Apple announced the public release of iOS5 on October 12th today.

We have been testing iOS5 for several months now, and we are very excited about many of the new features:

• Twitter Integration & Game Center improvements – Integrated properly, this can make apps more discoverable which translates directly into improved app rankings and sales
• Newsstand – this is an important new feature for magazine and subscription applications. We expect to see many print publishers produce apps incorporating these features.
• Notification Center – this will make notifications more useful in general. Since many applications send push notifications, this will make notifications less intrusive to users and will make it more likely for users to subscribe to push notifications knowing that they will be less invasive.
• iCloud – we believe the ease of integrating iCloud and cloud syncing will reduce the technical bar to creating applications that share user content across multiple devices. With many users purchasing second and third iOS devices, data synchronization is more important than ever.
• Automatic Reference Counting – while it’s not a user-visible feature, this important new technology helps reduce the cost and effort of writing iOS applications. We are working hard to get ARC technology baked into new applications and future updates.