iOS 18: New features
Apple’s latest software update, iOS 18, is redefining the way we interact with our iPhones in 2024. The update brings with it a host of new features that improve personalization, simplify daily tasks and enhance the overall user experience. From enhanced privacy options to clever messaging features, iOS 18 has something for everyone. Let’s take a look at the highlights of this major update.
Important adjustments to the home screen
With iOS 18, you can personalize your iPhone’s home screen even more. Finally, you can arrange app icons and widgets to better suit your needs and preferences. Finally! The customization options allow you to design your home screen to your liking by moving app icons and finally seeing your beloved wallpaper.
Customization of the dark mode
Dark Mode in iOS 18 has received a significant upgrade with the introduction of a customization sheet. This feature allows users to fine-tune the appearance of Dark Mode, making it easier to customize personal aesthetics or specific colors. The feature is similar to the one we already have on the lock screen.
Improved control center
The Control Center in iOS 18 is more flexible and user-friendly than ever before. You can now navigate through the controls in groups or with a single swipe and even resize them to suit your preferences. The update improves accessibility and allows you to use the side button or shortcuts on the lock screen to control your device’s functions faster and more efficiently.
Enhanced privacy features
iOS 18 significantly improves privacy with several powerful features. With App Lock, you can secure individual apps with a password or Face ID, ensuring sensitive information remains protected.
For even more privacy, you can use the Hidden Apps feature to store apps in a locked, hidden folder so that they are not visible.
Finally, Private Device Connections ensure secure and private interactions with other devices and protect your data during transfers and Bluetooth connections. Taken together, these improvements will give users more control and security.
Enhanced messaging features
The Messages app in iOS 18 introduces many features to improve communication. You can now respond with tapbacks to any emoji to express yourself even better. Scheduled Messages allows you to schedule messages and send them at a later time – a very nice feature to introduce to some people, such as your boss or your friend who lives in a different time zone.
With the new formatting options for messages, you can emphasize text with bold, italics or underlining and give your conversations more clarity and expression. Text effects bring your messages to life and make them visually appealing and memorable.
For iPhone 14 and later models, Satellite Messaging offers the ability to send encrypted messages via satellite when traditional networks are unavailable, so you can stay connected even in remote areas. iOS 18 also supports RCS messaging, enabling better media sharing across different platforms.
Enhanced email categorization
This is one of my favorite improvements that will make me use the Mail app more often. iOS 18 makes managing emails more intuitive with its advanced categorization features. The main category helps you focus on what’s important by prioritizing important emails and placing them easily accessible at the top of your inbox.
To further simplify the email experience, new categories for transactions, updates and actions have been introduced. This organization allows us to quickly find and manage different types of communication without clutter.
For frequent travelers, the flight information feature consolidates all flight details in one place, simplifying travel planning and ensuring that all important information is available at the touch of a button.
In addition, we can now easily re-categorize and move emails between categories to sort and organize the inbox according to personal preferences. These improvements make navigating and managing your emails more efficient and are tailored to our needs.
Redesigned Photos app
From now on, we will experience Photos very differently. iOS 18 unveils the biggest redesign of the Photos app yet, offering a more seamless and intuitive interface. The unified view brings all photos together into a single, cohesive display, making it easier to navigate and browse.
With controls at the bottom of the screen, accessing key tools is now even more convenient as they are all located at the bottom of the screen, improving usability. Advanced filters allow us to quickly find specific types of images, such as screenshots, making searches faster and more efficient.
The app also has smart collections that automatically group photos by themes such as travel, recent days and categories such as people and pets, making it easier to organize our memories.
Finally, the new carousel format for highlighted photos offers a visually stunning way to showcase and relive your best moments.
Accessibility: feature helps combat motion sickness
Vehicle Motion Cues are one of the new accessibility features introduced in iOS 18. With the help of animated dots placed on the edges of your phone’s screen, you should be freed from so-called motion sickness on board a vehicle.
These dots on the display move according to the movement and direction of the vehicle and give you the right instructions on your cell phone or tablet. This allows your brain to interpret that what you see and feel corresponds to the movement.
Video recording without sound interruption
It really was time Apple did something about this: With iOS 18, gone are the days when audio playback is interrupted when you take a photo or record a video.
In the camera settings, a toggle switch labeled “Allow audio playback” was discovered under the Camera sound section, which is activated by default. We have already presented this function in detail in our article on recording video without interrupting the sound.
Improved apps and functions
Before we get to the second—and very exciting—part of this guide, we will list some interesting optimizations to various apps. iOS 18 introduces significant improvements to the most important apps on the iPhone.
In Maps, we can now explore new topographic maps that offer detailed terrain views. We can also save and download these maps for offline use, so you can have reliable navigation even without internet access.
The Wallet app has been enhanced with the “Tap to Cash” function, which enables seamless transactions with Apple Card and Apple Pay. Event ticket management is also simplified with integrated event guides, so you can find all the details and access to events in one place.
For gamers, there is now Game Mode, which is designed to improve the gaming experience by minimizing background activity, ensuring smoother performance and reducing interruptions, making gaming even more intense and enjoyable. Android users have known this for a long time.
These are just a few of the new features in iOS 18 … but there was one more thing that was introduced today … and that’s Apple Intelligence.
Apple Intelligence on the iPhone
With the release of iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and macOS Sequoia, Apple is introducing a groundbreaking development to its software ecosystem: Apple Intelligence! This suite of intelligent features and capabilities is deeply integrated into the core of the operating systems and is designed to provide a seamless, private and personalized user experience.
At the center of this innovation are smart models that leverage advanced on-device processing and new private cloud computing to provide users with unparalleled features while maintaining strict data privacy.
Here’s the catch: In the US, Apple Intelligence will launch with limited features in the first beta versions starting in October 2024, once the free iOS 18.1 update is released. Other regions, languages, and additional features will be introduced later. For European countries outside the UK, no estimated dates have been announced yet. However, we’re already showcasing the most important functions here.
Personal understanding of context
Apple Intelligence is designed to get to know us and interact with us in a very personal way. It works directly on our devices and keeps our data secure and private. That’s why it can understand our individual preferences and create customized responses for us.
For example, it can prioritize notifications according to what is most important to us, create fun personalized images with emojis of our contacts, or retrieve and analyze data from our device that is relevant to us. In short, Apple Intelligence is here to make our daily tasks easier and more intuitive—hopefully!
Seamless cross-app actions
One of the coolest things about Apple Intelligence is that it can work in multiple apps at the same time. Thanks to the A17 Pro and M-series chips, these smart systems can seamlessly perform tasks across all your Apple apps. But yes, they don’t come on every iPhone, as you may have noticed from the chip selection.
Our digital assistant can now seamlessly jump between apps to help us with more complex tasks, increase productivity and give us useful insights based on what’s on our screen. Whether you’re juggling multiple tasks or searching for information, Apple Intelligence makes everything easier (maybe).
Enhanced privacy and processing
Apple takes privacy very seriously. The smart features in iOS, iPadOS and macOS are designed to process data without collecting personal information.
When more complex data processing is required, it is handled by Apple’s private cloud system, which uses Apple Silicon chips for secure and fast computing. In this way, even the most difficult tasks are completed efficiently while our data remains secure. This combination of processing on the device and in the cloud ensures that your data remains private and secure.
Siri development
Over the past 13 years, Siri has evolved from a simple voice assistant to an intelligent and personal companion, now enhanced by Apple Intelligence. For example, it can understand in real time that we make mistakes, making interactions smoother and more accurate, similar to models like ChatGPT-4o.
You can now give Siri commands for tasks such as setting alarms or searching for information. Siri also has a smart feature that helps you with on-screen tasks like adding new contacts or recognizing images in different apps. When Siri is active, a glowing light indicates that she is ready to help you and she can follow you through various tasks in the system. My impression is that Siri has become a useful and intuitive part of using Apple gadgets.
Advanced email management
Apple Intelligence makes emailing a breeze by adding smart features that help you communicate better. If you want to improve your tone of voice or make your emails sound more professional, there’s a handy rewriting tool. It also offers proofreading tools to find errors and make sure your messages are clear.
For long emails, it can create short, easy-to-read summaries, such as a “tl;dr” version, so you don’t have to trawl through a desert of text. Quick replies are a breeze with Smart Replies. Plus, your inbox now includes short summaries of each message so you can see the most important points at a glance and decide what to pay attention to first.
Smart notifications
Apple Intelligence has a great feature called “Reduce Interruptions” to help you stay focused. When you activate this feature, non-relevant notifications are filtered out to avoid distractions. This way you can stay on top of your tasks.
Genmoji and personalized emojis
Genmoji adds a creative touch to messaging. You can create emojis that match your mood or even create personalized emojis with your friends and family. This adds a fun and personal touch to your conversations and makes your interactions more interesting and unique.
Image Playground
With the new Image Playground feature, you can easily create and preview images directly on your device. You can play around with different styles and even animations and get suggestions for cool images. This feature works in various apps such as Keynote, Pages, Freeform and Messages and gives you many ways to express yourself visually.
Improvements in the photo library
Apple Intelligence could change the way you manage your photos. With the new Photo Library, you’ll get advanced editing tools to clean up backgrounds in your pictures – hopefully this will work as well as promised right away.
You can easily search for specific objects or people in your photos and videos. You can also create memory movies by simply entering prompts. These movies are automatically compiled with a story that uses your selected images and music from Apple Music. So your personal moments feel like curated experiences.
Free and accessible intelligence
Apple Intelligence is available to all users at no additional cost. By integrating ChatGPT-4o technology into Siri, you get a smarter, more advanced conversational assistant on all Apple devices.
In short, Apple Intelligence is a big step forward in the way we interact with our iPhone and iPad. It combines cutting-edge artificial intelligence with a strong commitment to privacy and seamless integration. I firmly believe that this is the AI we have been waiting for. What do you think?
Visual Intelligence
With “Visual Intelligence,” Apple introduces a new image recognition technology in iOS 18 for its latest iPhones. Combined with the new “Camera Control” button, this feature acts like Apple’s answer to Google Lens. For example, you can snap a photo of a restaurant, and instantly get details like its rating and menu. Or, take a picture of a concert poster, and the event will automatically be added to your calendar with the name and date.
Release date and availability of iOS 18
The developer beta of iOS 18 became available right after the WWDC presentation on June 10. The public beta was released a little over a month later, and the stable version is set to arrive in mid-September. Apple has confirmed that the final version of iOS 18 will be released starting on September 16.
| Schedule for the release of iOS | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| version | iOS 18 (2024) | |||
| WWDC announcement | ||||
| Public beta | ||||
| Stable release | ||||
List of iPhones that are eligible for the iOS 18 update
Will my device be compatible with the new update? Yes and no. The devices listed below will receive the iOS 18 update, but Apple Intelligence will only be available on the iPhone 15 Pro and newer devices. Yes, I am also disappointed as I have an iPhone 15.
- iPhone 15
- iPhone 15 Plus
- iPhone 15 Pro (+Apple Intelligence)
- iPhone 15 Pro Max (+Apple Intelligence)
- iPhone 14
- iPhone 14 Plus
- iPhone 14 Pro
- iPhone 14 Pro Max
- iPhone 13
- iPhone 13 mini
- iPhone 13 Pro
- iPhone 13 Pro Max
- iPhone SE (2022) (3rd generation)
- iPhone 12
- iPhone 12 mini
- iPhone 12 Pro
- iPhone 12 Pro Max
- iPhone SE (2020)
- iPhone SE (2022)
- iPhone 11
- iPhone 11 Pro
- iPhone 11 Pro Max
- iPhone XS Max
- iPhone XS
- iPhone XR
We’ve covered the most important features of iOS 18. Are there any others you think we should mention? And how frustrated are you about not being able to fully use Apple Intelligence, or having access to it only partially and with delays based on your location? Share your thoughts and frustrations in the comments!
