Apple has today released iOS 18.4 and iPadOS 18.4 to the public; bringing new functionality for VoiceOver and braille users; several enhancements to Apple Intelligence, including priority notifications and expanded language support; as well as new emoji characters, a new "Ambient Music" feature in Control Center, Mail categorization for iPadOS, and more. Apple has also released iOS 15.8.4 and iOS 16.7.11 for older devices unable to run iOS 18.
New Features and Changes for VoiceOver and Braille Users
iOS 18.4 and iPadOS 18.4 include the following new features and changes for VoiceOver and braille users:
- It is now possible to change when, and if, VoiceOver speaks the type of the control currently in focus, such as heading, link, button, etc. This setting can be found in Settings > Accessibility > VoiceOver > Verbosity > Controls, and allows you to choose whether control types are spoken before or after the contents of the control, or not at all.
- You can now perform an indefinite double-tap and hold on a braille display, useful when, for example, recording an audio message in the Messages app or trying to fast forward or rewind a podcast or other audio material. To do this, double-press Space with dots 3-6-7-8; press this key combination once more to release the hold.
- Performing a three-finger swipe down at the top of a page in Safari will no longer immediately refresh the page when the gesture is first performed, with VoiceOver instead instructing you to "Scroll up again to refresh." If you are scrolling up rapidly through multiple pages, VoiceOver may not speak this instruction, instead playing the "Boundary reached" sound.
- Similar to macOS, VoiceOver on iOS and iPadOS now announces the positions of items when navigating a bulleted list, E.G. "2 of 2." There is currently no way to change this behavior.
Resolved VoiceOver and Braille Bugs
For VoiceOver and braille users, our experience is that the following accessibility bugs have been resolved or meaningfully improved in iOS 18.4 and iPadOS 18.4:
- VoiceOver no longer speaks the term "Collapsed stack" as part of a notification.
- When on the Home Screen, pressing Space with S on a braille display connected to an iPhone 16 Pro has been improved to move focus to the status bar. It may be worth noting that the Status Bar command seems to only work from the Home Screen most of the time, but not while in most applications.
New VoiceOver Bugs
We are currently aware of two new bugs in these releases:
- When resizing a control for a HomeKit accessory to 1x1 in Control Center, the displayed options are unlabeled.
- On devices with Apple Intelligence, when opening a message in the Mail app, VoiceOver focus may not automatically be placed in the message content; instead being placed on the 'More Summary Options' button. The presentation of this issue is not consistent.
If you notice any further changes, improvements, or regressions in your use of iOS 18.4 and iPadOS 18.4, please post a comment below with your findings.
Release Notes
iOS 18.4
This update introduces a new Sketch Style option in Image Playground, recipes in Apple News+, and enhancements to better organize and filter your library in Photos. This release includes other features, bug fixes, and security updates for your iPhone.
Apple Intelligence (All iPhone 16 models, iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max)
- Priority notifications appear at the top of your notifications, highlighting important notifications that may require your immediate attention
- Sketch is now available as an additional style option in Image Playground, allowing you to create gorgeous sketch drawings
- Apple Intelligence features support 8 additional languages and 2 additional English locales, including English (India, Singapore), French (France, Canada), German (Germany), Italian (Italy), Japanese (Japan), Korean (South Korea), Portuguese (Brazil), Simplified Chinese, and Spanish (Spain, Latin America, US)
Apple Vision Pro App
- The new Apple Vision Pro app, automatically installed for users with Apple Vision Pro, helps you discover new content, spatial experiences, and quickly access information about your device
Apple News+
- Recipes from some of the worldâs best recipe publishers are now available on Apple News+
- Recipe Catalog allows you to browse or search to find the perfect dish and save it to your Saved Recipes
- Cooking mode lets you easily follow step-by-step directions
- The Food section also includes stories about restaurants, kitchen tips, healthy eating, and more
Photos
- New filters to show or hide items that are not contained in an album, or synced from a Mac or PC, in the Library view in Photos
- Reorder items in the Media Types and Utilities collections in Photos
- Consistent filtering options in all collections, including the ability to sort by oldest or newest first in Photos
- Option to sort albums by Date Modified in Photos
- Ability to disable âRecently Viewedâ and âRecently Sharedâ collections in Photos Settings
- Hidden photos are no longer included for import to Mac or a PC if Use Face ID is enabled in Photos settings
This update also includes the following enhancements and bug fixes:
- Safari recent search suggestions help you quickly get back to previous search topics when starting a new query
- Setup Assistant streamlines steps parents need to take to create a Child Account for a kid in their family, and enables child-appropriate default settings if parents prefer to complete setting up a Child Account later
- Screen Time App Limits persist even after a child uninstalls and reinstalls an app
- App Store includes summaries for user reviews so you can get helpful insights from other users at a glance
- Pause and resume of an app download or update on App Store without losing progress
- New widgets for Podcasts including a Followed Shows widget to track your favorite shows and a Library widget to get to your most used sections, such as Latest Episodes, Saved, and Downloaded
- Ambient Music offers the ability to instantly play music from Control Center, giving access to a set of hand-curated playlists that offer soundtracks for daily life
- Apple Fitness+ Collections can now be added to Library
- Matter-compatible robot vacuum cleaners can be controlled in the Home app as well as be added to scenes and automations
- Support for 10 new system languages including Bangla, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu
Some features may not be available for all regions or on all Apple devices. For information on the security content of Apple software updates, please visit: https://support.apple.com/100100
iPadOS 18.4
This update introduces 8 new emojis, a new Sketch Style option on Image Playground, Mail Categorization, recipes in Apple News+, and enhancements to better organize and filter your library in Photos. This release also includes other features, bug fixes, and security updates for your iPad.
Apple Intelligence (iPad with M1 and later)
- Priority notifications appear at the top of your notifications, highlighting important notifications that may require your immediate attention
- Sketch is now available as a style option in Image Playground, so you can create gorgeous drawings on stark backgrounds
- Apple Intelligence features support 8 additional languages and 2 additional English locales, including English (India, Singapore), French (France, Canada), German (Germany), Italian (Italy), Japanese (Japan), Korean (South Korea), Portuguese (Brazil), Simplified Chinese, and Spanish (Spain, Latin America, US)
- Mail Categorization sorts your messages to help you prioritize the most important messages
Apple News+
- Recipes from some of the worldâs best recipe publishers are now available on Apple News+
- Recipe Catalog allows you to browse or search to find the perfect dish and save it to your Saved Recipes
- Cooking mode lets you easily follow step-by-step directions
- The Food section also includes stories about restaurants, kitchen tips, healthy eating, and more
Photos
- New filters to show or hide items that are not contained in an album, or synced from a Mac or PC, in the Library view in Photos
- Reorder items in the Media Types and Utilities collections in Photos
- Consistent filtering options in all collections, including the ability to sort by oldest or newest first in Photos
- Option to sort albums by Date Modified in Photos
- Ability to disable âRecently Viewedâ and âRecently Sharedâ collections in Photos Settings
- Hidden photos are no longer included for import to Mac or a PC if Use Face ID is enabled in Photos settings
This update also includes the following enhancements and bug fixes:
- 8 new emoji including objects, plants, and a smiley face are now available in the emoji keyboard
- Safari recent search suggestions help you quickly get back to previous search topics when starting a new query
- Setup Assistant streamlines steps parents need to take to create a Child Account for a kid in their family, and enables child-appropriate default settings if parents prefer to complete setting up a Child Account later
- Screen Time App Limits persist even after a child uninstalls and reinstalls an app
- App Store includes summaries for user reviews so you can get helpful insights from other users at a glance
- Pause and resume of an app download or update on App Store without losing progress
- New widgets for Podcasts including a Followed Shows widget to track your favorite shows and a Library widget to get to your most used sections, such as Latest Episodes, Saved, and Downloaded
- Ambient Music offers the ability to instantly play music from Control Center, giving access to a set of hand-curated playlists that offer soundtracks for daily life
- Apple Fitness+ Collections can now be added to Library
- Matter-compatible robot vacuum cleaners can be controlled in the Home app as well as be added to scenes and automations
- Support for 10 new system languages including Bangla, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu
Some features may not be available for all regions or on all Apple devices. For information on the security content of Apple software updates, please visit:
https://support.apple.com/100100
How to update
iOS 18.4 and iPadOS 18.4 are available via Over-the-Air Update (Settings > General > Software Update) via Finder on a Mac with macOS Catalina or later, or via iTunes on a PC or Mac with macOS Mojave or earlier.
Before updating, we strongly recommend making a full and complete backup of your device (either locally or in iCloud, depending on personal preference). This will ensure that, in the unlikely event that something goes wrong during the update process, you will have a current backup on hand in case a device restore becomes necessary. Also, if using OTA update, we recommend plugging your device into a power source for the duration of the download/installation process, so as to prevent the unlikely event of your battery going dead during the update.
Comments
@SeasonKing
If that doesn't work, is 'long press a command you have the ability to change? If so, can you change or assign 3, 5, 6 as the command?
Long press
dots 3-5-6 has never worked that well for me in the past. I will try it again under the 18.4 but I doubt it's changed as that command was also available for Braille display users and it clearly didn't work for them either.
dennis, I'm not on the beta. I only have one IOS device and am not brave/foolish enough to risk it, plus my IT departmet at work would not allow me to access corporate data were I running beta software. As I understand it, we have never had eight dots with BSI. In any case I'm a bit old school and prefer six dots - I've never set my JAWS, for example, to allow me to indicate upper case letters by adding a dot 7, which I know others like. I shall ping an email to the accessibility address as you suggest. Until then, I'll stop BSI whenever I want to, say, record a voice message...that is, if dots 3-5-6 still does not work.
Incidentally, I neverr thought I would lock orientation on my IOS device. However, since the advent of the new BSI I've found it's so much better to do so. Not much to do with what we're talking about here, but has anyone else felt the same?
Unstable at best
So far for me, iOS 18.4 seems to be entirely unstable. I've never heard my iPhone speak so much unexpected gibberish in the entire ten years I've been using VoiceOver. Oh, yes, everything works, for the most part, except when it doesn't, which seems to have increased in frequency with this update. There's so much random unexpected behavior going on that it will take me a few days of observation before I'm able to quantify any of it into an issue report. But my gut tells me this is one of the worst updates I've ever installed.
Does anyone else feel this way, or is it just me?
working just fine
18.4 is working just fine.
Just you, Sir
Or, at least, it's not me, which isn't the same thing at all, I suppose. It's working fine for the Lord of Bingo Manor. No sign of an indefinite double tap, but I can live to learn with that.
iOS 8.5
Will work on stability and addressing bugs. No new features just dealing with bugs.
Accidental malapropism
I, of course, meant that I can learn to live with that. I must be turning into slightly niche british comedy personality Count arthur strong. It would be fun to try and write subsequent contributions to the Applevis Forums in the manner of Count arthur, which I reckon I could do with my arms shut and one eye tied behind my back, but I would soon be reprimanded for not keeping my comments tropical. anyway what i meant to say was that the indefinite double trap issue isn't cricketal...no not double trap, idiot! Indiscriminate...double tap, that's what I said! Clay pigeon shooting, that's what you must be thinking of. They have the double trap in that, don't they? Honestly, how anyone could think you could shoot clay pigeons with an iPhone is beyond me! anyway come on! all this talking isn't getting that bus into town caught, is it?
Actually, that was easier than I thought. I do recommend Count arthur strong to those unfamiliar. teh radio series, not the Tv series.
Very unfortunate
I take it Paul you have done a hard reset? Asking because iOS 18 in general has been very stable for me and iOS 18.4 is extremely sound. Maybe try a different voice just to see if you have a quirk with the one you are using. Very unfortunate for you.
Malaprops are off-tropic, Bingo
I guess that makes them temperate.
No one else has noticed that the screen has suddenly become hyper sensitive, and the least little contact wakes the phone? Maybe my screen is dirty. But it's odd that a dirty screen would so strongly correlate with a software update.
Normally, you open an app and VoiceOver focus lands, well, somewhere, and VO speaks the name of whatever control won the lottery that particular time. No one else is noticing that you open an app, or even just go to the home screen, and VoiceOver says nothing? Until you interact with the screen, then everything is fine.
No one else has noticed that magic tap has gone to utter crap? Maybe it works on the third try, if I'm lucky.
No one else is seeing this? Really? I've got a base iPhone 16 with gobs of RAM, and it's rather shocking to see the quality drop so significantly on the fourth point release after the product was introduced.
Lee, I'll try a force restart, if that's what you mean.
PaulMartz
Sorry, no issues 16 pro max.
Re: Malaprops are off-tropic, Bingo
I also am not experiencing the issues mentioned. While it will require you to manually reconfigure many user settings, sometimes resetting all settings can resolve various issues you may be having with iOS or iPadOS. To do this, go to Settings > General > Transfer or reset iPhone > Reset, and double-tap Reset all settings.
HTH
Argh.
Thanks, Tyler. I'm not looking forward to that kind of downtime, and don't think it should be necessary, but it might come to that.
When you start playing a podcast or a voice message, no one else is experiencing VoiceOver suddenly starting to read random screen elements about five seconds into playback? It never did this before.
Phone is unlocked, but SIRI says you must unlock
Okay, here's one that's very repeatable.
With your phone locked, hold it up so that it's facing you, and say, "Hey SIRI, what's my update?" Your phone will scan your face and you'll hear the unlock sound effect. But, SIRI will immediately respond: "You'll need to unlock your iPhone first." Never experienced this before 18.4, and it's just one of several weird flaky things I'm running into.
PaulMartz
That has been around for previous iOS, regarding the lock screen. Sad but you need to do a reset or not.
Did Screen Recognition Somehow Become Enabled?
Hi Paul,
In a previous comment, you wrote:
This got me thinking... Is Screen Recognition somehow enabled, by chance? I remember helping someone who was having all kinds of issues with their phone, and when I looked at it, I eventually figured out that Screen Recognition had somehow (unbeknownst to them) become enabled.
Michael Hansen
I had that issue with screen re. Kept turning on for strange reason that was several years ago. It was a pain. No issues lucky me.
using new Iphone 16 siri voices with voiceover?
I remember reading that this was going to be possible, but if I play samples of the voices available, they sound like the same old ones. I was excited for the more customizeable verbosity settings, especially getting rid of VO saying button all the time, burt it ended up being quirky and weird. For example, if I'm in settings and want to go back a screen, I kind-a expected it to say "back" rather than "back button." However, it says absolutely nothing, so I just put things back the way they were. Also glad that the advertisement for image playground isn't shown on the first screen of the setti ngs app. That was just weird. It has a blank space where it used to be, but that's an improvement. All things considered, iOS 18.4 seems stable enough for me, so I'm thankful for that. The only bug I've run into is in messages. If I dictate some stuff and then type a "space" character, it says "Space" twice. Only 1 space is incerted, so it's not a big deal; kind-a reminds me of the classic double screen locked message we had all those years ago.
Backup-Restore Speed-Run
I agree, resetting all settings is a cursed nuisance.
If you've got ready access to a Mac or Windows box, and it's not putting you out too much (and yes I agree this really shouldn't be necessary), you could do the backup-restore speed-run. You use Finder/iTunes to do an encrypted backup, which will have everything, then you restore the device (from the computer, over USB), then you immediately restore your backup. This sometimes sweeps away some gremlin or other that's found its way in, maybe an inconsistency in the file system or the configuration.
Well, it sometimes works, anyway. Give it a try. If it's still behaving oddly, at least you know (though it's not a consolation, of course) that the problem is somewhere in your configuration and it's most likely not a hardware issue. And you can compare the fresh-from-factory experience that you're supposed to have with the one you actually have, and try to figure out which setting is ultimately responsible. And as a happy side-effect, you will have purged a load of caches and other crud, so for a brief while your storage space usage reports will actually be useful information that only reflect the space consumed by apps, the system, any downloaded assets you actually use, and your data.
G'luck âŠ
SE3 living large
hi Paul and others,
Sorry you guys are having all of these weird issues. The only issues I am having with iOS 18.4 on an iPhone SE 2022, is that occasionally when I double tap on the microphone, or otherwise the dictate button, on the keyboard and dictate a message, it sometimes will not read out what I have dictated. Itâs not a big loss, as exploring by touch will allow me to hear what has been dictated, and let me know if I need to edit anything out. Another issue that Missy Hoppe mentioned above, is that entering a space after dictating will sometimes say space space, when only one space has been added.
I did mention in another post about the issue with the date and time widget on the lock screen, but that has been an issue since iOS 17, when that widget was first established. Itâs not really a gamebreaker or anything, itâs just that you can only find the time on that widget with explore by touch, swipe gestures will not find it.
Thus far I have not found any other issues. I will say that I did take Tylerâs advice, and went to settings, General, transfer, and chose to reset all settings. However, I did that because I was having issues prior to iOS 18.4.
On a sidenote @Bingo Little, I have been using orientation lock probably since iOS 6 if not earlier. I tend to use my iPhone to listen to a book to help me fall asleep at night. As such, I could not stand having the phone going into landscape mode if I am laying on my side and I pick my phone up to do anything on it.
This upgrade blew away my rotor
After this upgrade, I noticed Screen Recognition was no longer on my rotor. So I went into Rotor Items. Sure enough, it was no longer selected. But, more than that, the order had changed. I know it used to be after Headings, but now it's before.
Furthermore, two items I have never had on my rotor were both selected, Typing Mode and Direct Touch.
I'm glad this update is working so well for everyone else. For me, it's chaos.