Apple’s iOS 18 introduces enhanced customisation, a redesigned Photos app, new communication features, and Apple Intelligence, a personal intelligence system. Key updates include:
Customisation:iOS 18 offers new customisation options for the Home Screen, Lock Screen, and Control Center. Users can arrange apps and widgets freely, change their appearance with dark or tinted effects, and resise them. The redesigned Control Center provides quicker access to frequently used controls and supports adding third-party app controls. The controls gallery allows full customisation, including new groupings and sizes. Users can now switch or remove controls at the bottom of the Lock Screen and quickly access functions with the Action button on iPhone 15 Pro models.
Photos App: The Photos app in iOS 18 gets its biggest redesign ever, featuring a simplified single view, theme-based collections, and a new carousel view for daily highlights. Users can pin favorite collections for easy access and enjoy autoplaying content. The app is highly customisable, allowing users to organise and prioritise collections and highlights according to their preferences.
Mail and Messages: iOS 18 brings dynamic text effects to iMessage, allowing users to amplify letters, words, phrases, and emojis with animations. New formatting options include bold, underline, italics, and strikethrough. Tapbacks now support any emoji or sticker, and users can schedule messages. RCS support improves messaging with non-Apple devices, offering richer media and reliable group messaging.
Messages via satellite enables text communication when cellular or Wi-Fi is unavailable, using iPhone’s satellite technology. Dynamic Island indicates satellite connection, and messages are end-to-end encrypted for privacy.
Mail introduces on-device categorisation to organise emails into Primary, Transactions, Updates, and Promotions, with a new digest view to quickly scan important emails.
Apple Intelligence: Apple Intelligence in iOS 18 enhances writing and communication with new privacy-focused features. Users can rewrite, proofread, and summarise text across various apps with systemwide Writing Tools. The new Image Playground allows quick creation of playful images in Animation, Illustration, or Sketch styles. Memories in Photos helps users create story-driven movies from their photo libraries, and the Clean Up tool removes unwanted objects from photos.
Siri becomes more natural and personal, allowing users to switch between text and voice interactions. Private Cloud Compute ensures AI privacy by flexibly processing data on-device or on secure servers without storing user data. Additionally, Siri and Writing Tools integrate ChatGPT for advanced text and image capabilities.
Additional features include Safari enhancements, a new Passwords app, improved privacy controls, Apple Maps updates, Game Mode, Apple Pay improvements, and new functionalities in the Notes, Journal, Calendar, and Health apps. The release aims to make the iPhone more personal, capable, and intelligent.