Here Are All the New Features in iOS 18.4

iOS updates are usually like ordering “just water” and getting a lemon wedge you didn’t ask for. But iOS 18.4?
This one shows up with a full tray: smarter notifications, a brand-new recipes hub, Photos cleanup tools, App Store
glow-ups, and even robot vacuum support (because the future is apparently: “Siri, tell the Roomba I’m mad at it.”).

Below is a complete, human-friendly tour of what’s new in iOS 18.4, what it means in real life, and how to
actually use the stuff Apple addedwithout turning your iPhone into a science project.

Quick reality check: what is iOS 18.4, and who gets the “good stuff”?

iOS 18.4 is a feature-packed point release that adds new capabilities across Apple Intelligence, Photos, Apple News+,
the App Store, Control Center, Safari, and more.

Apple Intelligence features (device-limited)

Some headline features in iOS 18.4 sit under Apple Intelligence, which means you’ll need compatible hardware.
In iOS 18.4’s notes, Apple calls out support on all iPhone 16 models plus iPhone 15 Pro and
iPhone 15 Pro Max for Apple Intelligence items like Priority Notifications.

If your device isn’t on that list, don’t worryyou still get plenty of upgrades (Photos improvements, App Store changes,
emoji, Ambient Music, Safari refinements, and more). iOS 18.4 is not a “rich get richer” update; it’s more like “everyone
gets snacks, but a few people also get dessert.”

1) Priority Notifications (Apple Intelligence): your Lock Screen gets a brain

The biggest daily-life upgrade in iOS 18.4 is Priority Notifications. Instead of letting your Lock Screen become
a chaotic confetti cannon of pings, iOS can now float the alerts that seem time-sensitive or important to the top.

What it does

• Highlights urgent items first (think: imminent calendar events, delivery updates, reminders due, “where are you?” texts).
• Separates priority from the rest, so you still have your full notification listjust organized with less doom-scrolling.
• Reduces “notification blindness” by surfacing what needs action, not what wants attention.

How to turn it on (because it may be off by default)

Look for the setting under Settings → Notifications, where you can enable prioritization and (in some builds)
manage it per app. Translation: you can let Messages and Calendar be “priority,” while your coupon app can go back to
shouting into the void.

Why this matters

Apple Intelligence features tend to feel flashy when they generate something. Priority Notifications is the opposite:
it’s helpful precisely because it’s quiet. If your phone makes you calmer instead of more anxious, that’s a real upgrade.

2) Apple Intelligence expands languages and locales

iOS 18.4 broadens Apple Intelligence language support with eight additional languages plus new English locales.
That means more people can use the tools without forcing their iPhone to pretend it grew up in one specific zip code.

Apple’s iOS 18.4 notes call out support including English (India, Singapore), French (France, Canada), German, Italian,
Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Simplified Chinese, and Spanish (Spain, Latin America, US).

3) Visual Intelligence expands to iPhone 15 Pro (plus easier launch options)

iOS 18.4 brings Visual Intelligence to iPhone 15 Pro users, a feature that had been limited
more tightly before. The practical win here is accessand also convenience.

New ways to launch it

• Action Button support: Map Visual Intelligence to the Action Button for quick access.
• Control Center button: A dedicated Apple Intelligence section can include a Visual Intelligence toggle.

Where it shines (real examples)

Visual Intelligence is at its best when you’re in “I need an answer now” mode:

• Reading a poster or flyer and pulling out relevant details.
• Identifying objects or context around you faster than typing a description.
• Getting quick insight when you’re out shopping, traveling, or troubleshooting something physical.

The humor here is that your iPhone is finally learning a human skill: seeing a thing and understanding itwithout asking
you to open five different apps and manually narrate your environment like it’s a documentary.

4) Image Playground adds “Sketch” style

If you’ve tried Image Playground and thought, “Cool, but can it look like I drew it on a café napkin with artistic confidence
I don’t actually possess?”iOS 18.4 answers yes. There’s a new Sketch style option.

What Sketch style is good for

• Concepting: quick visual drafts for ideas (logos, poster vibes, mood-board images).
• Playful sharing: a “hand-drawn” look that feels less sterile than typical AI art styles.
• Notes and brainstorming: images that look like they belong in a project notebook.

Pro tip: Sketch style pairs well with short prompts and concrete nouns. “Golden retriever astronaut” will always win.
“The ineffable melancholy of modernity” will… probably generate a dramatic scribble and judge you for it.

5) Apple News+ gets a recipes upgrade: hello, Apple News+ Food

iOS 18.4 introduces a Food/recipes experience inside Apple News+. If you subscribe, you get a more structured
place to browse recipes, save them, and follow directions without your phone constantly timing out, rotating, and deciding
you meant to watch a video instead.

What’s included

• Recipes from major publishers (with a catalog you can browse or search).
• Saved Recipes so your “I’ll totally make this later” collection has an actual home.
• Cooking mode for step-by-step directions that are easier to follow mid-chop.
• Food stories (restaurants, kitchen tips, healthy eating, and more).

In practice, this is Apple saying: “We noticed you’ve been screenshotting recipes like a raccoon collecting shiny objects.”
Fair. This is cleaner.

6) Photos gets smarter filters and better organization tools

iOS 18 already revamped Photos, and iOS 18.4 continues the cleanup mission with more filtering and sorting controls.
This is one of those updates you’ll feel when you’re looking for a specific picture and your phone finally stops gaslighting you.

What’s new in Photos

• New filters to show/hide items not in an album, or synced from a Mac/PC (in Library view).
• Reorder items in Media Types and Utilities collections.
• Consistent filtering options across collections, including sorting oldest/newest first.
• Sort albums by Date Modified (hugely useful if you actually organize albums).
• Disable “Recently Viewed” and “Recently Shared” collections (privacy and sanity win).
• Hidden photos excluded from imports to Mac/PC when Face ID protection is enabled.

If you share a phone or use your iPhone for work, those last two bullets are big. Your “Hidden” album stays meaningfully hidden,
and Photos becomes less of a surprise-reveal machine.

7) Eight new emoji (yes, including the exhausted face we all deserve)

iOS 18.4 adds 8 new emoji. Some are delightfully practical; some are hilariously niche; all are inevitable.
The set includes:

• Face with bags under eyes (mood: Monday).
• Fingerprint.
• Leafless tree.
• Root vegetable (often described as a turnip/radish-beet vibe).
• Harp.
• Shovel.
• Splatter (paint? chaos? emotional damage? you decide).
• Flag of Sark (because… sure).

Emoji updates are tiny, but they’re also a weirdly accurate snapshot of civilization. iOS 18.4’s emoji lineup says:
we’re tired, we’re trying to garden, we’re digging something up, and a small island is having a moment.

8) App Store upgrades: review summaries + pause/resume downloads

The App Store gets two changes that are small but extremely usefullike discovering your car has a “mute the seatbelt chime”
option you didn’t know about.

App Store review summaries

iOS 18.4 adds summaries of user reviews so you can get the gist quicklyespecially helpful when reviews are
70% “works great!” and 30% “my cousin’s phone exploded” and you’re trying to figure out what’s real.

In beta reporting, these summaries are generated using Apple Intelligence models and can refresh over time (for apps with
enough reviews).

Pause and resume downloads without losing progress

You can now pause and resume an app download or update from the App Store update list without nuking the process.
This is perfect for low-signal situations or when you need bandwidth for something more important than downloading a game
you’ll open twice.

9) Ambient Music in Control Center: instant vibes, zero effort

iOS 18.4 adds Ambient Music you can trigger right from Control Center. Think of it as Apple offering
“focus playlists” without making you hunt through your library or commit to an app.

What you get

• Sleep
• Chill
• Productivity
• Wellbeing

Apple describes these as hand-curated playlists meant to soundtrack daily life. It’s the fastest path from “my brain is loud”
to “okay, we’re pretending we’re a calm person now.”

10) Safari: smarter recent search suggestions

Safari now surfaces recent search suggestions to help you jump back into previous search topics when starting
a new query. This is the browser equivalent of your friend saying, “You were talking about that thing earlierwant to pick up
where you left off?” instead of forcing you to re-type the whole saga.

11) Family + child safety improvements: Setup Assistant and Screen Time reliability

iOS 18.4 puts more polish on parenting workflows and child accounts.

Setup Assistant for Child Accounts

Setup Assistant streamlines steps parents take to create a Child Account and can enable child-appropriate default settings
even if parents want to finish the setup later.

Screen Time App Limits that actually stick

App Limits now persist even if a child uninstalls and reinstalls an app. Translation: “Nice try” becomes a built-in feature.

12) Podcasts widgets: faster access to what you actually listen to

iOS 18.4 adds new Podcast widgets:

• Followed Shows widget to track your favorites.
• Library widget to jump to key sections like Latest Episodes, Saved, and Downloaded.

It’s a small change, but if podcasts are part of your routine, this reduces the “open app → hunt for thing → get distracted”
loop.

13) Apple Fitness+ Collections can be added to your Library

If you use Fitness+, iOS 18.4 lets you add Collections to your Library. This is a quality-of-life upgrade for people
who like structured plansbecause remembering which workout sequence you were on is not “mindfulness,” it’s just friction.

14) Apple Home supports Matter-compatible robot vacuums

One of the most “welcome to 2025” features in iOS 18.4: you can control Matter-compatible robot vacuum cleaners
in the Home app and add them to scenes and automations.

What this unlocks

• Start/stop cleaning from Home.
• Add vacuum actions to automations (e.g., “when I leave home, start cleaning”).
• Bundle vacuuming into scenes like “Movie Night” (because nothing says cinema like a robot humming in the hallway).

Matter support varies by manufacturer, but the platform-level support means your smart home gets less “app zoo” over time.

15) New Apple Vision Pro app on iPhone

If you own a Vision Pro, iOS 18.4 adds a dedicated Apple Vision Pro app on iPhone to help you discover content,
find spatial experiences, and access device information more quickly.

Some roundups also highlight improvements around guest usage and guidanceuseful if you’ve ever tried to hand someone a Vision Pro
and watched them immediately do everything wrong in under six seconds.

16) Default apps expand: translation (and navigation in the EU)

iOS 18.4 also moves the needle on default apps:

• Default translation app: iOS and iPadOS allow users to choose a default translation app.
• Default navigation app (EU): users in the EU can set a default navigation app (a shift tied to regional requirements).

For users who live inside Google Maps or prefer a specific translator, this is the kind of change that makes an iPhone feel
more personaland less like it’s politely insisting you do things “the Apple way.”

17) CarPlay tweaks (especially on larger displays)

iOS 18.4 includes CarPlay upgrades reported by several outlets, particularly for vehicles with bigger infotainment screens:
more room for app icons, better glanceable info (like sports scores), and improved flexibility in certain regions.

These updates aim at the same goal as most good CarPlay changes: fewer taps, less fiddling, more driving.

18) Ten new system languages

iOS 18.4 adds support for 10 new system languages: Bangla, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi,
Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. That’s not flashy, but it’s meaningfulespecially for households where language support is the difference
between “works for everyone” and “works for one person.”

So… should you update to iOS 18.4?

If your iPhone supports iOS 18, iOS 18.4 is a solid update for everyday usability. Even if you don’t have an Apple Intelligence-capable
device, you still get Photos improvements, App Store quality-of-life upgrades, new emoji, Control Center Ambient Music, Safari refinements,
smart home additions, and broader language support.

If you do have an Apple Intelligence-capable device, Priority Notifications alone can change how your phone feels day to dayless frantic, more
helpful. And that’s the whole point of a “smart” phone: being smart in ways that reduce your workload, not add to it.

Real-world experiences: what iOS 18.4 feels like after you live with it

Here’s the funny thing about iOS 18.4: you don’t notice it all at once. You notice it in tiny moments when your iPhone behaves like a considerate
assistant instead of an attention-hungry toddler with a cymbal. The first time that really lands is usually notifications. You pick up your phone and,
instead of seeing a pile of “stuff happened,” you see the one thing that actually matters right now. Maybe it’s a reminder that your meeting
starts in 10 minutes, or a message that clearly needs a response, or a delivery update that changes your day. It’s not magicit’s triage. But it feels
like your phone is finally on your side.

Then you hit a second “oh, nice” moment in the App Store. You’re about to download an app you only kind of trust (because the icon looks like it was
designed during a caffeine shortage), and the review summary gives you the quick truth: people love it for one feature, hate it for a recurring bug,
and several reviews include the phrase “after the last update.” That’s enough context to decide in seconds, not minutes. And when your download starts
crawling because you walked into the one corner of the grocery store where cell service goes to die, you can pause the download and resume later without
losing progress. It’s a small thing, but small things are basically the operating system’s love language.

Photos is the sleeper hit. The benefits aren’t glamorous, but they’re constant. Sorting albums by Date Modified is the difference between “I know I saved
this somewhere” and “I’m going to give up and text the group chat asking if anyone has the photo.” Being able to disable “Recently Viewed” and “Recently Shared”
is also a quiet privacy upgradeespecially if you’re the kind of person who has ever handed your phone to someone to show one picture and immediately regretted
every decision that led you there. The new filtering options make your library feel more manageable, less like a junk drawer with 23,000 screenshots and one
perfect sunset photo you can never find.

Apple News+ Food is one of those features that doesn’t sound essentialuntil you’re cooking. Then it becomes obvious why “Cooking mode” matters. You’re mid-recipe,
hands messy, brain juggling timing, and your phone isn’t bouncing around between ads, pop-ups, and a life story about how the author’s grandma invented salt.
You get the ingredients, the steps, and the ability to save recipes without building a scrapbook of screenshots. If you already subscribe, it’s a surprisingly
practical upgrade; if you don’t, it’s at least a reminder that Apple is trying to turn services into everyday utilities.

Ambient Music is the “I didn’t know I needed this” feature. It’s not about audiophile perfectionit’s about friction removal. You’re working, stressed, or trying
to fall asleep, and instead of opening an app and selecting the exact right playlist like a DJ auditioning for your own life, you tap Control Center and go:
Chill. Productivity. Sleep. Wellbeing. Done. It’s the iPhone equivalent of dimming the lights without getting up.

Finally, the fun stuff: the new emoji. The “face with bags under eyes” gets used immediately, because it’s basically a universal greeting now. The shovel and
splatter have strangely high utility (metaphor is powerful), and the random flag emoji is the classic Apple move: “You didn’t ask, but you’re getting it.”
iOS 18.4 is like that overallpractical improvements with a few delightful odditiesmaking your iPhone feel a little more modern without forcing you to relearn
how to use it.

Wrap-up

iOS 18.4 is a “daily driver” update: less about headline theatrics, more about improving the things you touch constantlynotifications, Photos, the App Store,
Control Center, and everyday content. Whether you’re here for Apple Intelligence upgrades, recipe hunting, smart-home automation, or just a better way to express
your exhaustion via emoji, iOS 18.4 delivers.