- The first iOS 18.4 developer beta could land sometime within the next week
- Rumors predict that the beta will drop "in the coming days"
- The update is expected to give Siri "on-screen awareness" and more
iOS 18.3 recently brought Visual Intelligence upgrades and more to our iPhones, but developer beta testers will soon get to test-drive iOS 18.4, according to new rumors. It's expected to be a major update, and contain a Siri boost I've been waiting for since WWDC 2024.
The iOS 18.4 beta will arrive "in the coming days", according to Bloomberg's generally reliable Mark Gurman, writing in his Power On newsletter. To be more precise, Gurman thinks the update will roll out "sometime between the middle of this week and the next one", ahead of a public version in April.
The big feature of this update is expected to be a more personalized Siri that can tap into your personal data to answer queries. That's not all, with the iOS 18.4 beta also likely giving us our first taste of Siri with on-screen awareness and app control.
While Siri's latest brain upgrade will be iOS 18.4's main highlight, the update is also expected to bring a few other handy features. We'll likely see Priority Notifications (which uses AI to highlight your most important notifications), and the new emojis that were recently announced by the Unicode Consortium – yes, expect to see a new 'fight cloud' emoji and more for your iMessage chats.
But it's the Siri upgrade I'm most looking forward to – even if Gurman has tempered expectations by warning that "Apple is still well behind in this area"...
A better way to navigate your iPhone?
The Apple Intelligence rollout has been painfully slow, with many of the features highlighted at WWDC 2024 last June still not available on our iPhones. But I'm looking forward to seeing Siri finally break out of its straitjacket and become more of a personal assistant than a voice-activated timer.
We've already seen Siri get a few smaller updates in the last six months. iOS 18.1 gave us the ability to ask it follow-up questions, while iOS 18.2 plugged Siri into ChatGPT for the first time (although this is something I've used sparingly, due to ChatGPT's propensity to hallucinate).
But it was the next-gen Siri promises from WWDC 2024 last year (the video above jumps straight to them) that I've been most looking forward to. Apple showed demos of "on-screen awareness" and "in-app actions" that look genuinely useful – and they won't be limited to Apple's own apps, thanks to the App Intents API for developers.
There will likely be a delay until third-party apps tap into these powers, and we'll have to see if the experience lives up to Apple's lofty promises. But I could actually see Siri becoming my default way of navigating my iPhone if it works well, particularly as it's now possible to type to Siri (by double-tapping the base of your home screen) when you don't want to talk to it audibly.
The full version of iOS 18.4 won't be landing for a few weeks yet, with rumors point to an April release, but this developer beta will give us an idea of whether or not Siri will be capable of fulfilling the promise shown in its WWDC 2024 previews.
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