iOS 18 Public Beta Feels Like a Breath of Fresh Air, But I Can’t Help But Miss Apple Intelligence
I’ve been running the iOS 18 developer beta for a while now, so the transition to the iOS 18 public beta, which dropped on Monday, was smooth and without any issues. Overall, it’s a solid, stable upgrade that adds a lot more customization and tons of little details you might find and appreciate.
But it won’t feel like the sea change I’m craving until all those cool Apple Intelligence features are here. And the wait for all those features could be a while.
There are some obvious and useful changes, like the ability to radically resize your home screen and the organization of apps on each page. There’s still a grid, which means I can move app icons around and customize widgets on the home screen, but I can’t drop an app icon between rows or columns. It’s now easy to move apps around so they no longer block your dog’s background image, but a moved app still aligns with any apps below, above, or next to it. You can’t skew an app either, so it sits at a 45-degree angle. That’s not something you might expect, but it’s worth noting that customization has its limitations.
I’ve been playing around with the new, infinitely customizable Control Center. It offers pages of personalization, but be warned: it can be easy to get carried away. At one point, I managed to move all of my main Control Center options to the second page. As a result, when I swiped down from the top-right corner of my iPhone, I was left with a blank Control Center. It took some work to get everything back to the first screen. As far as I could tell, there’s no big “RESET” option.
I’m intrigued by the update to the Photos app, which lets me search my photos more heuristically with sentences that make sense. Of course, the system still needs to index all of my photos for this feature to work. I like that the Photos features that were previously hidden under search are now part of the main screen, and “Recent Days” is a handy carousel.
Messages in iOS 18 gets some updated reactions that look nice, but I can’t wait to build a Genmoji (AI-generated emoji characters). That’s apparently not coming until Apple Intelligence is ready for it.
One of the more useful iOS 18 features that is ready in the public beta is iMessage scheduling. I scheduled a message for my wife and she got it on time. The only annoying thing was that I forgot I had scheduled it and then forgot to respond for 15 minutes.
I discovered 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 can hide them Asphalt 9 so that no one takes my phone and disrupts my racing career.
By the way, I noticed that “Game Mode,” which reduces background processes in favor of the game, started automatically when I played. Still, it’s hard to say whether 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 ready yet, but I’ve found the new Passwords app and I’m now convinced it’s going to be a lot more useful than I originally thought. It’s perhaps one of the clearest representations of my password world I’ve ever seen, with easy access (for me) and details of all my passwords, including those at risk and those for the Wi-Fi networks I use most often. 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 I discovered that when you press one of the physical buttons on the iPhone, the area of the screen next to it squeezes inward, giving the feeling of pinching the screen. It’s a nice little update.
Like the new Flashlight, which has a completely new design. 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 bigger updates was a bit of a surprise. I knew Math Notes was coming to iPadOS 18, but didn’t realize that iOS 18 would get the exact same feature set. In Notes on iPhone, I simply open the Notes app, select Math Notes, then type out math equations. As soon as I add an “=” sign to the end, Notes solves them and displays the result in what looks like my own handwriting.
Keep in mind that the iPhone doesn’t support the Apple Pencil, so you’ll have to scribble out those math problems with your finger. The good news is that iOS 18 seems to understand even the worst numerical scribbles.
Math Notes is really Apple machine learning at its best, not Apple Intelligence. iOS 18 public beta does not have the new Siri, chatbot capabilities, text suggestions, or Image Playground. These and other generative AI features will eventually define iOS 18, but they’re not here yet.
I asked Apple if Apple Intelligence will be included in the iOS 18 public beta. Apple reminded me that Apple Intelligence will arrive for testing the beta software sometime this summer (for Global readers, that means sometime between now and the end of September). That could mean we’ll see updates to the public beta later, or it could mean we’ll have to wait until the expected iPhone 16 in September.
So if you were to ask me what I thought of iOS 18 Public Beta, I’d say it’s a polished work in progress with a lot of promising features in the pipeline. Should you put it on your current best iPhone today? Probably not, but ask me again when the first Apple Intelligence features start rolling out and I might feel differently.
