RCS, Better Home Screen and Control Center customization, finally getting locked and hidden apps on iOS as Android has had those for years! The Photos update is pretty good, in addition to Lock Screen customization.
Apple Intelligence. The image generation and bullshit text generator aspects I’m over (although Genmoji looks cute), but the ability to process complex natural language requests using an on-device LLM so I can perform tasks via voice without laborious specificity?
I’m in. If they nail this it will be the biggest leap forward in human-computer interaction since the GUI.
The other features I already like in DB1 aren’t on this feature slide either:
The new Calendar app with a proper multi-day view is great and has already replaced the “list” view I’ve used since 2009. I like “list” but it makes every day look busy visually, and makes it difficult to see gaps in your day.
New Calculator app finally has most features people would like. Multi line, easy editing of mistakes, a history, etc. They only talked about the handwritten stuff for iPad in the keynote but the whole thing is vastly improved across all iOS platforms.
This one is on the slide but the new Photos app is great, although some don’t like it I found most features in Photos were buried and people never used the tabs in the app, just scrolling down to see everything actually works quite well. Most users seem to think that the first tab is the only one you need to use and everything else is just settings and whatnot so it’s best to just adapt to that at this point.
Does anyone else have this problem: Some messages only showing up for iPhone users in the group SMS chat? For example someone will answer a question that the Android users never see. Then those questions randomly show up a week later for Android users? Hopefully RCS will fix that.
I dont really care about any of this crap. Let me install my own internet browsers, fix the poor keyboard hit boxes, let me build my own predictive text library...
iOS devices would be actually good if they literally just let you install .ipa s from anywhere (.apk equivelent for iOS). Not even unlocking the APIs that ensure Apple apps stay on top, just allowing .ipa installation.
What IPAs do you want to install? This is a real question, I know there are a handful of apps that you need to install from outside the App Store but over the years as restrictions have loosened that has dropped to almost nothing for me.
I used to install nzbUnity which has been fully replaced by LunaSea at this point, and with the rule change allowing emulators they really took a ton of wind out of the sails of the 3rd party App Store push.
Satellite connectivity isn't offered on iPhone models purchased in Armenia, Belarus, China mainland, Hong Kong, Macao, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Russia.
Apparently no paid agreements to use satellite around those regions.
Honestly, I just hope Siri transcription for iMessage gets better, and that the music app will actually do a decent job of recognizing the artist/album/thing I want to listen to.
I never got into fidget spinners, but having parallax on my iPhone’s Home Screen probably had a similar effect for me. I’d just play with it every once in a while and enjoyed it. I’ve always been mindful of battery drain, but I consciously made an exception for parallax.
All of that has been fixed in the iOS 18 calculator, they just didn’t talk about it in the keynote. It has history, multi-line, and your can place the cursor anywhere and edit expressions.
Give it a shot, you might be pleasantly surprised.
Lots of updates coming to the ios calculator with ios18. They obviously focused on the ipad version because it has the written math notes stuff, but a lot of those features are coming to the iphone, too.