I’ve Been Using iOS 18 for a Few Weeks: 5 Reasons to Download It Today

Apple announced the iPhone 16 series with much fanfare last week, showcasing four new phones that tout better cameras, longer battery life, and a new “Camera Control” button on the side for taking photos, swiping to zoom, and more. The new phones go on sale on Friday, September 20, but you don’t have to feel left out, as Apple is making iOS 18 available as a free software update for millions of older iPhones starting today.

One of the main new features in iOS 18 is Apple Intelligence, Apple’s new set of artificial intelligence tools. These new features will only work on the iPhone 16 series and the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max.

Thankfully, iOS 18 is about more than just AI, and if you have an iPhone released in 2018 or later, you should be getting the update on your phone soon. That’s a series of phones from the iPhone XS and XR to the iPhone 15 released last year.

I’ve been using the iOS 18 beta on my iPhone for a few weeks now to get a feel for the new software before it’s officially released. Before you head into your iPhone’s Settings app to check for a software update, here are five of the best features and changes Apple has made that I think will make your iPhone experience better every day.

You could do this on Android from the very beginning, but Apple finally saw the point and now lets you place apps anywhere on the screen. Until now, iPhone apps would automatically populate a grid that filled from top to bottom.

iOS 18 lets you place apps and widgets however you want. You can have a screen with a row at the bottom or on the side, or just one app. It hasn’t changed the way I set up my phone much, but if you keep multiple home screens, you can now organize them more freely.

If you like customisation, you’ll also love the ability to ‘tint’ apps, as Apple calls it. You can change the colour of all the apps on your phone to a single colour of your choice, which seems a bit odd at first. You might want to do this for aesthetic reasons, but I found it worked well to remove the oversaturated charm of the app, and it meant I wasn’t mindlessly clicking on Instagram half as much because the purple was now a dull grey.

You can also choose to have apps in a light or dark theme, even if your phone is not in light or dark mode, and set the wallpaper to light or dark. This is not Android, but it gives you a greater chance to customize your iPhone to your needs.

Perhaps my favorite new feature in iOS 18 is the ability to fully customize Control Center, the long-standing screen at the top right of the display that lets you, well, control everything. It looks a bit different in terms of design, with more rounded edges, but you can now delete unwanted items, move things around, and for the first time, add shortcuts to supported third-party apps.

You can now also swipe controls across the entire screen to control media, the home screen, and connectivity. It doesn’t add a ton of extra functionality, but it reinforces the sense that Apple is finally giving up some control over the iPhone software to let you decide how to use your phone, and that’s a good thing.

In a case of Sherlocking — when big tech companies release a feature that does what successful third-party apps do — iOS 18 adds a Passwords app to every compatible iPhone. If you’ve ever used 1Password or LastPass, you’ll feel right at home with an app that securely stores all your logins and passwords for websites and apps so you don’t have to remember them. You can then use the app when you need to log in to a service you’re already signed up for.

The best part about Passwords is that you don’t have to pay for it, unlike most password management services that charge a subscription fee. That’s bad news for those services and good news for iPhone owners.

Much like when we all complained about the big changes to Facebook because no one likes change, the Photos app looks a little different in iOS 18, but it seems to be for the better. Scroll up, past your most recent photos, and Apple sorts you through several rows of curated photos, videos, and Memories, sorting the ones that matter most to you. This is useful for me because I take so many photos that I often forget about them, but this presents groups of people I often photograph, photos by location, and Memories rolls that I can enjoy and share.

There’s also a cool “Travel” section that saves you from having to hoard all your latest vacation photos, which might be my favorite part of the new app — even if it does remind me that I need to take a lot more vacations.

In addition to all these new iPhone goodies, if you want to take advantage of all of Apple’s new AI features, called Apple Intelligence, it’s coming as part of another update in December. You’ll need an iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, or one of the new iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro, or iPhone 16 Pro Max models, though.