Best iOS 18 Updates For Each Device: Part I - iPhone
In Part I of this series we take a look at upcoming IOS 18 features based on how beneficial they will be for your daily use, work-flow, and accessibility.
For this series, we will start with the iPhone and take you through each device’s main upgrades. We will mostly focus on features that do not implement the upcoming ‘Apple Intelligence’ as we save that for when more details and functionality are examined by hand. Apple has stated there will be Intelligence features to be released through early 2025, so for now, we will look at features to be seen by fall or early winter.
UI/Home and Lock Screen
It certainly is not the biggest upgrade from a technical standpoint, but Apple users can now drag their app icons on the home screen and place them on any part of their home screen grid. This (obviously) opens more creative options for placement of app groups, accent colors of app icons, formation of the app icons, widgets (that can now be made from within the quick action menu), and icon and widget resizing. Users can try different wallpapers now to fit these formations, for example, if you want all apps on the left side of your screen, you can find a ‘half and half’ colored wallpapers to contrast the color on your app icons.
These updates bring much-needed personalization and life to a home screen that held the same song and dance for over a decade and lacked features to assist you comfortably in day-to-day situations. The addition of choosing your lock screen app pair will especially help when needing to send a text, take a picture, set a calendar event, or open your favorite app in an instant.
The lock screen is worth noting on its own here. Not only are you able to set a pair of apps, but any built-in feature on your phone such as live speech, code scanning, and calculator, giving you over 50 different options to replace the standard ‘Camera’ and ‘Flashlight’. Combined with the lock screen widget functionality being improved, this could potentially turn your lock screen into its own control panel for accessibility, entertainment, and media.
Control Center
With Apple focusing more on ease of access for its devices, it would not be possible without a new and improved control center that is uniform throughout the ecosystem. Similar to the lock screen, you can now add nearly any accessibility feature to the control center in a position that best suits your daily use. From the top ‘page’ of your control center you will now see icons to the right of your screen such as a heart, music symbol, house, and network. These make up your complete control center, along with the ability to add a blank page with an empty grid. With each page being accessible by swiping up and down, it frees more space and compels even the most minimal users to explore the phone's full capabilities.
The pages can be edited to your liking, making this a foolproof update to let all users experience it how they choose. Something that glares to mind seeing these updates is how easy it will be to control different Apple devices without actually touching them. For those with a full Apple ecosystem, this will be especially useful for media control, file sharing, accessibility options, and daily workflow. More personal advantages will be for those with disabilities, sensory issues, or physical ailments as they continue to focus on accessibility features being easier to incorporate daily such as the hearing, motor, and vision options.
When focusing on the potential benefits to workflow and media consumption, attention immediately shifts towards cross-device controls. Apple previewed it’s new screen-mirroring option that will let you control your phone screen with the device it is projecting to. Apple intends to make their ecosystem users’ lives a bit easier with similar enhancements to the iPhone itself. More of these options will be found on the ‘house’ and ‘music symbol’ icons in the Control Center, showing controls for audio output settings, HomePod controls, muting your smart TV, or locking your front door. While not new features, they are now at your disposal in a much easier fashion.
Photos
The Photos app may have gotten the most personal attention from the IOS 18 features so let’s outline just some of our favorite changes.
UI
Search and Filter options
Collections
Memories
The new UI design for photos is much more ‘user’ friendly in overall layout and functionality. Whether you need to go some months to years back in screenshots or photos transferred from another device, Apple has made it quicker to traverse the app. Simple tweaks like removing the bottom row where you would find the Library, For You, Albums, and Search tabs come to mind seeing as you aren’t using those each time you open the app. The point of any UI is to let you use each function and feature as you need while having what you do not just an instant away. Apple has seemingly (for now) perfected this, letting you swipe down to reach all your key memories and categories, rather than switching the tab completely.
Within the UI you can find the massively overhauled search and filter optimization which helps when sifting through albums of different media types, for example. When viewing a single picture your options for the image are directly under the photo and when editing the picture you are able to temporarily switch your phone’s theme from dark or light (just in the app) to get a better perspective on color and contrast.
Collections and Memories are more of a personal favorite as a photographer, but will still serve a purpose to anyone finding themselves in the photos app. Collections lets you place tags on each photo so they can be added to their overall ‘Collection’ whether that be vacation photos or a group of photos imported from your camera. In the case of photography, this could help categorize photos that are already edited or still need to be, serving as a pre-google drive organization option. There are countless options to fit personal preference when managing large groups of images at once and ways to find those images simply by an object seen on the image. Memories on the other hand will automatically show you your images and video from that day from previous years and could serve as a fun quick way to share old memories. As any Facebook user can tell you, however, some ‘memories’ are best left as such, so explore each trip with caution!
Calendars/Reminders/Notes
We will group these together with each fitting into the ‘productivity’ role. The main event here is the new integration between Reminders and Calendar. When creating an event or in this case a reminder within Calendar, it will now give you all the detail options that you get when creating an event in Reminders. For example, you can create a reminder, give it a ‘work’ tag, flag it for top priority, and it will show up in your Reminders app instantly. Similar to the app icon resizing ability, this upgrade is small in a technical sense but will be extremely beneficial with the new choices of Compact, Stacked, Details, and List views for Calendar. Reminders also received some improvements within the app specifically to help navigation like finding subtasks within different lists and editing those subtasks.
Notes has now received new features that could potentially push you to stop using some extra apps as advertised. To start is the ability to record voice memos within a note or even record a phone call and have it transcribed in a note for later use. That voice recording and transcript can also be saved and shared to multiple apps including Messages. Images from your library can now be integrated directly into a note without sharing or pasting using the ‘Attach File’ option. This means with other apps like Notes now able to be set as Lock Screen apps you could unlock your phone, swipe up on ‘Notes’ into a to-do list, and add pictures of the correct brands of items you need to get at the store.
Siri…Yes, Siri!
While the new and improved Siri is mainly at the hands of Apple Intelligence, Siri is maybe the most important asset that ties all the IOS 18 updates together. To start Siri received a brand new UI as well, including its most (visibly) different feature which similar to Edge Lighting on Samsung devices, will have your display border turn different colors as the voice prompt is activated. You will be able to change these colors at a later time, but no guarantee that that function will be available immediately. The meat of this update will make daily tasks such as sending texts, setting alarms, turning off lights, or locking doors much easier. Siri’s functionality within multiple apps will also see improvements to help you carry out more extensive work functions whether that is moving files, reading documents, email organization, or article summarizations.
The most useful keynote from this group of upgrades will be Siri’s ability to chain voice commands. We have yet to truly see how in-depth this function can get as the word is Apple will not have the full parameters of the new and improved Siri 2.0 ready for the official IOS 18 release. However, a more common example of this feature will be sending a file to someone via text and email, all in one single phrase. Shutting off the lights and turning a fan would be a better example for personal use (and much more satisfying).
It seems like Apple is genuinely focusing on personalization, functionality, and productivity once and for all. Users have been pushing for new features and granted some ‘variants’ of these features were already available, but to be fair Apple has never made it easier “than it will be” to access these settings quickly for those who don’t want to search every inch of their phone. We won’t see the true potential for some of these updates until early next year, but it seems well worth the wait with these updates changing the way we interact with our devices daily.