We’re more than seven months away from the iOS 18 announcement, but there are already plenty of rumors and expectations surrounding the software update. iOS 18 will be announced at Apple’s annual WWDC developer conference next June and will be available to all users with compatible iPhones in September. We’ve collected all the rumors and information about the update below.

“Major New Features”

Mark Gurman in this month’s newsletter Bloomberg He said iOS 18 could be a “relatively groundbreaking” update with “significant new features and design,” but didn’t share many details. Gurman added that Apple’s senior management has internally described future operating systems as “ambitious and interesting.”

Smarter Siri

Gurman said iOS 18 will feature generative AI technology that will “improve the way Siri and the Messages app ask questions and autocomplete sentences.” He said Apple is exploring new generative AI features for other apps on its platforms, including Apple Music, Pages, Keynote and Xcode.

Information Apple reportedly plans to add comprehensive speech patterns to Siri to allow users to automate complex tasks; this is a feature that will include deeper integration with the Shortcuts app. The report states that the feature is expected to be released in an iPhone software update next year, which could be iOS 18.

Generative AI gained popularity last year when OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a chatbot that can answer questions and other prompts. Google and Microsoft launched similar chatbots earlier this year as more companies enter the market. Chatbots are trained on broad language models that allow them to respond like humans.

Apple has publicly acknowledged its interest in generative AI and has mentioned the technology in job postings posted on its website in recent months.

“We’ve been working on generative AI for years and have done a lot of research,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told Forbes in September. “And we’re going to approach this very thoughtfully and think deeply about it, because we’re fully aware of how this can have bad applications and the problems with biases, hallucinations, etc.”

Improved text messaging for Android users

Earlier this month, Apple announced that it would finally support the cross-platform RCS messaging standard in the Messages app on iPhone “starting late next year,” so based on that timeframe, it’s likely to be an iOS 18 feature.

RCS support will lead to several improvements to standard messaging between iPhone and Android devices:

• Higher resolution photos and videos
• voicemail
• Typesetting indicators
• Read receipts
• Exchange messages between iPhone and Android devices over Wi-Fi
• Improved group chats, including the ability for iPhone users to leave a conversation that includes Android users
• Improved encryption compared to SMS

These features are already available for iPhone-to-iPhone blue bubble conversations via iMessage, and many of the features are also available in third-party messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram. RCS support on iPhone will extend functionality to green bubbles in the built-in Messages app, providing a much better iPhone/Android messaging experience than the current SMS standard.