it came back it could read or not the descriptions of the photos. I updated and last Monday to the new version, I had several crashes when switched to Spotify. I restarted the device and everything went back to normal. It's worth remembering that I'm using Siri's male voice for Brazil

So anybody who is experienceing crashes have y'all tried restarting your devices?

Hello. I was able to fix an issue with VoiceOver haptic feedback while typing. Everything is very simple: go to Settings, General, Keyboard and turn off the Slide to Type option. That's all! Now, while typing, VoiceOver will behave as usual without haptic feedback.

My 13 Pro is crashing using Ava, especially when reading through Apple News articles. It's similar to the old bug that would stop reading, or send the focus to the top when a embedded content was reached. It used to be if I came to a embedded video, sometimes swiping would not go past it. Sometimes if I'm doing a "say all" type read, it would loop back to the top of the page.

Now, it sometimes does those things, but much more often I will hear, "Screen curtain enabled."

I have restarted several times.

Please forgive me if others have already drawn attention to this bug.

What happens is that I'll be happily reading line by line in apps, or I'll be continuously reading by means of a two finger swipe down, and IOS 16.4 and/or VoiceOver will suddenly say screen curtain off (or on), bring focus to the top, and force me to start hunting for the point where it happened.

Not nice, Apple.

Hello, I've been using iOS for years and with 16th version I've found following bugs
1. Minor bug when the mative weather app is open an icon "wi-fi off" is announced by VoiceOver, in fact no such icon appears on phone's screen.
2. !he critical bug concerns Apple books, some of these books, rreviously interpreted correctly, are eurrently rad by Samantha voice. Imagine how hard it is to ho through a book written in Polish with US English Samantha voice. Essentially, when a book is open it is impossible to change language on VO rotor.
Any suggestions?