Mark Gurman, Chief correspondent of Bloomberg News said in his Power of newletter’s subscriber-only Q&A section today that the iOS 18 can potentially be the biggest software update in the history of iPhones.
He wrote that “I’m told that the new operating system is seen within the company as one of the biggest iOS updates — if not the biggest — in the company’s history”.
He further shared that he plans to share further details as well as features of iOS 18, but as outlined below they are already aware of the two new features that are likely to be included in the release.
It shall be in the month of September that the iOS 18 shall be released and it shall be in the month of June that the first beta that come out for developers during Apple’s annual developers conference WWDC.
Notably, in last year November, Apple said that it shall support the cross-platform messaging standard RCS in the Messages app, so there are speculations that it shall be included in iOS since it matches with the timeframe.
RCS Support – What would RCS support mean?
It would result in the following improvements to the default messaging experience between iPhones and Android devices:
- Typing indicators
- Read receipts
- Higher-resolution photos and videos
- Improved group chats, including the ability for iPhone users to leave a conversation that includes Android users
- Improved encryption compared to SMS
- Wi-Fi messaging between iPhones and Android devices
- Audio messages
Some of these features are already available with blue bubbles for iPhone-to-iPhone conversations via iMessage. Many of others are already available in the third-party messaging apps, such as WhatsApp and Telegram.
RCS support on the iPhone will extend the features to green bubbles in the Messages app.
A Smarter Siri?
Gurman also interacted and said that he expects the iOS 18 to feature GenAI technology and it “should improve how both Siri and the Messages app can field questions and auto-complete sentences.” For other platforms including Apple Music, Pages, Keynote, and Xcode, Apple has also explored gen AI features.
In order to let users, automate the complex tasks, Apple further plans to incorporate large language models, a feature that would involve deeper integration with the Shortcuts app. This feature is expected to be released in an update that shall come in 2024, which as per the timeframe would be iOS 18.
With the advent and release and proliferation in adoption of OpenAI’s ChatGPT which was launched in 2022, the popularity of Generative AI has surged. In an attempt to catch up with these, this release was followed by similar chatbots launches by Google and Microsoft. Allowing them to respond like human, chatbots are trained on Large language models.
