Apple has shipped an astounding number of new iPhone features in the past few months, with major updates coming in iOS 18, iOS 18.1, and the recent iOS 18.2. But there’s more on the way soon. Here are all the new iOS features that we know are coming in the first four months of 2025.
Major Siri upgrades
Apple says Siri has entered a new era, and so far it’s been a little messy. iOS 18.1 brought a new Siri design and some minor enhancements, iOS 18.2 added ChatGPT integration, but some of the biggest changes yet are coming in iOS 18.4 this April.
Siri will get three big upgrades, including:
- New app actions: Apple says Siri will be able to perform hundreds of new actions in Apple apps, without the need to ever open those apps. App Intents will bring the same capability to supported third-party apps, too.
- Personal context knowledge: Like a real-life assistant, you’ll be able to reference texts you received, past calendar events, and more personal data to get truly intelligent assistance from Siri.
- Onscreen awareness: Siri will know what’s on your display, so you can easily ask it to take action on whatever you’re looking at.
With these changes in place, combined with ChatGPT support, Siri with Apple Intelligence should truly offer a powerful new user experience.
Priority notifications
Apple Intelligence has brought big changes to the way notifications work, and there’s more change coming: Priority notifications are coming soon.
Priority notifications appear at the top of the stack, letting you know what to pay attention to at a glance. And notifications are summarized, so you can scan them faster.
Based on Apple’s preview image, you’ll be able to see several of your most important notifications all at once with a priority summary. If this works well, it should be a nice improvement for iPhone notification management.
New built-in emoji
Genmoji now let you create any missing emoji that you’d like. But Apple plans to continue adding new built-in emoji to its iPhone emoji keyboard.
The next wave of emoji is expected in iOS 18.3 or 18.4, and will feature:
- face with bags under eyes
- fingerprint
- leafless tree
- root vegetable
- harp
- shovel
- splatter
The exhausted face is sure to be a hit when it arrives.
Sketch style in Image Playground
Apple just added a brand new app to the iPhone’s Home Screen in iOS 18.2: Image Playground.
The AI tool lets you create original images using a text prompt or one of many built-in tools.
Currently Image Playground lets you create images in two styles: Animation and Illustration. But there’s a third style being added soon: Sketch.
The new style, once it arrives, can be applied to existing images in your library in addition to being used for new creations.
Robot vacuums in the Home app
A new device category is coming to Apple’s Home app: robot vacuums.
Originally intended for iOS 18.2, we recently learned from the iOS 18.3 beta that Apple’s next software update will introduce the long-awaited robot vacuum support.
After iOS 18.3 launches in the next month or two, then with a compatible robot vacuum you’ll be able to control your device right from the Home app or with Siri commands.
New Apple Intelligence languages
Finally, Apple has announced that a variety of new languages will be supported by Apple Intelligence starting in April with iOS 18.4.
Apple hasn’t said exactly which new languages are coming in April, but it did share a list of ones coming in 2025:
- Chinese
- English (India)
- English (Singapore)
- French
- German
- Italian
- Japanese
- Korean
- Portuguese
- Spanish
- Vietnamese
- and more
New 2025 iOS features: wrap-up
The features above are only a fraction of what’s coming overall in 2025. Apple will undoubtedly have some surprises in store for iOS 18.3 and 18.4 with features it hasn’t yet announced. But more than that, WWDC in June will offer big reveals at what’s coming later in 2025 with iOS 19 and beyond.
Which upcoming iOS features are you most excited for? Let us know in the comments.
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