8 features I can't wait for my iPhone to get with iOS 18

Summary

• Customize your home screen with new themes and app positioning in iOS 18 for a more personal touch.
• Enjoy deeper ChatGPT integration and fun with Apple Intelligence's Image Playground for unique image creation.
• Control your lock screen toggles, access new Control Center pages, and use the redesigned Photos app with improved search features.

Apple’s iOS 18 is coming, and with it are some exciting new features. While some are available in developer beta right now, with a more stable beta coming in July, and the full release in the Fall, you’ll soon get everything. Upgrades for your iPhone include new ways to customize your home screen and app icons, Apple Intelligence (the company’s take on AI), deeper ChatGPT integration, and more. iOS 18 will work with all iPhone models from the XR up, although Apple Intelligence will only work with iPhones that have the A17 pro chip, which includes the iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, and future iterations. There are a few features in particular that I can’t wait to use, some of which I have already been testing with the developer beta.

1 Apple Intelligence’s Image Playground

If you have already been using AI through platforms like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, or Google Gemini, you have an idea of how it works. Apple Intelligence incorporates many of the same concepts, but with its own spin and naming conventions. They've formed a partnership with OpenAI, leading to deeper integration with ChatGPT in iOS 18, even if you aren’t signed up with an account. As a writer, I don’t think I would use the Writing Tools much, but I love the ability to create unique images through Image Playground in styles like animation, illustration, and sketch. This is something people have been using GenAI tools to do already, even third-party apps. So having this fun feature baked into my iPhone is a plus. You can create custom images to send in messages, like turning your friend into an animated character and sending them a picture with a birthday cake, or create one of your likeness relaxing on a beach to celebrate your upcoming vacation.

2 Home Screen control

Everyone loves personalization, and with new Home Screen controls, you can do things like adjust the positioning of apps instead of having them in a standard grid pattern. If you have a fabulous wallpaper photo, this means you can move the apps so that they don’t cover your child’s or pet’s face, for example, putting the image on full display. You can also turn frequently used apps into widgets so that they appear larger than others. New themes, meanwhile, will let you adjust the color scheme - you can make it match the wallpaper image or just suit your particular mood that day or week. Maybe it’s a dark red for the work week, and a soft light blue while you’re on vacation and want to get out of “work mode.” There’s even a tinted option. This customization will further help make your iPhone your own, and I’m excited to play around with it.

3 Changing lock screen toggles

Currently, while your iPhone is locked, you see two buttons on the bottom: the flashlight on the left and the camera app on the right. This allows you to open either without unlocking the phone, so you can quickly search for loose change wedged between the car seats with the flashlight, or hand your phone to someone to take a photo without having to first enter your passcode. The camera is useful for me, but the flashlight isn’t something I often use, so I appreciate the ability to change this icon to something else. I will use this for the alarm app, for example, to set my nightly alarm, pull up the calculator, or open a specific app I use far more often than the flashlight. I'll toggle through various options until I find the one that works best for my personal usage patterns, and you can do the same.

4 Control Center pages

Accessing Control Center is a simple pull down from the top, right of the phone. This opens up settings like Wi-Fi, Airplane Mode, Focus Mode, brightness, volume, flashlight, and more. Now, it is divided into several screens, each with a different theme. Your favorites are on the first page, followed by music and media playback, smart home controls, and connectivity. You can add more pages, adjust what appears on each page, and now even turn your phone off right from the Control Center versus having to hold down the physical power button combination. This allows for deeper organization and quicker one-touch controls to do things like control smart lights, queue up a music playlist, turn on a VPN, and more. Control Center is my go-to right now for turning on Do Not Disturb mode before I turn in for the night, and I love the option to control so much more from a single finger swipe.

5 Redesigned Photos app

I have thousands of photos on my iPhone, and I love the reorganization of the Photos app that uses a single page with continuous scrolling. It makes it easier to search through the library, even organizing photos intelligently into categories like trips. How well the new search function works, which can purportedly drill down to specifics via natural language commands, remains to be seen. It would be a real game-changer though, if I can easily search for a specific photo that I know is in my library but just can’t find (that actually happens pretty often). Search works fine right now with dates, locations, and even people I'm looking for. But being able to look for that photo of my son wearing the shirt grandma got him, even though I can't remember where or when I snapped it, would make calling up old pics so much easier than it already is. The customized carousel of highlights that update daily is also a nice way to revisit fabulous moments, fun events, and great shots.

6 Clean Up tool in Photos

The concept of cleaning up photos isn’t new. Google has offered its Magic Eraser feature in several generations of Pixel devices already, while Samsung has Object Eraser for Galaxy devices. Apple’s version is called Clean Up, and it will work much the same way. Using Apple Intelligence, you can identify a distracting object in the background of the photo, like a person walking by or an item on the ground or table behind you, and remove it without altering the main subject or subjects of the photo. This feature has worked beautifully in Google Pixel devices I have tested, so I’m excited to be able to perform this action with photos on my iPhone as well.

7 Safari updates for information discovery

There are some huge improvements to the redesigned Reader and Highlights experiences in Safari, which are available on iPad and Mac as well (as are the other features). With machine learning, when you open a webpage, you can get key information related to it right on the same page. For example, you might be looking up a hotel you're thinking of staying at for your next vacation, and you’ll see a pop-up with a map showing you its exact location, star rating, even a link to call them directly. This is the kind of information you’d typically have to open a new browser window and Google to find, or navigate through the web page to get to the right section. When reading an article, you can get a summary that gives you the gist of the content, such as whether the reviewer liked the movie or product they’re reviewing, what the base directions are for a recipe (versus going through the author’s life story first), or even see a generated table of contents for a lengthy article if the site doesn’t already have one.

8 The new Passwords app

I, like many others, have all types of passwords. Many of these are saved in Keychain for instant access to websites or services via Face ID or Touch ID authentication across my iPhone, MacBook Pro, and even Apple TV. But I have others that I need to keep in a secure place (I won’t say where!) like four-digit PIN codes. It would be fabulous to be able to save these all in one place, and you can do that with the new Passwords app. This allows you to keep all passwords in a safe and secure space that requires your Face ID to unlock. You don't have to worry about maintaining secure passwords that aren’t easy to guess but that you can still remember, nor feeling forced to use the same password or variation of a password across different services (you should never, it should be noted, use the same password twice). The app will even send alerts for common weaknesses in your passwords, including ones that have appeared in known data leaks. This app makes it easy to effectively keep all your passwords in a secure vault and make them as difficult and arbitrary as needed for security with plenty of letters, numbers, and symbols. Call them up whenever you need them and no one else can access them.

There’s so much more

There’s a lot more to look forward to in iOS 18 beyond the features here that I’m most excited to play around with. From being able to give Siri more contextual commands or even type commands (versus just talking to her), to Tap to Cash with Apple Cash, being able to solve mathematical formulas and equations directly in the Notes app, customizing which contact information you share with apps, and more, there are small tweaks and major upgrades with this new iOS. In every case, they've been designed to make our experience with the latest iPhones more engaging, helpful, and fun.