Apple Announces iOS 18 with New AI Features and Customizable Home Screen

Apple has recently announced the next major software upgrade for the iPhone: iOS 18. At the company’s WWDC keynote, Senior Vice President Craig Federighi demonstrated numerous new enhancements coming to Apple’s apps and the operating system itself. As expected, iOS 18 places a significant focus on artificial intelligence and generative AI features. Like the iPad and Mac, iPhones will gain Apple Intelligence when the new software update rolls out this fall. Apple is positioning this as a major milestone, promising that its comprehensive new AI features will help you send messages, save time, and express yourself with easy-to-use prompts.

However, the company started its presentation with more traditional changes. First up was a more customizable home screen that finally offers flexible icon placement. In dark mode, app icons will adopt a darker tone to be easier on your eyes. Additionally, a new theme engine will allow you to universally apply a chosen color across your app grid for deeper personalization.

Control Center is also getting an upgrade; you’ll be able to swipe between multiple pages of controls and toggles for your most important features — yes, there’s a lot of “Android did it first” happening today — with media and smart home controls getting prominent placement. Third-party apps will be able to offer Control Center integration for the first time. iOS 18 also lets you replace the default camera and flashlight icons on the lock screen with whatever Control Center toggles you prefer.

iOS 18 also increases privacy by allowing you to require authentication for any app you choose — or hide them altogether until your phone recognizes it’s really you. You can now specifically control which contacts third-party apps can access.

The Messages app is getting more expressive: you’ll be able to use any emoji in a Tapback response — and there will be new formatting options for bolding, underlining, strikethrough, and italicizing. Apple is also expanding the iPhone’s satellite communications to allow for messaging via satellite. What I’m most excited about is the option to schedule messages, which Google Messages already offers. And yes, Apple has confirmed that RCS is coming to Messages with iOS 18. I’m looking forward to higher-quality image and video sharing with Android devices.

Improvements to Apple’s built-in Mail app include better categorization, with Gmail-like automatic sorting for transactions, updates, and promotions. For those times when you’re more focused on gaming than productivity, iOS 18’s new Game Mode minimizes background activity for the best performance and lowest latency with connected gamepads or AirPods.

Apple is promising the biggest-ever revamp of the Photos app with iOS 18 as the company competes against Google Photos on Android. More importantly, the app is now optimized to handle the ever-growing libraries that many of us have accumulated over the years. It includes face sorting and the ability to pin collections to the top for quicker access. Photos will also do a better job of automatically grouping people and pets into collections that you can access via the app’s new carousel view.

When it comes to AI features, Apple says that Apple Intelligence — and by extension iOS 18 — will understand you and your personal context to a greater degree than other services. Among its many systemwide capabilities, you’ll be able to easily generate images in messages. iOS can now prioritize notifications in a smarter way, showing you what’s most important before you move on to the full list of things you’ve missed. Apple’s Siri assistant will support more natural interactions and can answer a much wider range of questions.

Siri can also take action within iPhone apps on your behalf. You can ask it to pull up photos, edit images, or move items across various apps. For example, Apple said Siri can pull up a photo of your driver’s license, automatically grab the number, and paste it into a form. More lighthearted use cases include the option to create any emoji you can imagine, a feature that Apple calls “Genmoji.”

The Voice Memos app will include transcriptions, and the Phone app can now record calls and automatically transcribe them. (Whoever’s on the other end of a call will be notified that it’s being recorded.) Apple Intelligence will launch in beta this fall in iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia, with ChatGPT integration coming “later this year.”