iOS 11

Crack down on text message spam with SMS Shield

There’s no two ways about it: unsolicited texts are an issue. Be it outright spam, carrier notifications or simply unpalatable contacts, more often than not your phone fails to protect you from some rather unsavoury messages.

Interestingly, text message security is an unusual topic rarely broached, either because it remains forced to live a sad existence in the shadow of the seemingly more profitable email bubble, or because it’s decidedly trickier to contrive a service that genuinely satisfies text message users.

For all intents and purposes, SMS Shield has pulled off that feat. Once downloaded and set up (subscription fees range from $5.99 yearly to $0.99 monthly corresponding with a 1-year, 1/2-year and 1-month package), you can’t help but feel that your iPhone’s Messages app just battened down the hatches.

Iryss: an app that uses Machine Learning to identify objects

There are countless new features to take advantage of in iOS 11, but many of them are under the hood in the form of APIs and require App Store apps to get the full effect.

Iryss is a new app developed by Florian Hebrard, better known by the jailbreak community as Ziph0n, that takes advantage of Apple’s brand-new CoreML (Machine Learning) API to recognize objects around you in real time.