There is an iOS 18.4 functionality that I can’t wait to try – here’s how to configure it
IOS 18.4 may miss some Siri promised updates, at least for the moment. But there are many other changes to come on your iPhone thanks to this update, which is now available in public beta. And the best in the group can be the arrival of priority notifications.
Priority notifications are an Apple Intelligence feature, so everyone will not benefit from it. But if you have an iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max or any iPhone 16 (including the new iPhone 16th), your notifications will soon be presented in a way that distinguishes the most important.
In a word, priority notifications draw from AI to determine which incoming messages are urgent. Those deemed important or requiring your immediate attention will float at the top of the battery on your locking screen to see these notifications first.
In addition, priority notifications will use summary capacities to highlight the most important part of the alerts you receive.
Long before the beginnings of Apple Intelligence with iOS 18.1, I was looking forward to the arrival of priority notifications, because I thought it had the potential to solve some problems with the current Apple notifications method.
I found that the summary function of the previous notification is not so useful for highlighting important information. And I also find myself inundated with answers in group texts where it would be useful to bring out the really critical messages of others – more signal, less noise, in other words.
I only started using the beta iOS 18.4 version, so I always receive a flavor for priority notifications. But I am happy to share what I have learned so far as well as the steps you need to take so that the priority notifications work on your phone.
How priority notifications work
Let me share an early interaction with priority notifications to illustrate the operation of priority alerts.
My daughter takes dance lessons and we are in a carpooling with other families to share deposit and collection tasks. Without going into tedious details of my daily life, a scenario appeared the other evening when we had to pick up my daughter separately, but we wanted to make sure that the other carpool dancers always had walks at home. Text messages therefore started flying to make sure everyone was on the same wavelength.
Because these texts were sensitive to time, the priority notifications jumped into the action, and you can see the highlighted alert above confirming that we collect my daughter while his other friends confirmed that they had the transport of their own. (I escaped individual names for reasons of confidentiality.)
In this sense, priority notifications succeed in its mission. The information we needed to see was at the top of the notification battery when we needed to see it, so there was no confusion as to who picked up who.
But this is not a complete success, and the functionality summary tools are a great reason. “Roll confirmed for (name expurgated) and three dancers” has sense retrospectively, because I know that these children had a return home.
But for the moment, the summary has proven to be unclear. Does that mean that my wife and I were trying to confirm that the dancers had a return home? Or that other parents confirmed the journey? Information at a stroke is not very useful if you must carefully analyze what a summary means.
Apple has taken criticism for the quality of its SMS summaries, which are not always as clear as other summary tools for mail and phone calls.
If this aspect of Apple’s intelligence cannot be improved, I think that priority notifications could be better served by showing you complete alerts instead of summaries. But we will see if this aspect of the functionality improves during the beta iOS 18.4 version.
How to implement priority notifications
To experience the priority notifications yourself, you must do some work after installed iOS 18.4, whether we were talking about the current beta version or waiting for the full version of the application. Here’s how to start.
1. Go to notifications in the parameters
(Image: © Future)
Launch the Settings application on your iPhone and Select notifications in the menu.
2. Activate priority notifications
(Image: © Future)
Press the priority of notifications Under the Apple Intelligent header. On the screen that followed, Slide the tilt next to prioritize notifications on.
And that’s all there is. If you have decided that the priority notifications were not to your liking, simply go back to the notifications of the Settings application to deactivate the functionality.
If you are looking for more advice on the use of Apple Intelligence’s features, we can show you how to use visual intelligence to identify plants and animals or how to use the image playground function to generate images. If you are new on Apple Intelligence because you have just bought an iPhone 16th, here are other Apple Intelligence features to try first.
