The Three Most Important Features of iOS 18.3

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After some time, iOS 18.3 is finally available to the public. And while this software update doesn’t bring many new features, it does address some issues that many users have been complaining about.
If you’ve had issues with things like Apple Intelligence, you’ll probably want to upgrade your iPhone as soon as possible.
iOS 18.3 improves Apple Intelligence, makes Visual Intelligence a little bit better, and brings an amazing feature back to the Calculator app. Here’s what you need to know.
Apple Is Working on Notification Summaries
Notification summaries have been hit-and-miss at best since Apple launched them last fall. For many, they’ve only been a giant miss.
This feature, which is meant to summarize a group of notifications so you can get the gist without checking them all individually, has made many mistakes, creating both funny moments and unsettling news that no one should receive.
With iOS 18.3, Apple finally admits this feature is a work in progress. Now, when you go to the notification summary setting, Apple straight up tells you that “Summaries may contain errors.”
Further, because of the inaccurate descriptions this feature shows, Apple decided to disable notification summaries entirely for apps in the News and Entertainment category.
These apps will show the actual notification message in your Notification Center. Apple is working on fixing these problems as we write this, but that fix will come in a later software update.
Visual Intelligence Just Got Better
Visual Intelligence, one of the most exclusive Apple Intelligence features, got a little upgrade in iOS 18.3. Now, when you use Visual Intelligence, you’ll be able to create an event after you scan a date on a poster or a flyer simply by pointing at it. This makes it easier to remember important dates without having to open the Calendar app manually.
Additionally, Apple claims that with iOS 18.3, Visual Intelligence is now smarter when it comes to identifying animals and plants, and you should get a better description of the animals you look at with your iPhone’s camera.
As we mentioned, this feature is sort of exclusive, as you can only use it if you have an iPhone 16. You can trigger Visual Intelligence by long-pressing the new Camera Control button on the bottom right side of your iPhone.
Apple Brought an Important Feature to the Calculator App
With iOS 18, Apple completely changed the Calculator app, making it more useful than ever. Not only can you access your history of past calculations, but your iPhone can also solve math problems for you with the help of Math Notes.
However, with the new changes, Apple eliminated a very cool feature. In case you didn’t know, before iOS 18, when you made a calculation on the Calculator app and got the result, you could press the equals sign button and repeat the same calculation automatically.
So, for instance, if you entered 2×2 in the calculator app and pressed the equals sign, you would get 4. However, tapping the equals again would repeat the calculation and automatically give you the result of 4×2 — which is 8. You could do this indefinitely, and your iPhone would use the latest result as part of the previous mathematical operation.
Apple removed it with the first iOS 18 software update, but now iOS 18.3 is finally bringing it back.
Install iOS 18.3 ASAP
Besides these new features, Apple also added some security upgrades and fixed a few bugs you probably didn’t even know you had. For this reason, installing iOS 18.3 feels like a no-brainer.
Be sure to go to Settings > General > Software Update and install iOS 18.3 or the latest software update available on your iPhone as soon as possible.