Apple Releases First iOS 18.4 Beta with More Apple Intelligence Features and News For Foodies
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After an unusually long wait, Apple has just seeded the first beta of iOS 18.4 to developers, forging ahead with the next phase of Apple Intelligence features. However, as reported last week, we may still have to wait until iOS 18.5 before we see any real improvements to Siri.
For now, the first iOS 18.4 beta still brings a few new Apple Intelligence features we’ve been waiting for, paves the way for some new Vision Pro capabilities, and has a few other tricks up its sleeve. Here’s what’s new.
Priority Notifications
Apple Intelligence in iOS 18.4 now includes Priority Notifications, a feature announced last year during Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) but hadn’t materialized in prior releases.
While iOS 18.1 brought priority mail notifications to Apple Mail, and iOS 18.2 gave us notification summaries (a feature that Apple has since partially shut down to avoid misleading news headlines), the ability to sort through your notifications and bring the most important ones to the top hasn’t shown up until now.
A new Prioritize Notifications section found under Settings > Notifications lets you toggle the feature on or off. When enabled, notifications from any app that Apple Intelligence deems important will be shown more prominently on your Lock Screen to ensure you don’t miss them.
Image Playground Sketches
Image Playground also gains the third “Sketch” style, which was initially showcased alongside the Animation and Illustration themes but was conspicuously absent when the app launched in iOS 18.2.
This completes the trifecta of styles, and it’s available not only on the iPhone but also in the iPadOS 18.4 and macOS 15.4 betas for the iPad and Mac.
Vision Pro App for iPhone
Similar to the Watch app, iOS 18.4 adds a Vision Pro app to the iPhone to help users configure their headset, browse through a Spatial Gallery for content, download apps and games from the visionOS App Store, and configure the Guest mode feature when you want to let someone else use your headset.
Apple explained more about this in a press release earlier today, formally announcing that Apple Intelligence will be coming to the Vision Pro in visionOS 2.4 (which also saw its first beta today).
The Apple Vision Pro app for iPhone offers users a new way to download apps and games from the App Store; discover experiences from Apple TV, Spatial Gallery, and more; easily find helpful tips; and quickly access information for their Vision Pro. Enhancements to Guest User make it easier than ever for users to share apps and experiences with family, friends, and colleagues using a nearby iPhone or iPad.
More Languages for Apple Intelligence
In September, Apple promised to expand Apple Intelligence to 11 more countries in 2025. By the end of October, it had offered up a more specific timeline, noting that “Chinese, English (India), English (Singapore), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Vietnamese, and other languages will be supported,” and that Apple Intelligence would fully launch in Europe at the same time (it’s been limited to the Mac since launch as Apple determined how to navigate the European regulatory requirements that apply to the iPhone and iPad).
Apple reiterated this in a newsroom announcement today published just before the first betas arrived, noting that we’ll be getting “French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese (simplified) — as well as localized English for Singapore and India.”
Apple News+ Food
In another newsroom announcement, Apple also announced that it’s bringing a new Food section to its Apple News+ subscription service. This will launch with iOS 18.4 and iPadOS 18.4, giving subscribers access to “tens of thousands of recipes” and “stories about restaurants, healthy eating, kitchen essentials, and more.”
To accomplish this, Apple has partnered with leading food publishers, including All Recipes, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, Good Food, and Serious Eats. As with regular news stories, Apple News editors will provide curated highlights, but users can also browse, search, and filter through the Recipe Catalog to find anything that piques their interest. Apple promises new recipes will be added daily.
One reason this will require iOS 18.4 is that Apple is updating the News app with a special new format for recipes that will make it easy to review ingredients and directions, plus a “cook” mode to provide a full-screen experience suitable for the kitchen.
While you’ll need to be an Apple News+ subscriber to get the whole experience, Apple will still offer select stories and recipes in the News app for non-subscribers.
Other New Features in iOS 18.4
While we’re still digging through the first iOS 18.4 beta to see what else Apple has tucked away in this latest release, there are a few smaller features we’ve already noticed.
- Ambient Music Controls: The new and highly customizable iOS 18 Control Center gets a new set of buttons in iOS 18.4 to queue up ambient tracks from Apple Music. The categories under “Ambient Music” include Chill, Productivity, Sleep, and Wellbeing, each of which can be added individually to your Control Center, Lock Screen controls, or even your Action button.
The buttons are set to call up preset playlists, but they’re customizable so you can assign them to any playlist you like — even an appropriate one of your own that you’ve created. - Set a Default Translation App: The Default Apps section introduced in iOS 18.2 gets a new section in iOS 18.4 to let you choose a default translation app as an alternative to Apple’s Translate. As with other default apps, developers will have to update their apps to be included here, but we imagine we’ll see Google Translate and quite a few others show up once iOS 18.4 is released.
- Delete or Move Message Action in Mail: A new option in the Apple Mail settings (Settings > Apps > Mail) finally lets you choose to be returned to your inbox after you delete or move a message, rather than automatically viewing the next message in the list.
Lastly, while it’s not explicitly an iOS 18.4 feature, the iPadOS 18.4 and macOS 15.4 betas add the new categories from iOS 18.2 to the respective iPad and Mac Mail apps. This will provide a unified experience for those who prefer to let Apple’s software organize their incoming mail. The same four categories are here — Primary, Transactions, Updates, and Promotions — but it’s unclear whether Apple will sync this categorization between devices or simply assume that the same algorithms running on different devices will produce the same results.
This is also just the first set of betas, so it’s hard to say how things will work when the final versions are released, which aren’t expected until sometime in April.
