You can upgrade your iPhone to iOS 18 today, but some key features are missing

The iOS 18 Public Beta is available for you to download and install, but you'll have to wait a bit longer for the most important new features

iOS 18 Public Beta
(Image credit: Apple)
Carrie Marshall
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Quick Summary

iOS 18 Public Beta is available now and delivers some worthwhile improvements. However, Apple Intelligence is absent and outside the US, support for RCS messaging doesn't appear to have been enabled yet.

As expected, Apple has released the public beta of iOS 18. That means you can install it on your phone today and travel in time, because you'll be using an operating system that won't be released until September. However, while there are some useful improvements there are also some very big omissions.

As ever with beta software, you're advised not to install it on your main phone. However, I've been using the third developer beta, on which the public beta is based, and I've found it 99% reliable: the exception for me has been the camera app, which I've found to be quite crashy on my iPhone 15 Pro Max. Provided you don't have any apps that you absolutely depend on daily, I think this is a pretty safe installation.

Here's what you need to know.

Should you install iOS 18 public beta on your iPhone?

If you want to take advantage of the improved personalisation, yes. You can now arrange your home screen icons in a more fluid way, and you can change the tinting so that all your icons share the same colours. It's a nice change, and there's also a new colour-changing dynamic wallpaper. Control Centre has been improved and you can now change which controls appear on your Lock Screen.

There's a new stand-alone password app that I've found very reliable so far, and it's definitely an improvement on hunting around in Settings. You can lock apps behind Face ID, and there's a very revised Photos app that's proving divisive: lots of people dislike it but it does introduce a new Recovered folder where you might find photos you thought you'd lost forever.

There are some big omissions, however. Here in the UK the RCS messaging feature – which improves communication with Android – doesn't appear to be implemented yet. And the biggest missing feature of all is Apple Intelligence. If you were hoping that the beta could let you experience a smarter Siri, that's some way off still – and for those of us outside the US, it could be many months before we get Apple Intelligence on our iPhones.

You can find out more about installing the iOS public beta on the Apple website.

Carrie Marshall
Carrie Marshall

Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series; her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. When she’s not scribbling, Carrie is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind (unquietmindmusic).

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