iOS 18.4 set for ‘early April’ release after a lengthy beta delay

Macworld

Apple websites in many countries where Engish is not the primary language now show that Apple Intelligence will be available in early April, which likely coincides with the release of iOS 18.4. Macworld’s sister publication, Macwelt, caught the change on the Apple Germany website; we checked Apple France, Apple Japan, and Apple Mexico, and those sites also state an early April timeline.

The iOS and iPad OS 18.3 and macOS Sequoia 15.3 updates (both of which were updated with point releases) were released in late January, but Apple has yet to release the iOS 18.4/macOS 15.4 betas to developers weeks later. With an early April deadline, we expect betas to arrive next week to give testers ample time to dig through the new features.

The Apple Intelligence sites in Japan, Germany, and France now state an early April release.

iOS 18.4 will be the first look at Apple Intelligence for many users around the world. However, the specific Apple Intelligence features that will be made available is not yet known. Apple has released Apple Intelligence features in phases, with the first set including notification summaries, the Photos Clean Up tool, reply suggestions in Messages and Mail, writing tools, and the new Siri UI. These features will likely be available at release, but it’s unclear whether the second set, released in the iOS/iPadOS 18.2, which includes ChatGPT integration, the Image Playground app, Visual Intelligence, and Genmoji, will be delayed.

One update that reportedly won’t appear in iOS/iPadOS 18.4 and macOS 15.4 is the much-anticipated Siri content overhaul. A recent report by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that work on this has run into bugs and performance issues, forcing the company to push its release to May or later with iOS/iPadOS 18.5. Learn more about Apple Intelligence and the feature rollout.