Apple has big iphone plans for this year

2 min read

Big updates coming to iOS 18 and the iPhone 16

EDITED BY ROB MEAD-GREEN

**HOT TOPIC!**Despite RCS support coming to iOS, Android users won’t be getting blue bubbles any time soon.

There are still months to go before the iPhone 16 launches, but already we’ve been inundated with interesting news, rumours and titbits surrounding the device and the software it will run. Put together, there could be a lot to look forward to.

Let’s begin with iOS 18. This could be a major upgrade after a couple of fairly subdued updates from Apple, says Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman, who declares that iOS 18 will be “one of the biggest iOS updates – if not the biggest – in the company’s history.” That’s due to two major additions, the first of which is generative artificial intelligence (AI). Tim Cook recently commented that generative AI is coming to iOS “later this year,” and Gurman believes it will be used to augment Siri and make it far more useful than it already is. Both Siri and the Messages app will be able to better understand queries and auto-complete sentences, Gurman says. Apple has also explored adding generative AI to some of its other apps, the reporter claims, including Music, Xcode, Keynote, Pages and Shortcuts.

The iPhone 16 could see a move to a sideby-side lens system to enable spatial video recordings.

Aside from that, iOS 18 will also come with support for the RCS (Rich Communication Services) messaging standard, which will enable Messages to have greater interoperability with Android text platforms. Right now, there are many restrictions on cross-platform messaging between iOS and Android, including poor-quality media and limited support for group chats. With the adoption of RCS, that should end.

That particular change came after years of complaints from users concerning the “green bubble” issue – that is, texts sent by Android users would show up as green bubbles instead of blue ones in Messages, creating a kind of stigma. However, Apple has announced that even though Messages will work with RCS, those green bubbles aren’t going away.

iPhone adapted for spatial videos

Now that we’ve covered the software side, what about iPhone hardware? Well, big changes are coming there too, and at least some of them are linked to Apple’s brand-new Vision Pro headset.

That’s because the iPhone 16’s camera arrangement could change to feature two vertical lenses instead of the diagonal layout you’ll find on the iPhone 15. The reason for that? The lenses will then be side