No matter whether you downloaded iOS 18 earlier this week for your older iPhone or got it today with your new iPhone 16, we’ve found a few hidden tricks that we bet will make your iPhone experience better.
The latest offering from Apple brings big changes to the iPhone, including more customization to the lock and home screen, new features to the text messages, a dedicated app for passwords and a completely redesigned photo album.
On iOS 17 and earlier, the only way to restart your iPhone is to press and hold either volume button and the side button.
There are a few ways you can share a Wi-Fi network and password with people via your iPhone, and there’s a new way to do it on iOS 18. Using a QR code fills in a few gaps for ways to quickly share your Wi-Fi information:
This only works for Wi-Fi passwords, not regular passwords.
The flashlight on the iPhone is getting a big upgrade. While you’ve long been able to change the intensity of the flashlight, on iOS 18 you can now also adjust the beam width of the light, as long as you have a compatible model. You can go wide, to cover more area with less light, or go narrow, to use more intense light over less area, and everywhere in between. It’s a fun feature to play around with for lighting people for photos.
To use the new feature, turn on your flashlight (use the lock screen or control center), and a new user interface will appear in the dynamic island. You can change the light intensity by swiping up and down, but to change the beam width, you’ll need to swipe left and right. If you tap anywhere in the dynamic island, you can turn the flashlight off and on.
Take an existing voice memo (left) and create a transcript of the recording (right).
Now, when you use the Search field, the app looks through the transcripts in addition to the titles for results. The text is also available throughout iOS – when you perform a search from the home screen, you’ll see Voice Memos as a category with the memos that include the search term (you may need to tap Show More Results to reveal it).
This will also remove the app labels from the folders in the App Library.
Not every iOS app has a widget for your home screen, but if it does, you don’t need to dig through the widget edit page to find it. If you’re running iOS 18, and there’s an app that you want to turn into a widget, you can do so very quickly right from your home screen.
On a supported app, press and hold down on the icon on your home screen to bring up the quick actions menu. If the app has a widget, you’ll see an app icon next to a variety of widget icons (up to three). Tap on any of the widget icons to change the app to a widget. If you want to go back from the widget to the app, go to the quick action menu and hit the app icon on the left.
Assign the Recognize Music feature to the Action Button and then identify songs by just holding the button.
To make it work, just press and hold the Action Button for a couple of seconds. Shazam appears in the dynamic island to listen to what’s playing and identifies the song. If you’re sneaky about activating Shazam and peeking at your phone, no one needs to know you got some help from a supercomputer in the cloud.
A lot is changing in the Photos app in iOS 18, from the way things are organized to the ability to use generative AI to remove objects in images (coming next month). Apple has also tucked a few surprises into the app to help you sort through your library.
Scroll down past the main library itself to view categories such as People and Pets and Memories until you reach Utilities. Tap it to view the full list – but note that a new feature of this interface is the ability to swipe left to view additional panels. Prior to iOS 18, Utilities included options to view hidden, recently deleted and duplicate photos.
Now, it includes many more options. Tap Handwriting to view images with handwriting in them. Looking for images that are illustrations and not photographs? Tap Illustrations (though in our testing this seems to grab a lot of screenshots, too).
Start by sharing the episode itself.
Lastly, choose the method of sharing, such as via Messages or Mail. When the recipient receives the shared episode and opens it in the Podcasts app, they’ll see the option to Play from [the time].
