Apple Releases Second Beta of iOS 18.3 for Developers | Here’s What’s New

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Shortly after releasing iOS 18.2 in early December, Apple snuck out an initial beta of iOS 18.3 for developers and public beta testers. Since this came just before the holiday season, it was a safe bet that we’d be waiting a while to see a subsequent beta arrive, but the good news is that Apple hasn’t wasted any time getting that one pushed out.

While iOS 18.3 and iPadOS 18.3 don’t offer much in the way of new features, the corresponding macOS 15.3 beta brought full Genmoji support to the Mac. This is something that was conspicuously missing in macOS 15.2 after iOS/iPadOS 18.2 introduced Genmoji to the iPhone and iPad — macOS 15.2 users could see Genmoji and even pick pre-generated ones from the stickers library, but there was no ability to create new ones from the Mac.

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Beyond that, the first round of betas offered little of note, and while some hoped that Apple might introduce some new features in subsequent betas after the holiday break, today’s release doesn’t change the equation. That’s not too surprising, as most reports have suggested that the next round of Apple Intelligence updates — Siri with personal context and support for non-English languages — will come in iOS 18.4, expected to arrive in April.

Meanwhile, it looks like Apple is focusing this round on polishing things up and fixing bugs. That’s probably a good thing, as we’ve seen plenty of small issues reported. Apple released an iOS 18.2.1 update yesterday that presumably fixes some of the most serious problems (although Apple hasn’t said what those are), but we imagine iOS 18.3 will cover a few more.

For one thing, Apple has promised a fix for misleading Apple Intelligence notification summaries after several users received notifications from apps like BBC News and the New York Times that were summarized to show erroneous reports. For now, Apple’s “fix” will be to make it more obvious when the notifications are summarized by Apple Intelligence, so the mistakes may not go away. Still, at least it should be more evident that what you’re reading is an AI summary and not an actual headline.

BBC bad Apple Intelligence notification via BBC

There are no signs of any changes to this behavior in today’s iOS 18.3 beta, but that’s not too surprising. Apple only issued a statement yesterday to say it was working on a fix for an update that will arrive “in the coming weeks.”

According to Apple’s developer release notes, the only other changes in iOS 18.3 are a fix for creating personalized Genmoji based on a person’s photo, HealthKit authorizations in third-party apps, and some issues with accessing Writing Tools in other apps.

The Calculator Gets an Important Feature Back

iOS 18.3 Calculator repeating actions

The folks at 9to5Mac have discovered one other subtle but significant fix related to the Calculator app.

Apple redesigned the Calculator app in iOS 18, but it seems that when it did so, it removed support for repeating operations: the ability to hit the equals sign multiple times to repeat the last calculation.

For example, if you enter 2+3 and hit equals, you’ll get 5. Hit equals again, and you should get 8, then 11, and so on, as the 3 continues to be added to the original result.

While mathematical purists will debate whether this behavior is technically correct, it’s something that Apple’s Calculator app has supported since the original iPhone was released in 2007. So, it’s fair to say it was a jarring change for those who have been used to doing quick math this way. Thankfully, Apple has brought it back in iOS 18.3 beta 2.

Apple has also integrated it properly into the new Calculator experience, ensuring that the calculation summary properly reflects the subsequent operations and that they’re correctly recorded in the history. Each press of the equals key will show the previous result and the operation directly above the final calculation. For instance, if you started with “1+2+3” the first press of equals will show that calculation and the result of 6; the second time you press equals, the calculation will be replaced by “6+3” and show a result of 9, followed by “9+3” and “12” and so on. The history will also show the same progressive set of calculations.

In addition to bug fixes, iOS 18.3 may also bring the promised support for robot vacuums to HomeKit. However, we’ll have to wait and see what form that takes, as few devices on the market can take advantage of this — no HomeKit-specific vacuums exist, and there are only a handful of Matter-enabled ones available right now.



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