iOS 18 was one of, if not the biggest, updates pushed out to Apple’s iPhone collection to date.
While not a complete overhaul of the operating system, there are plenty of changes that permeate practically every aspect of the iOS experience, especially if you’ve got an iPhone that can take advantage of Apple Intelligence.
Apple Intelligence was Apple’s big gambit for iOS 18, hoping to bring the iPhone in line with the best Android competition when it comes to generative AI capabilities – and to that end, Apple has largely succeeded in its aim.
Apple Intelligence includes all of the popular AI-powered features available on the Android competition, including writing tools, text-based image generation, dictation and translation tech and more, along with a few features we’d not seen yet, like custom emoji dubbed Genmoji, official integration with ChatGPT, and the ability to summarise phone calls.
Some features might not always work as intended, as recently showcased by iPhones incorrectly interpreting a BBC News headline and essentially creating a fake headline using the Notification Summary tech, but there are some genuinely handy new features baked into the experience.
Essentially, it was an absolute doozy of an update that introduced way more new features and functionality than any other big iOS update in recent memory – but don’t get used to those big updates because iOS 19 is looking a little… light on features right now.
What could Apple have for us in iOS 19?
The big update for iOS 19 looks to be a proper LLM-powered Siri experience. While Siri did get a big update in iOS 18, allowing it to answer questions in a wholly more useful manner, it still has to hand off to ChatGPT for certain tasks in iOS 18.2. A proper LLM-powered Siri could do away with that need.
For those new to the world of AI, an LLM, or Large Language Model, is trained on vast amounts of data, from text to art to maths and more depending on its speciality, that essentially allows it to understand natural language and perform tasks accordingly, whether that’s creating poetry or generating videos.
It’s the underlying tech that powers many of the AI experiences available in 2025, from chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini to image generation tools like Midjourney.
An LLM-powered version of Siri would instantly make the virtual assistant more helpful, allowing it to answer general knowledge questions, help with math problems and the like, but it’s more than simply making it smarter.
A new Siri could also be able to better hold ongoing conversations and provide the ability to recall information from previous chats to better provide help – a key feature of the competing ChatGPT that makes it especially helpful.
Interestingly, despite being what I currently consider the headline feature of iOS 19, reports suggest that, like the initial rollout of Apple Intelligence, it won’t launch on the first version of iOS 19. Instead, Apple is said to be eyeing up a Spring 2026 launch, potentially within iOS 19.4 going by previous iOS dot update release cycles.
Now, an even smarter Siri is a big feature, but it’s just one feature compared to the magnitude that we saw with the release of iOS 18.
Is that it?
Elsewhere, rumours currently suggest that we’ll be getting a redesigned Camera app in iOS 19. Said to be inspired by Apple’s VisionOS UI, the new design offers more space for the camera view, with translucent pop-out menus that house the phone’s various shooting modes and settings.
In terms of current leaks, however, that’s pretty much it.
Now I’m not suggesting that Apple would ship a big update with only one or two new features – it’ll likely improve some of the current Apple Intelligence systems and potentially add new features to better compete with the 2025 competition – but all signs point towards a year for refinement for Apple’s mobile operating system.
iOS 19 won’t officially be revealed until WWDC 2025, which’ll almost certainly take place sometime in June, so we’ve still got plenty of time to hear about other new features and functionality headed to iPhone. But, by this time last year, we were already aware of many of iOS 18’s big features, including many under the Apple Intelligence banner.
The fact the same is not true this year could speak volumes about Apple’s plans for 2025 – but we’ll have to wait and see for now.
