Apple Releases iOS 18.3 | Here’s What’s New

Following last week’s release candidate for iOS 18.3, it was pretty much a given that we’d see the public release sometime this week. However, Apple hasn’t wasted any time pushing it out, with iOS 18.3 and the rest of its compatriots now available for download to nearly all your favorite Apple devices.

As with most of Apple’s “.3” releases over the past few years, there aren’t too many groundbreaking changes in iOS 18.3. Perhaps partly due to the holiday break that always occurs during development, Apple tends to get the biggest things out of the way in the first two point releases by early December and then takes a break with its January releases, which usually focus more on bug fixes, performance improvements, and security patches, usually with only a few minor new features, if any.

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For example, last year’s iOS 17.3 update introduced Stolen Device Protection, a small but significant anti-theft feature for iPhone users that we highly recommend you enable. iOS 16.3 similarly added support for using a security key with your Apple Account. iOS 15.3 consisted solely of “bug fixes and performance improvements.”

So, if anything, the few improvements we’re getting in iOS 18.3 are a nice bonus, although some are also corrective. Here’s a quick recap of what’s new:

1. Apple Intelligence will now be enabled by default. You’re still welcome to turn it off if you don’t want to use it, but Apple wants to encourage everyone to at least give it a try. Don’t worry, while Apple Intelligence does use some extra storage, we’ve confirmed that this data gets removed if you switch Apple Intelligence off.
2. Visual Intelligence on the iPhone 16 models gains the ability to add events to your Calendar when scanning a poster or flyer, and easily identify plants and animals. Apple promised these features when it unveiled Visual Intelligence in September, but it’s clearly taken a bit more time to roll them out.
3. Notification Summaries have been temporarily disabled for apps that fall into the News and Entertainment category to help prevent misleading summaries while Apple works on training its AI models. Summarized notifications are also now shown in italics to help make it more apparent when you’re viewing a summary instead of the actual notification, and a new control lets you turn off notification summaries for any app directly from the Lock Screen or Notification Center, by swiping left to right and using the Options menu as you would to disable notifications altogether.
4. The Calculator app now supports repeating calculations, letting you hit the equals button multiple times to continue a sum, multiplication, or other operation. This was how the Calculator app worked for years until Apple redesigned it in iOS 18.
5. Listed bug fixes include an issue where the keyboard might disappear while typing a Siri request, audio playback may keep on going even after you forcibly close Apple Music, personalized Genmoji might not generate without selecting a different person first, and third-party apps may encounter problems with HealthKit authorizations or Writing Tools.
   

Today’s iOS 18.3 release and its accompanying iPadOS 18.3 and watchOS 11.3 releases also add the Unity Rhythm watch face and wallpapers that Apple announced earlier today. macOS 15.3 was also released today, adding support for creating Genmoji is the Mac Messages app.

Lastly, Apple also published a list of 26 security vulnerabilities that have been fixed in iOS 18.3 and iPadOS 18.3, at least one of which may have been actively exploited against older versions of iOS prior to 17.2. An iOS 17.7.4 update fixes many of the same issues for iOS 17 users, along with macOS Sonoma 14.7.3 and macOS Ventura 13.7.3 to accompany today’s macOS Sequoia 15.3 release. Even tvOS 18.3 patches 15 vulnerabilities.

These security risks are reason enough to update to iOS 18.3 and the rest of Apple’s latest software updates, even if you don’t care about any of the other changes. While Apple is only aware of one of these being actively exploited, now that it’s published a whole list, it’s guaranteed that malicious hackers will be using this as a laundry list to find out ways to exploit iPhones, iPads, and Macs that haven’t been updated.