There are a billion things in iOS 18 this year, and I highly suggest checking out Federico Viticci’s review over on MacStories, but here are a few things that have actually been impactful for me since installing the beta back in June. This is addressing things in iOS 18 releasing tomorrow, and does not include anything we’re waiting to come in 18.1 later this year.

RCS

Without question, RCS in Apple Messages has been the most impactful iOS change in my life this summer. Although I wasn’t always in favor of RCS, I have been rooting for it for several years now, and I’m happy to say it’s lived up to my expectations. It sounds crazy, but it’s been borderline emotional for me to be able to send high quality messages to several people in my life in a way I’ve never been able to before. Yes, WhatsApp could have done this for years, but I challenge anyone to teach my 70+ year old relatives how to install WhatsApp and how to remember that some of their family are in one app and the rest are in another. Good, universal messaging is important, and the fact I can send nice images and videos to everyone in my life is wonderful.

If you have group chats with a mix of iPhone and Android people, then you’ll need every iPhone user in the chat to upgrade to iOS 18 before the convo will switch over, so encourage your iPhone friends and family to upgrade.

iMessage text effects

Also in Messages, I like the new styling options. Bold and italics are nice, but I also enjoy the other animated effects. They’re fun for accenting jokes here and there, and I’ve enjoyed that they’re available quite a few times.

iMessage Send later

My final messaging update is the ability to schedule messages to send later. It’s rarely useful, but a few times it’s been nice to write a message and wait to send it later. Mostly, it’s been nice when I think of something to send in the middle of the night, but don’t want to risk disturbing the person it’s going to.

Pro tip: schedule your messages for something like 8:12AM rather than 8:00 if you want to not make it so obvious that it was scheduled. This tip applies to your scheduled Slack messages, too.

Dark icons

I really dislike the tinted icons, but dark mode icons are pretty nice. You can set these all the time by customizing your home screen, or you can have them just kick in when dark mode on your phone is enabled (or you can never use them if you prefer, it’s all possible in the new home screen customization settings).

Free icon placement

This is something I’ve loved on Android since the beginning, and it’s quite lovely on iOS as well. I now have all of my apps within reach of my thumb on my Max iPhone and life is good.

Custom shortcuts on the lock screen

The flashlight and camera have been long accessible from the lock screen, but iOS 18 lets you put whatever you want there. For me, that’s meant the flashlight remains, but I’ve swapped out the Camera app launcher with the Apple TV Remote app, which I find myself launching more often than you might think.

Once Halide’s iOS 18 update ships (update minutes after posting this: it's out), I’m likely going to put it there instead, and make that my quick access to their “Process Zero” mode, which takes RAW photos without the normal processing that normal iPhone shots (including ProRAW) have baked in. My action button launches Apple’s Camera app, which I prefer most of the time, but this shortcut will make it easier to integrate third party cameras into my life.

Hiking directions in Apple Maps

I regularly drive to a random neighborhood and walk my dog, and a challenge of that has been finding a path that is around the right distance since I don’t have a great feel for how long a block is on the map. Now in Maps, you can easily map out a path and see how long it is before venturing out. It’s quick and easy and works very well. It’s intended for mapping hikes, but it totally works in the suburbs as well.

Erase and format external drives

This is obviously not a huge thing for most people, but every once in a while you need to format a hard drive, and iOS 18 brings the ability to erase and format connected drives into APFS, ExFAT, and FAT formats.

Again, definitely check out other reviews for more of the details, but these are the things I’ve appreciated over the last few months.