Apple unveils iOS 18: What new features does it have?

Apple presented the iOS 18 operating system at the WWDC 2024 event held yesterday. The company's senior vice president of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, showed off a number of innovations that this update will bring.

One of the first innovations is the customizable home screen, which will finally allow users to place app icons wherever they want. It will also be possible to hide apps from the home screen. Now users can also change the color of the icons as per their choice. It is also possible to change the app icons in the left and right corners of the screen when locked: Now they can be changed to anything you want, not limited to flashlight and camera app icons.

The Control Center will also be more advanced, with the user being able to swipe through multiple pages of controls and toggles for the most important functions, while media and smart home controls will be prominently featured. Third-party app developers will also have access to the Control Center.

iOS 18 also improves privacy by requiring Face ID authentication to launch any app of the user's choosing. A similar lock can be set on an entire folder of apps, meaning that an outsider will not be able to launch the app without the user's knowledge. You can also now control which contacts third-party apps can access.

The Messages app will become more expressive, allowing users to use any emoji in Tapback replies, as well as new formatting options such as bold, underline, strikethrough, and italics. It will also be possible to edit already sent messages.

Apple will also expand the iPhone's satellite communications capabilities by adding the ability to send messages via satellite in the absence of cellular service. Also interesting is the ability to schedule the sending of messages, which already exists in Google Messages. Apple has confirmed that the Messages app will switch to the modern RCS standard in iOS 18.

Improvements will also be made to the built-in Mail app. Apple will add automatic sorting of messages by category: payments, updates and promotions. Just like Gmail.

If you're more focused on gaming than work, iOS 18 introduces a new Game Mode that minimizes background activity for maximum performance and minimal lag when using a gamepad or AirPods.

As part of iOS 18, Apple is promising its biggest update yet to the Photos app as the company prepares to compete with Android's Google Photos. More importantly, the app is now optimized to work with the ever-growing libraries that many have accumulated over the years of iPhone use. The app now has sorting by faces and the ability to pin collections to the top to find them quickly. Smart photo editing like Google's Magic Eraser will also be added.

Apple also introduced Apple Intelligence, an artificial intelligence system that will become part of iOS 18 (as well as MacOS). A neural network will understand the user and their personal context more than other services. Among the many features of artificial intelligence are the ability to easily create images in Messages, answer various questions, provide text summaries, and much more. iOS will now be able to prioritize notifications more intelligently, showing the most important ones before going through the full list.

Apple's Siri assistant will support more natural interactions and be able to answer a much wider range of questions. Siri will also be able to take more active actions on behalf of the user in iPhone applications. For example, you can ask it to find the photo you want by describing it, edit the image, or move its elements to different apps.

iOS 18 will be available this fall after the presentation of the next generation iPhone. Developers will be able to download early versions of the OS this summer.