My 4 favorite iOS 18 features make iPhone a lot better, and more fun

A new version of iOS can make your iPhone feel like a new phone, if it’s a version with enough quality upgrades and new visuals. The features in iOS 18 definitely chin the bar to meet that standard. It comes with a bunch of quality-of-life upgrades that make daily phone use simpler, better, and a little more fun. 

The public beta of iOS 18 is now available for anyone to download and try. As always, we don’t recommend you install beta software on a phone you rely on for important work and communications. 

Since it was first released at WWDC 2024 in June I’ve been using the iOS 18 beta on an iPhone 15 Pro that I use for product and app testing. After a month of trying it out, there are four things I really like about iOS 18, a few more things I’m starting to get excited about, and a handful of things that I don’t love.

1. Control Center is now a juggernaut

The most impressive new feature in iOS 18 may sound subtle but it’s a game-changer for putting valuable settings and functions at your fingertips faster than ever. The Control Center is accessed by swiping down from the top-right corner of the screen and has been increasing in usefulness in recent years by adding to simple controls like turning on-and-off airplane mode, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Focus Modes or increasing brightness and controlling volume. The new additions in the few years have included options like screen recording, screen mirroring, a QR code scanner, toggling dark mode on-and-off, and starting a timer or a voice memo. 

But iOS 18 adds a ton of new toggles and options, allows you to change the size and location of the controls, and opens up the Control Center to third parties to add their controls to the mix. My two favorite things for now are the control for toggling on a Wi-Fi Hotspot and the new power button in the upper right corner of the Control Center that allows you to quickly do a full shutdown of the phone without digging into the Settings menu. But I’m confident I’m going to find a ton of additional things to love the more I use this new feature.

Also: How to customize your iPhone’s new Control Center with iOS 18

2. A built-in Passwords app is finally here

The new Passwords app now pulls in passwords you’ve saved in Safari and iCloud Keychain and allows you to manage them from one central app. In addition to saving username/password combos and auto-filling them, it can also handle passkeys and Wi-Fi passwords. With the app, you can now share passwords with family members, coworkers, and friends in a more secure way — once they are also using iOS 18 and the Passwords app. 

In addition to login credentials, it can handle two-factor authentication verification codes as well. And one of the best parts of the new Passwords app is that it’s not just on the iPhone. There are versions for Mac, iPad, and even Vision Pro. It’s not as robust and secure of a solution as something like Keeper, 1Password, or most of the other password management apps, but if you’re not using any of those then the Passwords app is going to be much more secure than using Apple Notes, Google Docs, sending text messages to share passwords, and other insecure practices that are widely used.

3. Messages feels more like Slack

I’ve been an avid Slack user for over 5 years. It’s become ubiquitous in many businesses and now it’s even becoming popular among lots of small organizations, friend groups, and community groups. One of the best things about it is the ability to react to messages with emojis without having to write a message. On iPhone, the Messages app has been limited to a set of six message reactions for several years. 

With iOS 18, the shackles have finally been removed and you can react with any emoji. In Slack, you can make your own custom emoji with an image. While you can’t do that in iOS 18, there is the promise of Genmoji that will let you design your own emoji based on a text prompt — but that feature is part of the Apple Intelligence set of features that aren’t available in the betas yet. Still, having the full set of emojis for reactions is a good step forward for Messages.

Also: Apple’s new AI-generated ‘Genmoji’ solves a problem we’ve all had before

4. You can design your own home screen 

The design of the iPhone’s main screen has gotten one of its biggest upgrades in the history of the platform. First of all, you’re no longer locked into the static grid that flows from top left to bottom right. You can now place icons (and widgets) anywhere on the screen. Of course, you’ve been able to do this forever on Android, but it’s the first arrival of the feature on the iPhone and it does feel pretty liberating. 

You can also change the homescreen icons to dark mode or select a color tint. And you can now toggle between small icon mode with the names of the apps listed underneath — the traditional default — or a cleaner large icon mode with no app names listed. Since I prefer dark mode on my iPhone, I happily changed my icons to dark mode, selected the larger icon size for simplicity, and went with a row of six icons on the right side of the screen where they were easily accessible using one hand. I love how clean the new layout is and it definitely makes the iPhone 15 Pro I’ve been testing it on feel like a new phone.

A few more highlights

• Mail gets categories — The Mail app now groups your messages into four categories (Primary, Transactions, Updates, and Promotions), which is similar to an excellent feature in Gmail.
• Calculator app becomes a math tutor — The awesome Math Notes feature introduced in the iPad calculator is also in the iPhone’s Calculator app now, and the notes sync between iPhone and iPad.
• Phone call recording — You can now record phone calls directly from the Phone app (it lets the person on the other line know you’re recording).
• Call transcriptions — You can save transcripts from your recorded calls into the Notes app. 
• Capture audio in Notes — In the Notes app you can now record audio straight into a note.
• Lock an app — You can lock apps like banking and health care apps, for example, and require biometric authentication to open them.
• Insight in the Apple TV app — Borrowing from the X-Ray feature in Prime Video, the Apple TV app on iPhone (as well as other Apple platforms) can now identify the names of actors and songs in the scenes you’re watching. 

Also: 6 reasons why iOS 18 makes the iPhone 16 a must-upgrade for me

3 things I don’t love

1. No Apple Intelligence — Half of the WWDC 2024 keynote that introduced iOS 18 and the rest of the new Apple software was focused on unveiling a set of generative AI features that are supposed to make the iPhone smarter, more efficient, and more whimsical to use. However, none of those features have shown up in the iOS 18 public beta or any of the other betas yet. Hopefully they’ll be worth the wait. When I was at WWDC in June, the Apple team emphasized that we would start to see Apple Intelligence features arrive in the betas throughout the summer.
2. Photos redesign misses the mark — One of the biggest changes in iOS 18 has come to one of the most widely used apps, the Photos app. And while I understand the motivation behind the redesign is to help better organize and rediscover the gems hidden in my camera roll, the changes have made it harder to use. It feels like it takes longer to get to stuff like my Favorites and photos where I know the general timeframe. And Google Photos still does a better job of surfacing interesting memories from my camera roll. 
3. Journal app is still iPhone only — I want to love the Journal app. In fact, Apple has added some decent new features to it in iOS 18, including new formatting options, a widget with prompts, audio transcription, integration with State of Mind, export, and an Insights dashboard. The biggest problem with Journal is that it’s iPhone-only. It would be amazing to be able to write entries in Journal from a Mac or an iPad with a Magic Keyboard and then be able to go back and review them from an iPhone. I’d also be happy to write short entries from the iPhone or even start entries on the iPhone and then expand on them when I was at a device with a full keyboard. To only have the Journal app on the iPhone is a missed opportunity to make this my primary journaling software.