Apple Says iOS 18.4 Will Be Released in April With These New Features

In a recent press release, Apple confirmed that iOS 18.4 will be released in April.

iOS 18
From the Apple News+ Food announcement:

Coming with iOS 18.4 and iPadOS 18.4 in April, Apple News+ subscribers will have access to Apple News+ Food, a new section that will feature tens of thousands of recipes — as well as stories about restaurants, healthy eating, kitchen essentials, and more — from the world's top food publishers, including Allrecipes, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, Good Food, and Serious Eats.

The first beta of iOS 18.4 is already available for developers and public beta testers.

The first iOS 18.4 beta does not include any of the new Apple Intelligence features for Siri that were originally expected, such as personal context and on-screen awareness, but the update still has a handful of other new features and changes.

Below, we highlight some of iOS 18.4's key new features.

Available Now

Priority Notifications

Apple Intelligence Priority Notifications
iOS 18.4 introduces a promised Apple Intelligence feature that can automatically identify and surface your most important notifications on the Lock Screen.

The option can be turned on in the Settings app under Notifications → Prioritize Notifications.

Apple Intelligence requires an iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, or any iPhone 16 model.

Apple News+ Food

Apple News Food
iOS 18.4 adds a new Food section to the Apple News app on the iPhone. This section will provide Apple News+ subscribers with tens of thousands of recipes and other food-related content from well-known food-related publishers, at no extra cost.

Here is how Apple describes the new Food section:

With the new Food feature, users will be able to find stories curated by Apple News editors, as well as browse, search, and filter tens of thousands of recipes in the Recipe Catalog — with new recipes added every day. The beautifully designed recipe format makes it easy to review ingredients and directions, and a new cook mode takes step-by-step instructions to the full screen. Users can also save their favorite recipes for later and access them offline.

Apple News+ is available in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. The service provides digital access to hundreds of major publications, including The Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, PEOPLE, The Athletic, Rolling Stone, and others. In the U.S., Apple News+ costs $12.99 per month, and it is also included in the Apple One Premier bundle alongside other Apple services for $37.95 per month.

Ambient Music

ios 18 4 ambient music
iOS 18.4 adds a new Ambient Music feature to the Control Center on the iPhone.

This feature allows you to quickly listen to a collection of songs from four different categories, including Sleep, Chill, Productivity, and Wellbeing.

More

  • iOS 18.4 makes Apple Intelligence available in more languages, including French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Simplified), English (Singapore), and English (India).
  • There is a new "Sketch" drawing style for the Image Playground feature, alongside existing "Animation" and "Illustration" styles. This feature, powered by Apple Intelligence, lets you generate images based on text descriptions.
  • In some vehicles equipped with very large dashboard displays, CarPlay is showing an extra row of app icons on a single page.
  • iOS 18.4 lets you set a default maps app, such as Google Maps, in the EU. You can also set a default translation app worldwide.

Read our iOS 18.4 features guide for even more.

Coming Later

Vision Pro App

Vision Pro iPhone App
It is not in the first beta, but iOS 18.4 will add a new Apple Vision Pro app to the iPhone.

The app will offer Vision Pro users a new way to download apps and games from the App Store, discover Apple TV content, learn helpful Vision Pro tips, quickly access information about their own Vision Pro, and more.

The app will appear for Vision Pro users when they update their iPhone to the iOS 18.4 release, and it will also be available in the App Store.

New Emoji

Unicode 16 Emoji Feature Clean
iOS 18.4 will include new emoji, according to code seen by MacRumors contributor Aaron Perris.

iOS 15.4, iOS 16.4, and iOS 17.4 all introduced new emoji, so there was a good chance that trend would continue with iOS 18.4.

Last year, the Unicode Consortium previewed the new emoji that should be coming with iOS 18.4, with new options including face with bags under eyes, fingerprint, leafless tree, root vegetable, harp, shovel, splatter, and more.

Related Roundups: iOS 18, iPadOS 18
Related Forums: iOS 18, iPadOS 18

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Top Rated Comments

iMattPro Avatar
7 weeks ago
So wait a couple months just for a food section in the news app for subscribers only.



All we want is Context aware Siri, which I'm sure will still turn out to be just as disappointing as all the rest of Apple Intelligence.
Score: 28 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Smittywerben Avatar
7 weeks ago
Instead of Pink vomit emoji, maybe fix your trash AI?


Attachment Image
Score: 12 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Biro Avatar
7 weeks ago
Nothing to see here. Move along…
Score: 7 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Aeronauts Avatar
7 weeks ago
The News+ Food feature would be useful if you could select a recipe and automatically add the ingredients needed into a new Reminders list for shopping or add them to your favourite supermarket basket for home delivery.
Score: 7 Votes (Like | Disagree)
nt5672 Avatar
7 weeks ago
I can't believe Apple is this messed up. I can hear Cook now, "Just give me anything that I can call AI, anything even if it is burp noises, cow farts, etc."
Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)
dss33k Avatar
7 weeks ago
Apple really pulled a Tesla here, sold me iPhone 16 with the promise of context aware Siri that is nowhere to be found. It’s not Apple like and they’ve lost a lot of goodwill as far as I’m concerned.
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)