I’ve been using iOS 18 for weeks: 5 reasons to download it today

Apple announced the iPhone 16 range to great fanfare last week with four new phones that tout better cameras, longer battery life, and have a new ‘Camera Control’ button on the side to take pictures, zoom in with a swipe and more. The new phones go on sale on Friday 20 September, but you don’t need to feel left out as Apple has now released iOS 18 as a free software update to millions of older iPhones.

One of the headline new things for iOS 18 is Apple Intelligence, Apple’s new set of artificial intelligence tools. These new features will only work on the iPhone 16 series and the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max.

Thankfully, there’s fat more to iOS 18 than AI, and if you have any iPhone released in 2018 or later, you should get the update on your phone very soon. That’s a stretch of phones from the iPhone XS and XR up to the iPhone 15 released last year.

I’ve been using the beta version of iOS 18 on my iPhone for a few weeks to get a feel for the new software before its official launch into the world today. Before you head over to your iPhone’s settings app to check for the software update, here are the five best features and changes Apple has made that I think will make using your iPhone better every day.

You’ve been able to do it on Android since day one but Apple has finally seen sense and now lets you plonk apps anywhere you want on your screen. Until now, iPhone apps automatically snap into a grid that fills in from the top down.

With iOS 18, you can place apps and widgets at will. You can have a screen with a row at the bottom, or up the side, or just one app. It’s not really changed how I set up my phone but if you keep multiple home screens you can organise them more freely now.

If you are into your customisation then you’ll also enjoy being able to ‘tint’ apps, as Apple calls it. You can change the colour of all the apps on your phone to one colour of your choice, which looks a bit odd at first. You might do it for aesthetic but I found it worked well to remove the saturated allure of apps, and meant I didn’t tap mindlessly on Instagram half as often because the purple was now a dull grey.

You can also choose to have apps in light or dark themes even if your phone is not in light or dark mode, as well as have your wallpaper light or dark. It’s not Android, but it gives you more chance to make your iPhone your own.

Perhaps my favourite new thing about iOS 18 is being able to fully customise Control Centre, the longstanding screen you access from the top right of the display and lets you, well, control everything. It looks a little different in design with more rounded edges but now you can remove bits you don’t want, move stuff around, and for the first time, add shortcuts to supported third party apps.

You can also now scroll through whole-screen controls for media controls, Home, and connectivity options. It doesn’t add much extra functionality, but it adds to the feeling that Apple is finally relinquishing some grip over the iPhone’s software to let you decide how to use your phone, and that’s a good thing.

In a sure-fire case of Sherlocking – when big tech companies release a feature that does what successful third-party apps do – iOS 18 adds a Passwords app to every compatible iPhone. If you’ve ever used 1Password or LastPass you’ll feel right at home with an app that securely stores all your logins and passwords for websites and apps so you don’t have to remember them. You can then use the app when you need to sign in to a service you’re already signed up for.

The best part about Passwords is you don’t have to pay for it, unlike most password manager services that charge a subscription fee. That’s bad news for those services, and good news for iPhone owners.

Just like when we all used to moan about big changes to Facebook because no one likes change, the Photos app looks a bit different in iOS 18 but it seems like it’s for the better. Scroll up past your most recent photos and Apple has sorted you out with several rows of curated photos, videos and memories, sorting highlights for you. This is handy to me as I take so many photos I often forget about them, but this presents groups of frequently photographed people, photos by places, and memories reels for me to enjoy and share.

There’s a good ‘Trips’ section too so you don’t have to round up all your latest holiday snaps, which could be my favourite part of the redesigned app – even if it reminds me I need to take far more holidays.

On top of all this new iPhone goodness, if you want to get all Apple’s new AI – called Apple Intelligence – it’s coming as another update in December, but you’ll have to have an iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, or one of the new iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro or iPhone 16 Pro Max.