iOS 18 Announced with Dark Mode Icons, AI Features, Control Center Customizations, & More

Apple has announced iOS 18, the next major version of system software for iPhone, with a host of new features, design updates, and changes. iOS 18 brings all new customization options for home screen icons including Dark Mode icons with color tinting, the ability to place icons and widgets anywhere on the Home Screen, a customizable Control Center, AI features called Apple Intelligence that can help with both writing and summarizing text, a dedicated Passwords app, new Messages features like any Emoji tapback, a redesigned Photos app, and much more.

iOS 18 debuted at WWDC 2024, alongside MacOS Sequoia, iPadOS 18, watchOS 11, tvOS 18, and visionOS 2.

Home Screen Customizations

iOS 18 includes some notable Home Screen customization options, including the ability to place icons or widgets anywhere you want on the Home Screen.

There’s also new Dark Mode icons:

And there’s even an icon color tinting effect, so you can make all your icons and widgets have a color hue if you’d like.

These new customization options for icons and widgets can make the Home Screen more unique and custom than ever before.

Control Center Redesign

Control Center, which includes a mishmash of many useful features that you want quick access to from anywhere on iPhone, is now more customizable than ever before.

Additionally, there’s now Control Center support for third party apps so they can add icons into Control Center too.

And you can now have multiple pages of icons and toggles on Control Center, giving you instant access to a potentially overwhelming amount of buttons, toggles, and doodads that are sure to improve you iPhone experience.

Standalone Passwords App

The Passwords Settings area that stores all of your iCloud Keychain and login information, accounts, and passwords, is now in a dedicated Passwords app, making it easier to manage and access your login information and account details.

The Passwords app also comes to iPadOS 18 and MacOS Sequoia.

Photos App Improvements & Redesign

The Photos app has received a significant redesign that aims to help users to easily find photos. There’s also a new collections feature that groups photos by theme and aims to make it easy to browse through photos.

Photos app also gains new touchup tools like Clean Up, which allows you to easily remove distracting elements from a photo (like someone you don’t want to be included in a picture).

Messages Gains New Formatting Options, Emoji Tapbacks, Scheduling

The Messages app has gained some new features as well, including formatting options for text to make words bold, underlined, small, big, explode, bloom, ripple, and more.

You can also now tapback any message with any Emoji.

Perhaps the most useful new feature in Messages is the ability to schedule messages, without having to jump through a bunch of hoops with other apps. With scheduling, you can easily send a message at a particular date and time of your choosing, for things like birthdays, holidays, or whatever else you’d like to message at a specified time or date.

Apple Intelligence AI

iOS 18 includes tons of new Apple Intelligence features, which is what Apple is calling their AI initiatives. With Apple Intelligence, you’ll gain writing tools to help you rewrite text in different tones like friendly or professional, summarize text, proofread, and much more. You’ll also have the ability to create images with an Image Playground feature.

The Apple Intelligence AI toolkit is available anywhere you can type on the iPhone, including Pages, Mail, Notes, and third party apps.

These tools should be familiar to anyone who has been using ChatGPT and similar tools from Microsoft Edge, Bing, and ChatGPT.

Safari Updates with AI

Safari now has some handy new AI assisted features that allow you to quickly summarize web pages.

Reader Mode in Safari is also improved with summaries and table of contents automatically generated.

Many More iOS 18 Features>/h3>
There are many other features in iOS 18 for iPhone as well, including the ability to lock apps behind Face ID, and a new ability to hide apps on your device. You’ll also be able to change the icons on the lock screen, type to Siri easier than ever, have access to national park hiking trails through Maps, gaming enhancements with Game Mode, and much more.

iPadOS 18 has most of the same features, plus a Calculator app

iPadOS 18 was also announced at WWDC 2024, and it includes basically all of the new features from iOS 18 for iPhone, but as iPadOS 18 on iPad.

An incredible new feature that is unique to iPadOS 18 is the inclusion of a new Calculator app, which has been fourteen years in the making since the debut of iPad, and so you’ll no longer have to rely on Spotlight to be your iPad Calculator.

iPadOS 18 also includes new features related to Apple Pencil and drawing and writing tools.

When will iOS 18 be available?

iOS 18 was announced at WWDC 2024, and the developer beta is available right away.

Public beta users will be able to download iOS 18 public beta in July.

The final version of iOS 18 will launch on iPhone in the fall.

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What features of iOS 18 are you most excited about? Share your opinions and thoughts in the comments.