First Look: iOS 18 Public Beta
Ultimately the reaction to 18’s initial public beta may be more about what’s not there than what is. When Apple first announced its latest annual update to the mobile software platform back in June, most of the attention went to a suite of features—the top-billed ones if you look at the company’s iOS 18 Preview Page—collected under the aegis of Apple Intelligence. These marked the company’s much anticipated foray into artificial intelligence and promise everything from image generation to a reinvigorated Siri.
But those features are planned to roll out over the course of iOS 18’s lifetime, which, according to some reports, means that many won’t be arriving until this fall or even next year. That even applies to other features not explicitly called out as Apple Intelligence, including the new Mail categorization and summaries, the ability to remove unwanted people or objects in photos, and summarization features in Safari.
While those features—or their lack—might overshadow some of the other announcements in iOS 18, when you strip them away, you’re still left with a nice—if not mind-blowing—set of updates, including deeper home screen customization, new capabilities in Messages, and a significant overhaul to the Photos app. There’s plenty to kick the tires on here, so let’s dive in, albeit with the caveat that since many of those marquee features are missing, we can’t really speak to them at all. And as usual, this is a public beta, so with apologies to Paul Thomas Anderson, there will be bugs. But that’s just part of the deal.
Your home screen is your castle
In recent years, Apple has gradually released its grip on the iPhone’s monolithic look and feel, allowing an increasing number of choices for those who want to customize their devices: widgets, the App Library, lock screen options, and so on. That trend is alive and well in iOS 18, which adds a couple new features for those who want to tweak the appearance of their iPhones.
The first is to put apps “anywhere” you want on the home screen. I say “anywhere” because your icons are still constrained to the same grid that they’ve snapped to since you’ve been able to reorganize apps—don’t start getting visions of piles of documents on a Mac desktop. But you can now leave open spaces in that grid if you want things just so. I struggled a little bit with this feature, as it still wants to reflow all your apps to fit, and that can lead to difficulty getting the precise open space you want—I had much better results starting with a new, blank home screen than trying to rearrange my current chockful one.
More radically, Apple has now taken the step of adding different color “themes” to your icons. Yeah, those quotes are still hanging around, because unlike the broad customization options you might get from a third-party app like Widgetsmith, Apple’s are limited to a few options, including light and dark versions, small and large (the large forego the labels beneath the app icons for a really wild aesthetic look), and yes, the ability to tint your icons any color you like.
I have found myself enjoying dark mode icons, especially the ability to shift automatically between light and dark with the system appearance. But though I’ve played around with the tinting option, I have to say that I haven’t find a color option that I love so much that I want everything tinted that way. Perhaps this is a deficiency in my own tastes: I like the way certain icons or widgets look, but picking what felt like a fun green to my eyes made my phone look like I’d stolen it from The Riddler1. It’d be nice if you could be a little more granular about which icons got tinted and how, but I also understand the complexity inherent in that decision.
Matters may improve somewhat if third party developers buy in by tweaking their app icons to be more tint-friendly—and I’d say the same for the dark mode, though I do appreciate that Apple is doing some clever work to enable it even for those apps that haven’t specifically made one—but I’m skeptical that picking an arbitrary color is for me. Then again, perhaps I’m simply mired in seventeen years of iPhone usage!
Actually, my favorite new customization feature in iOS 18 is kind of a small one: on the lock screen, there’s now an option to set the clock to a rainbow color. It’s a nice way to add a splash of color to your phone, even when the Always On display is in its dimmed setting.
You’re in control
We’ve gotten the ability to customize our home screens and lock screens in previous years, so this year Apple has ventured into new territory: Control Center. What started life as a way to quickly access certain phone functions has now morphed into a multipage affair that you can tweak to your liking. That includes not only being able to add or remove controls of your choosing, but also place them where you want and even (in some cases) choose what size they are. Plus it adds a ton of new controls and even unlocks the ability for third-party apps to provide their own actions. If that’s not enough, you can even swipe out the flashlight and Camera controls on the lock screen if you want, and iPhone 15 Pro/Pro Max users can choose to trigger a specific controls via the Action button.
This kind of flexibility is extremely welcome, though I feel like it will take some time for me to rework my memory—both mental and muscle—to get the most out of the feature. I’m so used to where the controls have been (in many cases, for years) that it will probably take time to get used to my newfound freedom. That goes double for the Lock Screen: I still haven’t figured out what else I’d even want there now that I have the option!
Of the added abilities, one that I find especially handy is that I can now have a home widget for a specific device, rather than relying on HomeKit to figure out which I might want access to at any given moment. I also appreciate Apple’s concession to the sometimes frustrating nature of having multiple pages of controls: by not lifting your finger as you swipe down from the top of the screen, you’ll continue on through the various screens until you get to the one you want.
There are still some limitations, of course. For one, there isn’t quite the same freedom to arrange controls as there is on the new home screen—no leaving open spaces here. Also, while you can resize widgets, most of them have only two or three possible sizes at max, and it’s sometimes tricky to figure out what’s actually possible—the key is to watch and see if the widget’s appearance morphs while you’re resizing it. The Action button configuration is also only limited to certain controls. And as with most features requiring third-party buy-in, it’ll be interesting to see just how much this ends up being something that developers adopt.
One other nice tidbit from the new Control Center: there’s now a dedicated power button in the top right corner, which lets you quickly shut down the phone without having to remember which button to press and hold (which is also an accessibility affordance for those who have trouble with that kind of motion).
Get the message?
Messages continues to get a lot of love from Apple—no surprise, as it’s probably one of the most used apps on the platform (in the U.S., at least). This year brings a slew of improvements, from under-the-hood protocols to flashy new effects to the ability to send a message from, well, pretty much anywhere.
I’m going to start by celebrating the best new improvement in Messages, the one that took us a surprising amount of time but was ultimately worth the wait: sending any emoji as a Tapback. I’ve wanted that feature almost since the moment Apple introduced the ability to react to a message, and I’m glad to say that it works just as well as I’d hoped. Apple even tweaked the existing tapbacks by adding more splashes of color as well as adding a second selection of half a dozen of your most recent emojis (on a per-chat basis) when you swipe to the left.
By comparison, I haven’t spent as much time with Messages’s new text effects, which include both styled text (bold, italics, underline), as well as animations where your words—or even just a specific word—shake, ripple, explode, or more. Like message effects before them, these features try to ride that line between fun and annoying, and I think mostly succeed, though the true test of time is whether people end up using them.
On the utilitarian end of the scale, Apple’s added a couple new features, such as the ability to queue up a message to send later. You access that in the same strange pop-up menu as stickers, Check In, and the rest of those forlorn iMessage apps, at which point you get a little blue bar at the top of the message that you can tap to pick a date and time to deliver the message. From my tests, it seems relatively precise—within twenty seconds or so of your scheduled time—although I did discover that you can only schedule a text up to two weeks in advance. It also doesn’t have to be limited to text—you can include an image or a GIF from iMessage’s #images tool or even a message effect for those times you want to prep some birthday balloons.
However, let it be known that all of these capabilities are still tied exclusively to iMessage—this despite the fact that Apple has made improvements to the experience of texting those not on its platforms with the addition of Rich Communication Services (RCS).
RCS is the successor to SMS, and while it improves on some of that very old technology‘s limitations, these are more on par with Steve Jobs’s “glass of ice water to someone in hell” than to any sort of parity. It has a few notable—and welcome—advantages, including message delivery and read receipts, typing indicators, better image and video quality, and the ability to send over a data network instead of the classic cellular phone system. Plus, yes, the end of those dreaded “reacted with” messages, even in your group chats. It’s worth noting that RCS uses the same old green bubbles as SMS; the only indicator to tell you which you’re using is in the text field, which now appends RCS or SMS to “Text Message” when the field’s empty.
Then there’s the class of feature that just feels like Apple showing off. The company first rolled out its Emergency Satellite SOS feature back in 2022 with the iPhone 14 line, but why should we have to wait to use a cool feature until an unfortunate emergency? As of iOS 18, any capable iPhone can now send text messages via satellite when you’re out of Wi-Fi and cell range. That comes complete with a new animation in the Dynamic Island that helps you make and maintain the satellite connection by telling you which way you need to point your phone. (While I didn’t get a chance to try this out for real, there’s a Demo mode that you can use to at least get the experience, but you really need to have no cell or Wi-Fi signals to use feature.) Satellite texts work for iMessage and SMS—but not RCS, as Apple says that the packet sizes are too large.
I don’t think most people need this feature, but there’s no denying it’s cool. I’ve gone on occasional hikes with no cell service available, and if nothing else, it gives peace of mind that I can stay in touch with people—even if it’s not to tell them that I need to be rescued from an ill-advised walk in the woods.
Apple has said that its satellite services will be available free for two years after activation of a iPhone 14 or 15 model; those first two-year periods start expiring this fall, so we’ll have to wait and see exactly what it will cost—or if Apple will kick the can down the road so as to avoid looking like their life-saving features are only available to those who pony up.
Photos go off the grid
What would an iOS update be without a big (and potentially contentious) app redesign? This year, that mantle is bestowed upon Photos, which has gotten a stem-to-stern overhaul that offers a lot more power and customization, while also forcing most users to relearn some aspects of an app that’s remained largely unchanged for several years.
I think you can best sum up this approach with the old aphorism about pleasing some of the people all of the time. Used to be we all had the same Photos app, and while there might have been some people who felt just fine about it, it ultimately didn’t matter, because there was only one experience.
Now everybody can tweak the Photos app, customizing which sections appear in what order, which is bound to make some people happier. But as with Apple’s home screen customization options, it only works up to a certain point, so those people who were perfectly fine with how the old app worked might find themselves feeling a bit at sea in the new world order.
Gone is the bottom toolbar with its Library, For You, Albums, and Search options. In its place is a new combined view: your grid of photos at the top in what Apple has dubbed “the carousel”2, and a modular set of items—”collections”—below. The carousel can be swiped through to show different sections that you choose or, if you swipe down on the library grid, it turns into the classic library view, with controls for filtering and sorting.
The modular collections below can be arranged or hidden as you see fit, although there are some limits to the granularity: for example, there’s a Shared Albums section that you can put there, but you can’t select a single shared album. (You can, however, put a single Shared Album in the Pinned Collections item at the bottom…confused yet?)
After several weeks of using the new Photos app, I’m still not totally sure how I feel about it. Newness seems to pervade every corner: when you’re viewing an individual photo or video, the old toolbars have been replaced with redesigned ones; in some cases—screenshots and video—the image itself no longer reaches to the edges of the screen, instead hovering against a white background until you tap on it. There’s also for the first time an option to toggle the appearance of the screen when you’re editing a photo—it was previously always against a black background, regardless of whether you were in Light or Dark system appearance, but now you can choose to have it be always light, always dark, or follow the system appearance.
So much of the experience of Photos is different…but I keep wonder if it’s better. Hard to say—there are a lot of trade-offs. For example, I’m not thrilled that it takes more steps for me to toggle between my Personal and Shared Libraries (I now have to tap on my icon on the top right corner, then scroll down, then select the other library, then exit out)—it seems like that toggle should be accessible from the filtering or sorting buttons. But, at the same time, I do appreciate that my icon also doubles as a sync indicator: a yellow dot appears on it where there’s unsynced content, and when it’s actively syncing, there’s a progress bar that rings your icon. That’s a feature that many folks—me included—have long wanted, and a welcome concession to Apple’s traditional approach of trying (often unsuccessfully) to make syncing transparent.
Apple’s also added a few new automatic categorization features to Photos: for example, in addition to people and pets it can now recognize groups of people. I have to say that’s proved effective for me: the fact that it collects all the pictures of, say, me and my son or me and my wife is pretty great.
The other major new category is Trips. In the past these might have surfaced as Memories, but I do think there’s something to the idea of collecting pictures from your travels—I’m old enough to remember my parents digging out the slide projector to show off photos from a specific trip. If you tap through to Trips, it allows you to filter by years, but I feel like there’s a missed opportunity here from not having a map-based interface (though, to be fair, you can easily now view each trip’s photos on a map).
Apple’s goal with Photos’s auto-generated collections is clearly to reduce the dependence on searching, but just in case it doesn’t automatically surface what you’re looking for, it’s also improved Photos’s search feature, allowing more natural-language-based searches. So, for example, if I wanted to find pictures from travels with two of my friends, I can search for “trips with Jane and Evan” and I’ll get the expected results. (I’m a little surprise that’s not part of the Trips function, to be honest.)
There’s a ton more in the Photos app: filtering more types of images like QR codes and handwriting, a redesigned Activity view for Shared Albums, and a new Recent Days view, just to name a few. But trying to wade through all those new features in an app that you use every day—while also sussing out whether it’s actually making life easier or harder—is a monumental task that’s going to take a bit more time.
Additional bits
As with every year’s iOS updates, Apple has also sprinkled plenty of changes throughout the entire OS, some of which you probably won’t run into unless you go looking for them. But there are a few that I found particularly worth calling out.
Passwords has graduated from a preference pane to become a full-fledged app. While I’m hopeful that this bodes well for its future development, it’s not a seismic change. I don’t spend a lot of time in the Passwords app, because there really isn’t much reason to—most of my interaction is via the AutoFill features in Safari, which continue to work as they have for some time. I do appreciate some of the categorization filters in the Passwords app, and hope that it means we might see more types of data—secure notes, identities, etc.—in there in the future.
Calendar gets a slight redesign that makes it easier to view items, especially in the Multi-Day view. You can also pinch to zoom in the Month view, in case you need more or less detail, and fully interact with Reminders: creating them, deleting them, and so on.
Files gets some much needed control over managing cloud-based files. You can now choose to keep files downloaded or remove their downloads by tapping and holding on an item and selecting the option from the pop-up menu. (My kingdom for a way to do that with apps.)
Notes continues on its quest to be the everything app. Now you can have audio recordings with automatically generated transcripts, collapsible sections, or highlighted text. Even without the Apple Pencil, iOS’s version of Notes has Math Notes functionality, letting you quickly type in equations or variables and get answers. Notes can already do a lot of what Pages can do, now it’s taking shots at Numbers. Is Keynote next?
Maps goes outdoors for this update, with hiking suggestions, including the ability to make custom walking routes and view topographic maps. I hope to give this a more thorough try on an upcoming trip, but it’s a smart addition. While it gives the highest and lowest points of a hiking trail, I do wish it gave you an overall elevation change instead of making you do the math yourself. There’s also a new Saved Places interface for keeping track of locations, including guides and routes, but I still wish you could have a collaborative guide that let multiple people add to it.
The Podcasts app builds on its relatively new transcripts features to allow you to send a share link tied to a specific timecode, which is very handy for when you’re trying to tell someone about a specific moment in an episode.
In Settings, in addition to new, more descriptive headers at the top of each section and all app settings—including Apple’s own—moved to a new sub-section, the Privacy section has gotten a substantial overhaul that makes it easier to manage. Now each separate section (Location Services, Calendars, Contacts, etc.) has a little subheading that tells you how many apps have access to that particular section. The same goes for hardware features like Bluetooth, Camera, and the Microphone. It makes it far easier to audit a specific set of permissions and make sure that only the apps you explicitly want to give permission to have it. You can also lock and hide apps from the home screen, for those moments when you might hand your phone to someone else, though it’s certainly annoying to have to do that on an app by app basis—it’d be nice if there were a unified “guest mode”, à la the Vision Pro.
There’s also at long last the ability to have a Bilingual Keyboard, which you can configure in Settings > General > Keyboard > Keyboards. If you frequently switch between languages or just, like me, get frustrated when you want to type a sentence or word in another language only to have autocorrect “fix” it, then you can now select two (but only two) languages. This is then denoted with an overlay on your spacebar, just in case you wonder why some of your English words are being changed to French.
All of this only scratches the surface of what’s in iOS 18, and more improvements are sure to be added (or come to light) as the beta process continues. Perhaps more than any update past, that progress will keep rolling along even once the initial iOS 18 release drops. Get ready for a full year of platform updates—it’s the roller coaster that never ends.
- And Batman Forever‘s Jim Carrey incarnation, to boot. ↩
- Apparently Don Draper works at Apple now. ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the sci-fi spy thriller The Armageddon Protocol, is out now.]
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