iOS 18 Review: Your iPhone, your way
Perhaps more than any of Apple’s other operating systems, iOS is about balance. For many people, their iPhone is their primary computer—in some cases, their only computer. Every year, Apple rolls out new features to the platform, but it wants to do so in such a way that it enhances the experience of using its phones without getting in the way of users who rely on the device.
This year’s update, iOS 18, walks that line carefully. There are new improvements that range from those that won’t really affect you unless you seek them out (big changes to home screen customization, for one) to those that will impact every single person who uses a phone (a brand new interface for Photos). The good news is that most of these features also come to the iPad too.
Perhaps the strangest part of this year’s update, however, is what’s not there. Apple has spent several months talking up Apple Intelligence, its suite of generative AI features that do everything from help enhance your writing to create imagery for you, and lots of other stuff in between. It even launched several ads about the features last week. But Apple Intelligence won’t start rolling out until iOS 18.1 arrives in October—which means, yes, I suppose we’ll be back to talk about them when they do eventually show up.
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. At this point in the iOS life cycle, there’s nothing wrong with some modest improvements. And the benefit of lots of smaller features means that there’s a little something for everybody in iOS 18.
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 custmoization, 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.
If you’ve already got a full homescreen, this can still lead to some trickiness—it’s like doing one of those puzzles where you slide around tiles into one open space. Far better, in my testing, to start with a blank home screen and arrange things to your liking—that’s aided by something I discovered while playing with this feature: you can have the same app on multiple home screens. So maybe try building a new one from the ground up to your liking.
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 icons forego the labels beneath the apps for a bold aesthetic look), and yes, the ability to tint your icons any color you like. (You can also choose whether your background is in “light” or “dark” mode, independent of your icons; the latter dims your wallpaper, making your icons pop more.)
I have found myself enjoying dark mode icons, especially the ability to shift automatically between light and dark with the system appearance, although I still occasionally run into glitches where icons get stuck in a certain appearance for a little while.
Over the past several months, I’ve played around with the tinting options and I’ve yet to 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 in a specific color, but applying it to everything often feels overwhelming, like I’m suddenly drowning in a sea of purple. 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 as third-party developers tweak their app icons to be more tint-friendly—the same goes for dark mode, though I do appreciate that Apple is doing some clever work to enable it even for those apps that haven’t specifically jumped onboard—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!
My favorite new customization feature in iOS 18 is a minor 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.
I think overall, Apple’s customization options here strike a pretty good balance. There’s enough to let those who want to play with the looks of their homescreen have a wide variety of options without losing the inherent identity—and usability—of an iPhone. Bottom line: your iPhone is even more yours now than it’s ever been.
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 configure to your specific needs. 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 options. If that’s not enough, you can even swap out the flashlight and Camera controls on the lock screen, and users of iPhones with an Action Button can choose to use it to trigger some specific controls.
This kind of flexibility is extremely welcome, but the biggest challenge is the same one that keeps me from taking full advantage of that Action button: muscle memory. Frankly after all these years I’m just used to where certain controls are, and the idea of moving them just makes me wonder whether I’m really better served. Change is hard is what I’m saying. 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. 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. However, with the imminent arrival of the iPhone 16 and the new Camera Control button, I’m starting to think maybe I can afford to diversify a bit.
Of the new controls available, the one that I find especially handy is a home widget for a specific device. Previously you had to rely on HomeKit’s algorithm to figure out which smart home gadgets you likely want to access at any given moment, which sometimes meant you ended up having to launch the Home app anyway. You can even have multiple instances of this Home widget for different accessories or scenes. 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. By default the screens are organized in Favorites, Media, Home, and Settings, but you can add or subtract these as you like.
There are still some limitations, of course. 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. I’m still not sure why I can’t have a two-by-four set of home widgets if I want one. There’s also some bugginess here: resizing widgets sometimes makes them jump around, including to the next screen if there’s not enough room, and sometimes my controls seemed to end up in an almost random order. I also noticed that when I added a control for a Shortcut it sometimes picked up the custom icon from Shortcuts and sometimes only showed the generic icon.
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. I’ve yet to try out any that really take advantage of the feature.
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 physical buttons to press and hold. (It’s also an accessibility affordance for those who have trouble with that kind of motion).
I’m glad to see Apple buying into Control Center as a more customizable area. Like Shortcuts it encourages people to try and do more with their phones, and as with the new home screen options, it provides people with the ability to make their phones work the way they want.
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; I know it’s one of the apps I use the most, day in and day out. 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 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. This has turned out to be just as great as I’d hoped it would be, with the caveat that so many of the people I was sending messages to weren’t on the beta—I look forward to all of them getting in on the fun. (If you send a message to someone whose device doesn’t support this feature, they’ll get the old “Dan reacted emoji to the message” text.)
Messages in iOS 18 also adds 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 even amongst those early adopters I didn’t see them used that much.
On the utilitarian end of the scale, Apple’s added a couple new features to Messages, 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. In true Apple attention to detail, the little analog clock icon even correctly shows the time the message will be delivered, because of course it does.
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 via data instead of the traditional phone network, meaning you can text when you have Wi-Fi but no cell signal. 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 one you’re using is in the text field, which now appends RCS or SMS to “Text Message” when the field’s empty.
For most users, the switch to RCS will be utterly transparent in the best way—texts with those not on Apple platforms should silently improve. I’m still looking forward to the improvement to group texts, which will really hit when the rest of the iOS users I message with upgrade to iOS 18 too.
Finally, 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 in November, but we have no information as of this writing as to what Apple will charge—or if the company 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 not pleasing all 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 really only one experience: take it or leave it.
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 and a modular set of items—dubbed “collections”—below. If you swipe down on the library grid, it turns into the classic library view, now with controls for filtering and sorting. If you swipe up, you scroll through your collections.
Which collections show up at the bottom are up to you. They can be arranged or hidden as you see fit using the Customize & Reorder button at the bottom, although there are some limits to the granularity: for example, there’s a Shared Albums section, but you can’t select a single shared album. (You can, however, put a single Shared Album in the Pinned Collections item…confused yet?)
Newness seems to pervade every corner of the app: when you’re viewing an individual photo or video, the old toolbars have been replaced with redesigned ones; in some cases—screenshots and videos—the image itself no longer reaches to the edges of the screen, instead hovering against a white background until you tap on it to enter a full-screen mode. 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.
The redesign has taken some time to get used to, but after a few months with it I’ve found I really do appreciate the changes for the most part. Yes, I do primarily want to get to my Photos, but a grid isn’t always the best way to view them. I have a Shared Album of my kid, and I love being able to pin it to a place I can easily get at it. (I also like that activity from all my Shared Albums pops up in a visible place in between the library grid and the collections.) More easily accessible filtering and sorting are also great—an endless grid of squares to scroll back through is very 2007 and, honestly, kind of overwhelming.
Some of the smaller touches in Photos are also handy. The profile icon in the top right, for example, 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 or all three of us is pretty great. And, as Jason points out, given that every collection has its own automatically generated Memories-style video makes it easier than ever to enjoy your pictures.
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 specifically 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 by not having a map-based interface to see all your trips (though, to be fair, you can easily view each trip’s photos on a map). You also, weirdly, don’t seem to be able to rename a trip; I have a couple that have ended up with some weird automatic tagging that I’d like to change.
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, search has also been improved, 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 surprised 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 collection, just to name a few.
One risk with so much new stuff is that most users won’t delve deep enough to check out everything they could be doing. There will no doubt be a bit of a learning curve in people adjusting to the new interface, but overall I think the Photos changes are broadly positive. They bridge the gap between being a familiar interface and new features in a way that helps ease people in. Making the collections interface more prominent is a good thing, in my opinion: I don’t collect pictures in order to be Smaug sitting on a huge horde of thousands of photographs from over nearly three decades—I want to see and enjoy them. This year’s updates will hopefully help even more people revisit photos they may have even forgotten they’d taken.
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.
Camera: The Camera app has a handful of new small features, including the ability to pause video as you’re recording—hey, you can do your own in-camera jump cuts now! You can also change flash settings by touching and holding; tapping just turns the flash on or off. There’s also a five-second timer, and heavens above, Bluetooth audio will still play even when you’re taking a photo or video. Small enhancements all, but appreciated.
Remote Control: You’ve been able to share your iPhone’s screen over a FaceTime call for some time, but this year Apple added some significant improvements. First of all, when you initiate a screen sharing session, you can use your finger to draw on the screen—colorful lines that evaporate after a few moments—or tap to issue a “ping.” That’s handy for troubleshooting, since it makes it easier to indicate to the person on the other end what you’re looking at (not to mention providing a more accessible experience for those who are deaf or hard of hearing). And if that’s not enough, you can remotely control the other person’s screen, though they’ll be prompted before allowing it to help prevent the feature form being abused. Jason and I were able to try this out in a session and it worked pretty well. Is it too much to hope that we could some day have remote control between our own iOS devices? iPhone Mirroring would seem to point the way.
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 remains 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—it’s useful to be able to sort by recency, for example, to find that password you just created—and I 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 (also accessible via the Calculator), letting you quickly type in equations or variables and get answers or insert graphs. 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 haven’t had a chance to give it a thorough testing—my only recent hikes were in the UK and the hiking routes are currently U.S.-only. While Maps does give 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. Chapters also now show up when you’re scrubbing through.
In Settings, in addition to new, more descriptive headers at the top of each section and moving all app settings—including Apple’s own—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. This is probably most useful to people who really do switch between two languages though—more casual users, like myself, stand to be frustrated when autocorrect mistakes your words into similar words in the wrong language.
18 going on 19
iOS has become remarkably mature in recent years. While it still may not have the freedom of the Mac, it’s become harder and harder to find things that you can’t do with your phone.1 Just to put things in context: by the time the classic Mac operating system was the age iOS is now, its successor—Mac OS X—was just coming out. iOS, by comparison, doesn’t seem to have a replacement coming any time soon.
Or does it? With Apple Intelligence hanging on the horizon, we’re poised for a major shift in how we interact with our devices. I say “poised” because until these features start arriving, we won’t really know whether they’ll change our lives or end up being another evolutionary cul-de-sac. But in some ways, iOS 18 seems to be about Apple checking off some long-awaited features before Apple Intelligence changes the game.
iOS 18 is, in many ways, a work in progress. Perhaps more than any update in the past, we’re in for several months of significant platform updates—it’s the roller coaster that never ends. Buckle up.
- Seriously, if they added the ability to use a microphone for two apps at once, I think I could do everything I do on a regular basis. Come on, Apple. ↩
[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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