Notifications actually arrive now
The big one. If you fully swiped the app closed, notifications from other people often never showed up at all — new photos, comments, likes, nothing. Fixed. They're now queued and retried until delivered instead of quietly disappearing while your phone had the app asleep. Note: this fix has to be on the sending phone too, so if someone in your album is still on an old version, their activity won't notify you until they update. Also fixed: notifications that said "Someone added photos" instead of the person's name.
New: activity feed
Tap the bell to see everything that's happened across your albums — photos, comments, reactions — in one list. Tap a row to jump straight to that photo or comment. New items stay marked unread until you've seen them, and a fresh install no longer dumps your whole history in as "just now".
New: Light, Dark, and your own accent colour
Settings > Appearance. Pick Light, Dark or follow your system setting, and choose the accent colour used through the app. Every screen respects it, not just the home screen.
Albums, your way
Choose which photo is used as an album's cover (tap the pencil on the cover) — works whether you created the album or joined it, and everyone in the album sees your choice. Hide albums you don't want on your home screen, and drag to reorder them; your layout follows you to your other devices. Your categories now survive reinstalls and match across devices. Covers no longer crop faces off, and they fill in as photos download instead of sitting on a placeholder until you open the album.
New: add photos from the Files app
You're no longer limited to your camera roll and the camera. Import straight from Files — iCloud Drive, Dropbox, downloads, wherever — with dates, locations and orientation coming through correctly.
Memory videos, rebuilt
Single photos now fill the screen properly and end on the whole photo instead of panning around and cutting off faces. What you see in the preview is exactly what gets exported. Long is now genuinely longer than Short (more moments kept, rather than cramming more photos onto each screen). Photos that used to vanish from the finished video now show up. Saving to your memories works reliably, and landscape playback is cleaned up.
Joining and sharing
When an owner approves your request you're now joined automatically — no waiting or retapping the link. Fixed a bad one where leaving a shared album could stop other albums from that same person syncing, and rejoining an album you'd previously left now works. Owners get a proper notification when someone asks to join, and tapping it opens the request.
Speed and polish
Home screen scrolling is smooth again. Adding photos no longer freezes the interface while they're processed. Changing your display name is instant (it used to spin for minutes) and updates on your photos right away. Photo info — camera, date, location — now works even for photos you haven't downloaded in full. And there's a comment preview strip on photos so you can see a conversation exists without opening it.
