On January 29th, Beijing time, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman, who frequently leaks major news about Apple, stated that Apple internally regards iOS 18 as the most important update in history. As usual, this update is expected to be announced at the Apple Developer Conference in June and officially launched in the fall.
Mark Gurman previously reported that Apple's software engineering director Craig Federighi told employees last year that the operating system codenamed Crystal will undergo a series of changes in various aspects.
Multiple indications suggest that iOS 18 is likely to fully introduce generative AI technology, making it one of the largest upgrades in iPhone history.
Apple's ecological information media 9to5mac speculates that supporting more artificial intelligence features will be a major highlight of iOS 18, involving experience improvement content such as Siri digital assistants and messaging applications.
In the new version of Siri's digital assistant service, generative AI will make Siri more intelligent, with more personalized and natural interactive answers. It can also handle more complex problems and be more deeply integrated with shortcut functions.
In addition, iOS messaging applications that integrate AI support can also answer questions and automatically complete sentences. The new AI feature of Apple Music music application can create "automatically generated playlists", and the iWork series office suite's Keynote and Pages will also integrate generative AI.
On the developer side, generative AI functionality will be added to the Xcode programming environment, allowing developers to write new applications faster.
In terms of other updates, it is expected that supporting RCS format messages will be another heavyweight update for iOS 18. RCS stands for Rich Communication Services.
If RCS is introduced, iOS messaging will support higher resolution photo and video content transmission, as well as the ability to send audio messages, display whether messages have been read, and directly transmit short messages across platforms between iPhone and Android devices via Wi Fi network, allowing Android devices to join chat groups between iPhones and enhancing message encryption protection.
However, Apple's use of generative AI and RCS in iOS 18 still appears to be slower than its competitors in the Android camp.
Last year, Google released multiple mobile phones, tablets, and IoT products, all promoting the concept of AI, stating that its self-developed chip Tensor, combined with the Android system and Google Cloud AI capabilities, will make mobile phones personal AI products.
The Android camp has been pushing for RCS to replace SMS, but for a long time, Apple's progress in promoting RCS has been slow, dragging down the progress of RCS popularization. At last year's Google Developer Conference, the company immediately called out for Apple's support for RCS.
In addition to a large number of AI related updates, iOS 18 will also undergo another major change in the Apple ecosystem.
On January 26th, Apple announced that under the regulation of the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA), it will update relevant rules such as iOS, Safari browser, and app store in 27 EU countries or regions starting from March, and will also open up more API (Application Programming Interface) application resources.
This means that Apple will soon launch new service content, which is expected to drive the growth of more third-party application services.