With the release of the first iOS 18.4 Public Beta, we can now get a glimpse of the next round of iPhone features, some based on Apple Intelligence and others on new iOS capabilities. A new option uses AI to tag priority notifications, for example, and you can start playing ambient music directly in Control Center and view recipes in Apple News.
From talking fridges to iPhones, our experts are here to help make the world a little less complicated.
The public beta is more stable than the developer betas, which Apple has steadily released since the beginning of June, and are intended for… developers.
But “more stable” isn’t the same as “rock solid.” Apple is still adding and changing features in the iOS 18.4 betas before the anticipated release of iOS 18.4 in April.
If you do decide to install the iOS 18.4 public beta, I recommend doing it on a separate iPhone that isn’t using your main personal phone. iOS 18.4 will work with models as old as the iPhone SE (second generation) and iPhone XR, so reach into the back of your tech drawer and put that forgotten iPhone into service.
Also, as always, make sure you have good backups of your data.
Betas can be tough on batteries.
Partially due to the reindexing of gigabytes of data on your phone, the iOS 18.4 public beta will almost certainly not deliver the performance you might be expecting. Processor-intensive apps and games also need to be tuned to work with the new iOS, so stutters and glitches are normal.
Game Mode is a new feature for iOS (it first appeared in macOS Sonoma) that redirects resources to improve frame rates and Bluetooth latency, so the most demanding games might perform better than under iOS 17 or iOS 18. However, Game Mode works at a low level and could be interrupted by beta components.
