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IMHO, the most compelling reasons to install this are RCS support in Messages and the dark mode icons.
That said, I imagine 18.1 will be in public beta soon, and people will probably be more interested in that. That includes the newer Siri model, writing tools, notifications summaries, etc.
First thing I did was test out the new RCS support, and it’s pretty awesome!
What makes it awesome?
Being able to text an Android user and have things like: typing notifications, read receipts, better image support, working reactions, etc.
It’s like imesssge but with non iOS devices
Are you able to send messages from iPads and Macs to Android users now?
You’ve always been able to do that. Settings > messages > text message forwarding
Thank you. I am relatively new to having an iphone and had no idea that was available.
(Not a trolling/joking)Why Americans so tied to Apple messages and as result waiting for RCS? We, here in Europe, just use Telegram/Facebook messenger/Instagram direct for decade and only 1.5 nerds like me knows about existence of Apple iMessage. I’ve tried iMessages with my friends and then we just back to Telegram, because we have tried to convince our friends to use iMessages and nobody wants to learn how to use it and first question from everyone is: how I will write to people with android(most people here have android)?
Using metas privacy invasion apps for messaging is cringe
I primarily use Signal because I like my chats end-to-end encrypted. iMessage is not that bad on that front.
I avoid any Facebook-written code like the plague, including WhatsApp and Messenger. They literally have a track record of putting malware in their products. I don’t understand why Europeans aren’t bothered by this.
There’s some history here:
SMS was ubiquitous in the United States long before smartphones. We didn’t have country codes to worry about, so anyone else in the United States was reachable in near real time over text, using an asynchronous, open, inter-carrier method of communication. If I had your phone number I could text you for free. Layered onto that was various automated systems over text (alerts, etc.). Later on, the carriers rolled out MMS for basic pictures being sent, group texts, etc.
So when iPhones became popular here, the default method of communication was SMS/MMS. The iPhone user knew that it would work with dumb phones, Android phones, Windows phones, whatever. And those habits and those chat threads predated the rise of WhatsApp, FB Messenger, WeChat, Telegram, etc., and a lot of those apps simply didn’t work with old dumb phones. Why give up an existing group chat thread just because one of those friends didn’t have a smartphone yet?
Then, whenever every member of a chat had an iPhone, the system automatically defaulted to the upgraded iMessage experience: high quality media sharing, typing/delivery/read notifications, reactions, etc. It was a slow transition, and didn’t start to show clear advantage over the open SMS/MMS standard until smartphones were ubiquitous, and where most people had iPhones.
And so once everyone had a “it just works” app, they didn’t want to switch to an app that required everyone to get a separate account and download a separate app. Especially because the iPhone hit something like 80% market share among certain demographics (the young, the non-technical rich, etc.).
Excellent write up. I hear people ask about this all the time, why the USA defaulted towards SMS/MMS/iMessage when other parts of the world didn’t. It is not the case of now but the history of the technological development and saturation of the technology within the younger demographics that got us here naturally. We didn’t have to make a choice of which platform to migrate our friend/family groups too because we had enough of the functions we needed built into all of our phones along the last 30 years.
It doesn’t come down to what is the best platform right now, it comes down to what was the best, and easiest, platform to get all my friends and family using when my country/region/friend group/etc got smartphones. There are large swaths of the world population where their technology exposure was landline>TV>Internet cafe>smartphone. Where the beginning of their online presence was through an Internet cafe and then very soon after (within years) they had a smart phone. In that model their first interaction with instant messaging was not phone to phone but computer to computer and they used messenger/instagram/whatsapp/wechat and etc and those social networks of friends migrated with them from the Internet cafe PC as the main point of access to a Smartphone as the main point of access.
Apple is less evil than Facebook/Meta/etc so it’s an easy choice not to use them.
Open communication standards are always superior to proprietary lock-in that relies on the good graces of a corporation that doesn’t care about you.
I don’t usually install major Apple OS updates on launch; there seem to be major bugs often enough that I try to wait until the first bugfix release.
Okay 👍
I’ve updated on launch since iPhone was initially released. I can’t recall any time I ever had an issue with bugs; not to say others hadn’t. After seeing what this OS looks like, I will be holding out on iOS 17 (on my 12 mini) for as long as possible. Apple has gotten into the habit of breaking things that previously worked perfectly well for no apparent reason. Meanwhile, we can’t get basic things like smart folders or a decent music app. I’m really fed up with the crap this company puts out.
Same. I always wait for the first point update to hit before upgrading.
Running iOS betas on test devices is enough pain for me.
Photos app new interface sucks.
I like it, I already sort my newest photos at the bottom so seeing the extra albums by scrolling down works better for me
I dig it
They finally nuked the “special” widget section on the left fully… which screwed up a couple useful widgets that I was using and haven’t found a replacement for… so that sucks.
New homescreen positioning is cool, but breaks one of the workarounds I was using without a replacement either (smart stack with a background that made them invisible until I scrolled them). Minor thing, but annoying. We can position icons slightly better now… but I still can’t have 5 items in my dock? I still can’t have different grid sizes? I still can’t add custom icons? Sad.
No more mandatory camera app on lockscreen? nice. Hasn’t been needed in forever… even less with the newer models having a hardware button.
Drag n drop for control center? Better late than never. Hate the round icons though… I like squarcles. When I still had an android and they tried to move to circles for everything, I applied a custom icon set to make them revert. Dislike the circles. Also the fact that the larger size is still a squarcle… makes it mismatched and stupid looking.
Like always… feels like a step forward and a step back. :/
Gawd… I just opened the photo gallery app… that redesign is awful. I don’t want a bunch of “we’re pretending to be facebook so here’s a bunch of ‘memories’ for you” pushed at me. I know what photos I took… I took them. Go away.
The configurable control center pages is nice in theory… but what it does in practice is you open it to use it and try to swipe it back up so you can go back to your homescreen, but instead you end up swiping up the stupid control center page and seeing your media controls instead. That’s going to take ages to get used to.
The new more fluid feeling fade in for notifications on the apple watch is nice though. I still hate the redesign from the last version. Reduced functionality for me, as usual.
Just as a heads up, you can edit the sections that show and where they show in the Photos app and you can always swipe control center away if you start at the very bottom of the screen like an app.
Yeah I saw the edit button for the gallery. It’s classic Apple though. Just let you move around their generated nonsense but the app is fundamentally changed interface so might as well just get used to it.
Same thing with the control center. I know I can swipe from the very bottom to clear it. But the point was I didn’t have to do that before so it’s less convenient for someone we didn’t need and wasn’t implemented well.
Remove the additional pages in control center, then you can swipe up to close.
Wait, where do I disable the lockscreen camera? I haven’t yet found that option unfortunately.
It’s one of my most hated “features”, to the point where I just completely disabled the camera itself to get rid of it.
You can go into the edit lock screen area and where you customize the background and widgets etc the bottom two things (flashlight and camera icons)are now editable.
Thanks! Seems there still isn’t a way to disable the left swipe camera though?
Nope.
YOU STILL CAN’T MOVE THE LOCKSCREEN CLOCK. FUCK.
Is this really a major problem?
It’s literally making me consider a different operating system. If there were more options than just android I would probably unironically switch largely due to this.
^not guaranteed to be a true fact^
It might be time for you to pick up a hobby.
Unfortunately that’s the key reason why the clock position is bugging me
I checked my group chat and noticed that it only shows SMS despite the whole Android-side of the group all showing RCS in their individual chats. Is this the intended implementation?
I’m guessing that the iPhones in the group also need to be upgraded to iOS 18 for it to work correctly.
Everyone has to be RCS.
Dang it. I’m pretty sure my aunt is using an iPhone 8. Fingers crossed she upgrades this year!
Tbf, there might be people like myself who refuse to use Google messages too and since there is no Oss way to use RCS, kinda stuck.
Wish the standard was open.
Kinda breaks the purpose of the S in RCS
Services?
I thought the S stood for Standard 💀
I thought it stands for Sucks
I seem to remember vaguely that iOS 18 was supposed to have a feature but was left out in the end. I do not mean the AI stuff, there was some other major part. Something like handoff but not handoff. I completely forgot what it was and searched online but searching without knowing what to search is a…challenge :-)
Anybody here have any clue what it was or am I imagining things?
Ah! Found it!
iPhone MirroringThat was the one. Sadly, not available in the EU for now :-(
Yeah and I can’t get my head around why it won’t be available here in the EU. This is so fucking stupid! Like how is the DMA or any other legislation supposed to prevent them from implementing iPhone mirroring? They literally offer every other continuity-related feature over here. This is just Apple being upset they’re actually being regulated in the EU.
I honestly think it’s just because their lawyers work through other stuff first. They’ll get to it eventually
I tried it out today! Works decently with most apps, but lags a bit with others. I’ve run into one app that doesn’t scroll vertically, but hopefully that is an easy fix on the developer’s part.
I’ve been running the beta and have no issues with 1:1 chats. But the group chat (3 people) I tried didn’t switch to RCS until the other iPhone user sent a message.
Does the other iOS user have 18? I’m the 1 android user in a 3 person group chat and I’m wondering if I should try to get one of them to update.
Everyone needs iOS 18.
