iOS 18 comes jam-packed with handy features and quality-of-life improvements – but there are some major privacy upgrades, too. Here are my favorites.
Excitement about the upcoming iPhone 16 release alongside iOS 18 is at a fever pitch following the launch event on September 9th. The leap from iOS 17 to 18 is set to be pretty significant—especially in terms of app privacy.
iOS 18 gives us new and inventive ways to customize the home screen, more interactive widgets, and even a chic dark mode but, for me, the ability to lock and hide apps, and the shiny new password manager, are the real stars of the show.
Some of these upgrades have been seriously long-awaited—so let’s dive right in and run through my favorite iOS 18 privacy features. 1. Lockable apps
Passcodes, Face ID, and Touch ID—your iPhone can be locked in all sorts of ways. If you give your phone to someone after you’ve unlocked it, however, maybe to check out a video or string of texts, there’s nothing to stop them from rifling through it to see which apps you’ve installed.
Naturally, you might have some you’d rather keep private, like medical and health-related apps, and iOS 18 gives you the power to give them all a boost of privacy.
There are third-party apps that already require you to validate your identity before accessing them—like banking apps—but the new iOS upgrade will let you lock pretty much every app on your phone (excluding ones deemed non-sensitive such as the clock, calculator, and Maps).
Locked apps will require you to punch in your passcode or use the biometric authentication of Face ID or Touch ID. Once an app is locked, the information it contains won’t appear elsewhere on your phone, either, further reducing the risk of snoopers stumbling across data that they shouldn’t.
