Hands-on with iOS 18: Impressive but incomplete [Hey, it’s a beta!]

After spending a few days trying out all the new features in iOS 18, I think it really is one of the biggest updates in a long time. However, hands-on testing shows there’s a lot that needs cleaned up before September, when it’s expected to ship.

The new customizable iPhone Home Screen opens a wide world of possibilities — but you’ll have to wait for third-party apps to update their icons to really make it sing. I’m impressed with the level of customization in Control Center, too, though it’s understandably pretty buggy in this first developer beta. The new Photos app is proving controversial, and I think there are some obvious areas it could be improved, but I like where it’s going overall.

I think there’s a lot to look forward to in iOS 18.

Hands-on with iOS 18, after nearly a week

If you want to try out iOS 18, it’s available right now as a developer beta. I don’t really recommend it — it’s pretty buggy. After I first installed it, Snapchat would crash after about five seconds every time. It seems to have sorted itself out, but if there are mission-critical apps in your life that you depend on every day, you can’t guarantee they’ll work.

Table of contents: Hands-on with iOS 18

• Customizable Home Screens
• Customizable Control Center
• Message effects and features
• Redesigned Photos app
• Other miscellaneous changes
• What’s missing
• Final thoughts

Customizable Home Screens in iOS 18

The first big change in iOS 18 is free placement of app icons on the Home Screen. I’m really happy Apple provided this option for other people, but personally, I won’t be using it. I’ve never had a cute wallpaper. My Home Screen is where I launch apps, so it’s filled with as many apps as I can cram on there. I have a medium widget on top to fill the spot where my thumb can’t reach.

I tried it out — it’s a little weird. If you have a bunch of apps in a group, like you will when you first update, breaking one of the icons away still makes the rest of them shuffle around, right-to-left, bottom-up. But if you have an icon on its own, you can put it wherever you want on the invisible grid. If you bunch too many icons together, they’ll start flowing into each other again.

Another element of the customizable Home Screen is recoloring app icons. You can keep them in light mode, switch them to dark mode or pick a monochrome color of your choosing. All of them have their quirks. If you keep your phone in dark mode, but keep the light mode icons, your widgets will be in light mode, too. According to Apple’s developer release notes, this is a bug, not a feature.

Dark mode for app icons

Dark mode icons are interesting. According to Apple’s guidelines, the black gradient is supposedly a standard element provided by the system. Apple’s style is that icons with a colorful symbol on a white background (Safari, Notes, Reminders, Photos, Calendar) are swapped out for the standard black background. Icons with a white symbol on a colorful background (Messages, Mail, Podcasts, Music) have their accent color on the symbol with a black background. Gray icons (Settings, Camera, Clock) simply get darker. The odd one out is Maps. Its colors are much lower-contrast than other icons, yet there isn’t enough black showing through to really make it feel dark.

Another odd one out will be any third-party apps on your Home Screen. If an app happens to provide alternate icons using the existing system (like Slack), you can swap it out to make it fit in, but even apps with a bunch of alternate styles (like Mona) might not have any options that match Apple’s specific style. Unfortunately, you’re out of luck until September, because apps aren’t allowed to offer iOS 18 compatibility or features until it ships publicly.

Color icons

Color-tinted icons also use the standard black background, except the symbol color is one of your choosing. Unlike dark mode, this will actually force third-party apps to comply, too. If you want a theme or aesthetic for your Home Screen and Lock Screen, you now no longer need to spend hours making Shortcuts for custom icons. Except … color-tinted icons are always your-color-on-black. If you want a light, pastel color scheme, the black icon backgrounds will clash.

I’m also glad Apple is giving this option to other people, but I don’t think I’ll use it myself. With as many icons as I have on the screen, colors help with legibility. Especially in the App Library, which adopts your chosen color scheme in iOS 18, too.

You also can choose to show larger icons, which looks neat at first, but gets a few details wrong. Without the app labels, without pagination and without the Search button, it leaves an unsightly empty space between the bottom row of icons and the dock. So much space that you could fit another row of icons between them, but you can’t. The larger icons in the Dock are also no longer equally spaced on the left and right as they are on the top and bottom.

Customizable Control Center

In iOS 18, the iPhone’s Control Center becomes highly customizable. You can add new icons and remove ones you don’t want from within Control Center itself. There are many more controls to choose from — and third-party apps will be able to provide their own. You can make several different pages. You can resize buttons to be more prominent. Editing and rearranging icons is promising, but it’s hilariously buggy in this first developer beta.

There’s one regression I really don’t like about this new design after a few hands-on days with the first iOS 18 beta. In the old Control Center, I learned that with my right hand, I could swipe my thumb down and up to open and close it without my finger leaving the screen, while my other hand toggles the button I want. It’s a two-handed gesture, but with one fluid motion, I could toggle Wi-Fi or orientation lock.

In this new design, I swipe my thumb down to activate Control Center, but tapping with my other hand doesn’t toggle the controls, it selects the first page. I must tap a second time to interact with any of the buttons. Swiping back up in the top-right corner doesn’t dismiss Control Center; swiping anywhere on the screen scrolls to the next page. I need to move my hand back to the bottom of the screen and swipe up from the Home bar.

Thankfully, you can go back to the old way. You just have to give up on pagination. Remove the second and third pages, and the iPhone’s Control Center will function the same as before its iOS 18 upgrade. Even though when you pull down Control Center, the icons will still appear shrunken as if the page isn’t selected, you can still interact with them.

Because Control Center is so customizable, I don’t really feel like I’m missing out with only one page. I can fill that page with exactly the controls I need and take out the ones I don’t.

Also in iOS 18, you also can swap out the Flashlight and Camera buttons on the iPhone’s Lock Screen for any of the same buttons available in the Control Center. At first I didn’t think I would want to switch them for anything else, but then I learned that different Lock Screens can have different buttons. So my Driving Lock Screen can have shortcuts to Music and Podcasts using the Open App shortcut.

Message effects and features

All the fun new Messages features like emoji tapbacks, bold/italicized/underlined/strikethrough text and the new text effects will only work with other contacts who are also running iOS 18. However, you can take advantage of scheduling messages right away in the iOS 18 beta, and it’s already really great.

You can find this feature in the Message app’s + menu. Just scroll down to the second page, and tap Send Later. You can set a date and time up to a week in advance. Scheduled messages will appear in a dotted outline bubble below the current chat. Remember that, as of iOS 16, after a message is sent, you have two minutes to unsend it or five minutes to edit it a limited number of times — but scheduled messages have no limits until they’re sent.

iOS 18’s redesigned Photos app

I see what Apple is going for with the big upgrades coming to the Photos app in iOS 18. Most people don’t know the difference between the current Photos app’s Library tab and the Recents album. They just stay on one or the other 100% of the time.

The new design doesn’t come with a tab bar at all. It’s one giant, scrollable view. Scroll up to see your library, scroll down to see the list of albums and memories that previously made up the For You and Albums tabs. Search has been diminished from a tab to a floating button in the top corner.

That’s the broad idea of iOS 18’s redesigned Photos app. But I think the implemented design is far more complicated than it needs to be, for the following reasons (remember, this is after going hands-on with the first developer beta for just a week — things can and will change, hopefully for the better):

• After you scroll down, your photo library disappears and becomes a rotating carousel of different people, favorite shots and intelligently chosen images. I find this behavior incredibly confusing. Figuring out how to get back to your library is challenging. Many of the collections shown in the carousel are the same as the collections shown below, so it’s repeating information, with no benefit.
• Scroll further down and you see sections for Recent Days, People & Pets, Pinned Collections, Memories, Trips, Albums, Featured Photos, Media Types, Utilities and Wallpaper Suggestions. That’s a lot of categories.
• Tap on the carousel or any of these collections, and it’s not obvious how to get out of them. The Close button is unnecessarily small. Although it’s a view that you can swipe down to close, it doesn’t look like a sheet because it completely fills the top part of the screen.
• Tap on a collection name (Trips or People & Pets) instead of a specific collection (California 2022 or Griffin Jones) and you get a completely different-looking sheet.

I don’t think Apple needs to chuck out the design and revert to the old one. The idea is sound and has the potential to make Photos more understandable. But as it is, with those problems listed above, I think the Photos app is more confusing than before.

Hands on with other iOS 18 features

Passwords

Apple’s new Passwords app — which runs on iPhone as well as Mac, iPad and Vision Pro — is excellent. No more digging through Settings to find your saved passwords. It also surfaces your saved Wi-Fi passwords, which was technically included in iOS 17 but similarly buried. My other complaint in the past is that there was little integration between iCloud Keychain and Apple’s privacy-focused Hide My Email feature. If I’m creating an account and I have a fake email address generated for this site, that should autocomplete as an email or username. I haven’t tested whether this is fixed yet.

Calendar

Apple’s Calendar app receives vast improvements in iOS 18. You can copy and paste events. Reminders now show up as events in the day view. The month view was kind of useless before, because a single dot to indicate more-than-zero events on a day doesn’t give you any idea of how busy that day actually is. Now, you’ll see a big row of dots, colored to match the calendar. And the inscrutable View button on top that no one knew what to make of has morphed into an easy-to-use drop-down menu.

Settings

The Settings app now shows big, friendly descriptions on all of the common pages like General, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Accessibility and more. Camera settings are higher up and 1,000 times more discoverable. The gigantic alphabetical list of every app on your phone is now tucked away behind an “Apps” category. I think Phone, Messages and Mail still deserve spots in the main list of Settings, but they’re thrown in the Apps junk drawer, too.

Safari

The new page menu in Safari is much bigger, but friendlier. I didn’t see any of the big features like web page summaries or automatically generated tables of contents in Reader View after checking a couple different sites. Apple doesn’t list it as a feature of Apple Intelligence, so maybe I just haven’t figured out how to activate it yet. (We’ll let you know how Apple’s mobile web browser shapes up after we go hands-on with later versions of iOS 18.)

Math Notes

Math Notes — an incredibly useful feature showcased in Apple’s iPadOS 18 demo during the WWDC24 keynote — actually appear on the iPhone, too, in iOS 18. Yes, with handwriting input and everything. Apple Pencil doesn’t work on the iPhone, but if you have one of those capacitive styluses or a pen with a capacitive nub on the end, that kind of works. This makes handwriting things like complex fractions, exponents and square roots an order of magnitude easier.

Hide apps in iOS 18

Hidden apps are cleverly done in iOS 18. When you hide an app, notifications are muted, too. You can tap on the Hidden folder to unlock the app using Touch ID or Face ID. I wish there was a configurable grace period, because it’s slightly annoying re-authenticating every single time.

Phone app

In the Phone app, you can use the letters on the number buttons to search for a contact by name. It’s much faster than pilfering through the list of contacts. It’s not like texting, where you would need to press “5” three times to get the letter L. To call Lewis, for example, I would type 53947.

Swift 6

New for all platforms this year is Swift 6, Apple’s open-source programming language for app development. Its top feature is improved concurrency — how software handles splitting up tasks across different CPU cores. Apple’s chips get more and more cores with each generation, so this should offer a big boost in multi-core performance over time.

What’s missing after a week of going hands-on with iOS 18

It’s worth mentioning that I haven’t been able to test the following features:

• As mentioned, Apple Intelligence isn’t in the first iOS 18 beta. (Apple’s suite of AI-powered features are not in the first iPadOS or macOS Sequoia betas, either.) That means I couldn’t go hands-on with features like the new Siri, system-wide Writing Tools, notification summaries, Image Playground and Genmoji. Apple Intelligence also won’t run on my iPhone 12 Pro, but I plan to test these features from my Mac when they become available.
• Although the iPhone Mirroring app is present in the first macOS Sequoia beta, the feature is disabled. (Some have hacked it into functioning early.) I desperately want this on my Vision Pro.
• Messages via satellite aren’t supported on my iPhone 12 Pro — not that I ventured into the wilderness within the past week, anyway.
• Mail categories also don’t appear in the first beta.

Closing thoughts

Rumors ahead of the WWDC24 keynote were hyping up iOS 18, and I was a bit skeptical. However, iOS 18 really is turning out to be one of the biggest updates ever. Currently, it’s a mixed bag — that’s why most people should steer clear of the week one beta. All the features I’ve tried hands-on are great, but it looks like Apple engineers will have a busy summer of bug fixes and design tweaks.