Apple is nearly ready to ship its next iPhone update: iOS 18.5 is coming next week and will bring a handful of new features to users. Here’s what’s coming.
#1: Enhancements for Apple’s Mail app
Last December, iOS 18.2 brought major changes to Apple’s Mail app. The big redesign and new inbox features were a bit controversial, though.
In iOS 18.5, Apple brings two enhancements to Mail that should help:
- The previously hidden ‘All Mail’ inbox view is now visible
- and contact photos can be easily enabled or disabled
The first change makes it easier to keep the new inbox categories enabled, while bouncing between categories and ‘All Mail’ views as needed. Previously, you could only find ‘All Mail’ if you happened upon it with a swipe gesture, but iOS 18.5 makes it visible on the right edge of the screen.
Not everyone’s a fan of the Messages-inspired addition of contact photos to the inbox. If that’s you, tapping the three-dot icon in the top-right corner now reveals an option to show or hide contact photos. You could do this from the Settings app before, but now it’s right inside the app.
#2: New Pride wallpaper
It’s rare for Apple to add new system wallpapers to iOS, but in the last few years the company started doing so for certain annual occasions, such as Pride.
Now in iOS 18.5, your iPhone’s built-in wallpapers include a brand new Pride addition. It’s a colorful new option that joins existing Pride wallpapers from previous years.
#3: Screen Time notifications
Screen Time is Apple’s set of tools across iPhone, iPad, and Mac for having a healthier approach to your tech.
One aspect of Screen Time is parental controls, and those are getting a nice update in iOS 18.5.
Now, whenever a Screen Time passcode is entered on your child’s device, you as the parent will get notified about it. This ensures that your child isn’t bypassing Screen Time limits without your knowledge.
#4: Seamless Apple TV app purchases
The best big-screen experience with Apple’s TV app is generally found on tvOS. But many users don’t own an Apple TV 4K, and they stick with the built-in Apple TV app on their smart TV.
In iOS 18.5, an iPhone feature that previously only worked with tvOS is now extended to third-party TVs and streaming devices too.
‘Buy with iPhone’ enables you to purchase content in the Apple TV app by authenticating on your iPhone.
Basically, if you want to subscribe to a new service inside the TV app, or buy or rent a movie, iOS 18.5 makes that experience more seamless than ever when using third-party TV devices.
#5: Satellite features come to iPhone 13
Historically, if you wanted to use satellite features in iOS, you needed an iPhone 14 or newer.
But that’s changing with iOS 18.5, which enables you to access carrier-provided satellite features on an iPhone 13, 13 mini, 13 Pro, or 13 Pro Max.
T-Mobile, for example, lets users benefit from Starlink-based satellite connectivity when you’re in an area without network coverage.
Top comment by Inkling
No improvements to the Notes app? It's gotten so good I'm moving most of my note-taking to it. But improvements are still needed.
For instance, smart folders are great, but when one's being created, there's no way to create a new #tag. One has to be added to a note to exist. That wastes time. Include an Add a New Tag option with Smart Folder creation.
Notes is also visually dull. Scrivener illustrates what it could be. Give us the ability to add a colored background to individual entires in the Folder list. That would make them stand out. And add the ability to create various backgrounds to notes not just the system-wide light and dark. Perhaps offer the option that allows users to set the background color for all the notes in a particular folder. In short, make Notes visually interesting.
Having Title, Heading etc. styles are great, but even better would be allowing users change the formatting for those styles and to create ones of their own. For school work, a formatted style for indented quotes would be handy, as would one for references either to online or printed sources.
There's also an irritating bug. Once the text in a note is colored, there's no way I can find to turn that color off. Users can change it to another color, but they cannot return it to black. Once created, colors are often hard to read. At least give us black as an option.
However, some of Apple’s own satellite features—like Emergency SOS via satellite—remain exclusive to newer iPhones because of specific hardware requirements.
iOS 18.5 features: wrap-up
Overall, iOS 18.5 is a much smaller iPhone update than the norm. This isn’t entirely surprising, though, because Apple rarely adds big new features this late in a release’s annual cycle.
Next month, iOS 19 will be unveiled at WWDC. That major update has occupied Apple’s engineering resources for a while now. Thus, any remaining iOS 18 updates will offer more minor changes and bug fixes.
Are you interested in any of the new iOS 18.5 features listed above? Let us know in the comments.
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