Apple has delivered an incredible number of new iPhone features over the past few months, with major updates coming in iOS 18, iOS 18.1, and the recent iOS 18.2. But there will soon be others. Here are all the new iOS features we know are coming in the first four months of 2025.
Major Siri upgrades
Apple says Siri has entered a new era, and so far it’s been a bit complicated. iOS 18.1 brought a new Siri design and some minor improvements, iOS 18.2 added ChatGPT integration, but some of the biggest changes yet will arrive in iOS 18.4 in April.
Siri will get three major upgrades, including:
- New application actions: Apple says Siri will be able to perform hundreds of new actions in Apple apps, without needing to open those apps. App Intents will also bring the same functionality to supported third-party apps.
- Knowledge of personal context: Like a real-life assistant, you’ll be able to reference texts you’ve received, past calendar events, and more personal data to get truly intelligent assistance from Siri.
- Screen Awareness: Siri will know what’s on your screen, so you can easily ask her to take action on whatever you’re looking at.
With these changes in place, combined with support for ChatGPT, Siri with Apple Intelligence should truly deliver a powerful new user experience.
Priority notifications
Apple Intelligence has made big changes to how notifications work, and more changes are coming: Priority notifications are coming soon.
Priority notifications appear at the top of the stack, letting you know at a glance what to pay attention to. And notifications are summarized so you can analyze them faster.
Based on Apple’s preview image, you’ll be able to see many of your most important notifications at once with a prioritized summary. If it works well, it should be a nice improvement for managing notifications on iPhone.
New built-in emoji
Genmoji now lets you create any missing emoji you want. But Apple plans to continue adding new built-in emoji to its iPhone emoji keyboard.
The next wave of emoji is expected in iOS 18.3 or 18.4 and will include:
- face with bags under the eyes
- fingerprint
- leafless tree
- root vegetable
- harp
- shovel
- splash
The exhausted face will definitely cause a stir when it arrives.
Sketch style in Image Playground
Apple just added a brand new app to the iPhone home screen in iOS 18.2: Image Playground.
The AI tool lets you create original images using a text prompt or one of the many built-in tools.
Currently, Image Playground allows you to create images in two styles: Animation and Illustration. But a third style will soon be added: Sketch.
The new style, once arrived, can be applied to existing images in your library in addition to being used for new creations.
Robot vacuum cleaners in the Home app
A new category of devices is coming to Apple’s Home app: robot vacuum cleaners.
Originally planned for iOS 18.2, we recently learned through the iOS 18.3 beta that Apple’s next software update will introduce long-awaited support for robot vacuums.
After iOS 18.3 launches in a month or two, with a compatible robot vacuum, you’ll be able to control your device directly from the Home app or with Siri commands.
New Apple Intelligence languages
Finally, Apple announced that a variety of new languages will be supported by Apple Intelligence starting in April with iOS 18.4.
Apple hasn’t specified which new languages will be available in April, but it shared a list of those coming in 2025:
- Chinese
- English (India)
- English (Singapore)
- French
- German
- Italian
- Japanese
- Korean
- Portuguese
- Spanish
- Vietnamese
- and more
New iOS 2025 Features: Recap
The above features are just a fraction of what’s coming in 2025. Apple will no doubt have a few surprises in store for iOS 18.3 and 18.4 with features it hasn’t yet announced. But even more, WWDC will offer big reveals in June about what’s coming later in 2025 with iOS 19 and beyond.
What upcoming iOS features are you most excited about? Let us know in the comments.
