The iOS 18.4 upgrade is available now
Apple’s iOS 18.4 software for iPhones has arrived. It’s a fairly chunky upgrade that is of particular interest to owners of iPhone 15 Pro phones, who get new Apple Intelligence features.
The update is available now, and you should receive a prompt when it hits your iPhone.
You can also check manually, by heading to Settings > General > Software Update. Need some reasons to upgrade? Here’s a summary of what iOS 18.4 brings to your iPhone.
1. Priority notifications
Owners of iPhone 16 or iPhone 15 Pro-series phones now get Priority Notifications. This uses Apple Intelligence AI to work out which notifications are likely to be the most important to give them greater prominence on your lock screen.
2. Visual Intelligence for iPhone 15 Pro
Previously only available on iPhone 16 phones, Apple Visual Intelligence now comes to the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max. It’s another AI feature, one that uses an iPhone’s camera to recognise objects or animals, translate text or look up local businesses. It’s similar to Google’s Lens.
3. More emojis
A pack of eight emojis are added in iOS 18.4. These are the “face with bags under eyes”, fingerprint, a leafless tree, root vegetable, harp, a shovel, a splatter icon and the flag of Sark.
4. Ambient music
This one is pretty neat. iOS 18.4 has a section for ambient music playlists within the iPhone’s Control Center. There are Chill, Productivity, Sleep and Wellbeing options. Such soundtracks can be handy for those looking to block out distractions while working, and to help you relax a bit in noisy environments.
5. Image Playground: Sketch
Sketch joins Animation and Illustration as a style option within AI image generation tool Image Playground. This style was actually announced in June 2024 when the wider feature was announced, but Image Playground launched without it. Presumably it needed a little longer in the oven to produce results Apple was happy with.
6. Vision Pro app
This one won’t be of interest to all that many people, considering the relatively low sales of Vision Pro. But Apple’s Spatial Computer headset now gets its own iPhone app if you own the headset. This lets you browse for and download apps for it, and check out other Vision Pro content.
7. Recipes in Apple News+
The £12.99-a-month Apple News+ now gets a Food section. This serves up recipes from many of the most prolific providers of them, and it breaks recipes down into tabs containing the ingredients and directions. Handy if you don’t want to spend ages scrolling through endless paragraphs of blurb.
8. CarPlay upgrade
If you have a car that supports CarPlay and has a large display, you may find it now shows three rows of icons instead of the previous two rows. It’s not clear yet what screen inch count or resolution you need to see this enhancement but it’s a reaction to an increase in in-car screen sizes. There’s also a minor change to how the system works, letting sports apps show score updates in the Now Playing view.