In today's exclusive Q&A section for PowerOn newsletter subscribers, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman said iOS 18 has the potential to be the "biggest" software update in iPhone history. "I'm told that the new operating system is viewed within the company as one of the biggest iOS updates, if not the biggest, in the company's history," he wrote.

Gurman said he plans to share more details about specific features and changes in iOS 18 in the future, but we already know about two new features that may be included in the update.

iOS 18 will be released in September, and the first beta version for developers will be launched during Apple’s annual developer conference WWDC in June.

RCS support

In November 2023, Apple announced that it would support the cross-platform messaging standard RCS in the iPhone's Messages app starting "later" in 2024, so based on this time frame, it is likely to be an iOS18 feature.

After supporting RCS, the default messaging experience between iPhone and Android devices will have the following improvements:

  • Higher resolution photos and videos

  • audio information

  • Typing indicators

  • read receipt

  • iPhone and Android devices can communicate via Wi-Fi

  • Improvements to group chat functionality, including the ability for iPhone users to leave conversations that include Android users

  • Stronger encryption than SMS

    • These modern features are already available for iPhone-to-iPhone conversations using blue bubbles through iMessage, and many of them are also available in third-party messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram. RCS support on iPhone will extend these capabilities to green bubbles in the Messages app.

    A smarter Siri

    Gurman predicts that iOS 18 will use generative artificial intelligence technology to improve the way Siri and messaging apps handle questions and automatically complete sentences. He said Apple has also explored generative AI capabilities for other apps on its platform, including Apple Music, Pages, Keynote and Xcode.

    The Information reports that Apple plans to add large language models to Siri to allow users to automatically perform complex tasks. This feature will be deeply integrated with the Shortcuts application. According to reports, this feature is expected to be released in an iPhone software update in 2024, most likely iOS18.

    In 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a chatbot that can answer questions and other prompts, making generative artificial intelligence popular. Google and Microsoft also released similar chatbots last year, and more and more companies are rushing to enter this field. These chatbots are trained with large language models to respond like humans.