I've been running the iOS 18 developer beta for some time now, so the switch to the iOS 18 public beta, which arrived on Monday, was smooth and uneventful. Overall, it's a solid, stable update that adds a lot more customization and numerous little touches that you might stumble upon and then appreciate.
But it won't feel like the radical change I want until all those great Apple Intelligence features arrive. And the wait for all of them may be a while.
There are some obvious and useful changes, like the ability to radically alter the home screen and the organization of apps on any page. There’s still a grid, which means that while I can move app icons around and resize widgets on the home screen, I can’t place an app icon between rows or columns. It’s now easy to move apps around so they no longer block your dog’s wallpaper image, but a moved app will still align with apps below, above, or next to it. You also can’t tilt an app, so it’s tilted at 45 degrees. Not that you should expect to do that, but it’s worth noting that there are limits to customization.
I've been playing around with the new Control Center, which is endlessly customizable. It offers pages of customization, but be warned: You can get carried away. At one point, I managed to move all of the main Control Center options to the second page. As a result, when I swiped down from the top right corner of my iPhone, I got a blank Control Center. It took a bit of work to get everything moved back to the first screen. As far as I could see, there's no big “RESET” option.
I'm intrigued by the update to the Photos app, which will allow me to search my photos more heuristically with phrases that make sense. Of course, the system still needs to index all my photos before this feature will work. I like that Photos features that were previously hidden in search are now part of the main screen, and “Recent Days” is a useful carousel.
iOS 18 Messages brings some updated reactions that look nice, but I'm looking forward to trying to build Genmoji (AI-generated emoji), which apparently won't arrive until Apple Intelligence is ready.
One of the most useful features of iOS 18 that's available in the public beta is iMessage scheduling. I scheduled a message for my wife and she received it on time. The only downside was that I forgot that I scheduled it and then didn't respond to her until 15 minutes later.
I found that I could now lock apps behind my Face ID, but I also realized that there are no apps that I want to hide. Maybe I could hide Asphalt 9 so that no one takes my phone and messes with my racing “Career”.
By the way, I noticed that the “Game Mode,” which reduces background processes in favor of gaming, was automatically launched when I was playing. Still, it’s hard to tell if it affected performance, which is already excellent on the iPhone 15 Pro with A17 Pro.
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Some of the updates to Mail organization, like new folders, aren't quite ready yet, but I found the new Passwords app and am now convinced that it will be much more useful than I originally thought. It's perhaps one of the clearest views into my password world I've ever seen, with easy (for me) access and details about all my passwords, including the ones that are at risk and those for Wi-Fi networks I frequent. I have a feeling I'll be using it a lot.
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I spent a lot of time looking for subtle changes, and that's how I discovered that when you press any of the iPhone's physical buttons, the adjacent screen area pushes inward, making it feel like you're squeezing the screen. It's a fun update.
Just like the new flashlight, which has been completely redesigned. I don't know how often I'll use the extra beam control features, but I think it's pretty well done.
One of the biggest updates was a surprise. I knew Math Notes was coming to iPadOS 18, but I didn't realize that iOS 18 would have the exact same features. In Notes on the iPhone, I simply open the Notes app, select Math Notes, and then type in math equations. As soon as I put an “=” sign at the end, Notes solves them and displays the result in what looks like my own handwriting.
Remember that the iPhone doesn't support the Apple Pencil, so you'll have to solve math problems with your finger. The good news is that iOS 18 seems to understand even the worst ways to write numbers.
Math Notes is actually Apple machine learning at its finest, not Apple Intelligence. The iOS 18 public beta doesn’t include any new Siri, chatbot, text suggestions, or Image Playground features. These and other generative AI features will ultimately define iOS 18, but they’re not yet available.
I asked Apple if there’s any Apple Intelligence inside the iOS 18 public beta. Apple reminded me that Apple Intelligence will be arriving to test the beta software sometime this summer (for global readers, that means between now and the end of September). That could mean public beta updates later, or we could wait until the long-awaited iPhone 16 appears in September.
So if you asked me what I think about the iOS 18 public beta, I'd say it's a polished work in progress with plenty of promising features in the works. Should they rush to put it on their current top-of-the-line iPhone today? Probably not, but ask me again when the first Apple Intelligence features start arriving and I might think differently.
