Lots of nice changes
I’ve been running the iOS 18 developer beta for some time so the switch up to the iOS 18 Public beta, which arrived on Monday, was smooth and uneventful. Overall it’s a solid, stable upgrade that adds a lot more customization and numerous small touches that you may stumble upon and then appreciate.
But it won’t feel like the sea change I desire until all those cool Apple Intelligence features arrive. And the wait for all of them might be a while.
There are some obvious and useful changes, like the ability to radically alter your home screen and the organization of apps on any page. There’s still a grid, which means that while I can move app icons around and resize widgets on the Home Screen, I can’t drop an app icon between rows or columns. It’s now easy to move apps so they no longer block the wallpaper image of your dog, but a moved app will still line up with apps below, above, or beside it. You also can’t skew an app, so it’s tilted at 45 degrees. It’s not that you should expect to, but it’s worth noting that customization has limits.
I’ve been playing with the new endlessly customizable Control Center. It offers pages of personalization, but be warned: you can get carried away. At one point, I managed to move all my core Control Center options to the second page. As a result, when I swiped down from the upper right corner of my iPhone, I got a blank Control Center. It took some work to move everything back to the first screen. As far as I could tell, there’s no big «RESET» option.
I’m intrigued by the Photos app update, which will let me search my photos more heuristically with phrases that make sense. Of course, the system still needs to index all my pictures before this feature would work.
