Here’s Everything Coming in iOS 18.3 Next Week

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Apple has just seeded the final release candidate for iOS 18.3, which means the final release is likely about a week away. While this latest beta cycle hasn’t promised any meaningful changes thus far, one advantage of Release Candidates is that they give us the full release notes for each major release.
That’s because, as the name suggests, a Release Candidate, or RC build, is what Apple hopes will be the version it sends to the public. It’s given to developers and beta testers first to ensure no show-stopping bugs exist; if everything goes according to plan, the RC version we’re getting today will be bit-for-bit identical to the public release when it comes along.
So, with those in hand, here’s what we can expect in iOS 18.3 when it launches.
Apple Intelligence Comes By Default

This first point isn’t in the user-facing release notes but is hidden in the developer release notes. It’s a simple change, but it seems that if you don’t want to use Apple Intelligence on your iPhone 15 Pro or later, you’ll need to explicitly turn it off:
For users new or upgrading to iOS 18.3, Apple Intelligence will be enabled automatically during iPhone onboarding. Users will have access to Apple Intelligence features after setting up their devices. To disable Apple Intelligence, users will need to navigate to the Apple Intelligence & Siri Settings pane and turn off the Apple Intelligence toggle. This will disable Apple Intelligence features on their device.
It’s unclear how this will affect folks upgrading to iOS 18.3 from earlier versions. If you’re going from a non-AI release, like iOS 18.0, chances are that Apple Intelligence will be on by default, but folks with iOS 18.2 who have left it off (or turned it back off) will want to check their settings after updating to make sure it’s still off.
Visual Intelligence Gets Smarter

During its September Glowtime event, Apple unveiled Visual Intelligence, a new Apple Intelligence feature specifically for the iPhone 16 lineup. At the time, the company showed off how Visual Intelligence would let users get information about the world around them by holding down the new Camera Control (which is why it’s exclusive to the iPhone 16) and then pointing their camera at something they wanted to investigate further.
When Visual Intelligence launched in iOS 18.2 last month, it brought ChatGPT and Google search integration for objects, but it was missing some of the more clever features like getting more information from signs (beyond a simple Google search), or identifying plants and animals.
Some of this is being added in iOS 18.3, which Apple notes now lets you add an event to the Calendar from a poster or flyer and easily identify plants and animals.
Notification Summaries Refined

Apple shut down some AI summaries in the last iOS 18.3 beta, and it looks like things are going to stay that way for now.
These changes came on the heels of a BBC complaint about how a stack of summarized notifications resulted in a headline falsely announcing that Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of healthcare insurance CEO Brian Thompson, had shot himself.
Since Apple seemingly can’t guarantee that it will be able to fix these “hallucinations” anytime soon, it’s done what it believes is the next best thing: shut down all AI notification summaries for apps in the news and entertainment category. Apple makes it clear this is a temporary solution, and they’ll be coming back in a future release:
Notification summaries for News & Entertainment apps are temporarily unavailable, and users who opt-in will see them again when the feature becomes available.
When we first heard the news, we’d hoped that Apple would be able to address this issue in time for the final iOS 18.3 release, but it seems not.
In addition to blocking summaries for news and entertainment apps, the summarized notifications available in other categories will now be italicized to help distinguish them from traditional notifications. There’s also a shortcut to turn off notification summaries directly from the Lock Screen.
Other Changes

The second beta of iOS 18.3 fixed a small but important nit in the Calculator app, which fans of the older calculator design will likely appreciate when the final release of iOS 18.3 arrives.
After Apple redesigned the Calculator for iOS 18, it stopped letting you repeat operations with multiple presses of the equal sign. Fortunately, it’s back in iOS 18.3, and it integrates well with the new Calculator experience so that the summaries and history show the repeated calculations.
In the release notes, Apple also mentions that iOS 18.3 “fixes an issue where the keyboard might disappear when initiating a typed Siri request” and “resolves an issue where audio playback continues until the song ends even after closing Apple Music.”
The developer release notes also indicate that iOS 18.3 addresses an issue where “ personalized Genmoji might not generate without selecting a different person first,” repeated prompts for HealthKit authorizations from third-party apps, and some problems with Writing Tools in certain third-party apps.