It’s generally a good idea to keep your phone’s software current – but some iPhone owners are feeling let down by Apple’s latest updates.
Since its initial release in September, users who have installed iOS 18 have reported issues ranging from batteries that drain faster to less efficient controls and confusingly redesigned apps.
“Woke up to find out my phone updated to iOS 18 while I was asleep and the new photo app design nearly sent me spiraling again,” one user wrote on the social media site X. “It’s hideous.”
This might all sound like much ado about nothing, but it takes time and effort to learn how to use tools – even digital ones – effectively. And it can be deeply frustrating when out-of-the-blue design changes force us to reset our habits and our muscle memory, as some iPhone owners are learning.
Thankfully, there are fixes and workarounds for at least some of Apple’s unpopular changes. Here’s what you should know.
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The divisive new Photos app
What changed: This year, Apple almost completely redesigned its Photos app, so … basically everything.
The most annoying change? This new design takes all the options for creating memories, accessing photo utilities, viewing and sharing albums that used to live on separate pages, and crams them all into one. (In other words, get ready to do a lot of scrolling.)
Apple also added a handful of new options that further serve to clutter things up, like wallpaper suggestions and an admittedly helpful Apple Intelligence tool that serves up photo and video montages on-demand.
The fix: For now, at least, you can’t make your Photos app look exactly like it used to. What you can do, however, is tweak its design yourself until it becomes something you can live with.
Scroll down until you find the “Customize & Reorder” option, tap it, and rearrange – or outright disable – the things you actually want to see inside the app.
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Supersized emoji
What changed: If you like to pepper your messages with emoji, you might have notice that they appear larger in iOS 18′s keyboard. There’s more space around each individual emoji, too, which can make finding just the right one more time-consuming.
Oh, and if you send an individual emoji, it’ll appear much larger inside your message thread than before. As one Reddit user put it: “I do not want to see the eggplant emoji in 4K. I do not like this. 0/10” (Messages that include text, or multiple emoji, display those smilies in their classically small stature.)
The fix: Switching to alternate keyboard apps like Microsoft’s Swiftkey can bring back the smaller, more densely packed palette of emoji you’re used to. That said, some third-party keyboard apps ask for deeper, or “full” access to your device to make certain features work.
This isn’t necessarily a dealbreaker, but it’s best to avoid keyboards that aren’t clear about what they’re doing on your phone.
If you’re more bothered by just how big emoji look in your conversations, well, sorry – short of sending a bit of text with each one, you’re stuck.
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A confusing Control Center
What changed: The Control Center, accessed by a swipe down from the top-right corner of the screen, has always had a lot going on. Now, in iOS 18, there’s even more happening, and it’s just kind of confusing.
For one, you can now swipe through multiple screens in Control Center to manage your media, toggle smart home gadgets on or off, and more – though you’ll often just find duplicates of what’s on your main Control Center page. Meanwhile, some options we previously had one-touch access to – like quickly turning Bluetooth on and off – now take an extra tap by default.
It’s technically easier now to customize your Control Center – tap the “+” icon in the top-left corner to rearrange these icons – but getting specific controls into just the right spot can also be trickier than it sounds.
The fix: Use that new customization option to get rid of anything and everything you don’t need. (I’d start by getting rid of those separate windows for media and smart home controls, personally.) Unlike the Photos app, you can get your Control Center looking like the one you’ve used for years without too much effort.
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Faster battery drain
What changed: After installing iOS 18, or one of its subsequent updates, some users have reported that their iPhones’ batteries don’t last as long as they used to.
The fix: There’s a lot going on behind-the-scenes when you update your phone, and that backstage work continues even after the update appears to be done. If you’ve noticed your phone doesn’t last as long after installing some new software, give it a day or two first before panicking – that’s completely normal.
If that lousy battery life lingers for more than a few days, though, it’s time to take some action.
There’s only so much you can do about the power iOS and its new features use, though you can try disabling Apple Intelligence or turning off features like Siri listening for its wake words.
There are other ways to optimize your battery life, too. Open your iPhone’s Settings, tap the Battery option, and see which apps are using the most power – you may need to tweak settings inside specific apps if there’s a standout battery hog. And then there’s my personal favorite: Tap the “General” option inside the Settings app, then “Background App Refresh,” and toggle off the apps you don’t want running when you’re not looking.
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