Once you fire up the iOS 18 public beta, you may not notice many immediate differences between Apple's upcoming iPhone software update and the current version of iOS. That is, unless your first stop happens to be the Photos app, in which things look quite different indeed. When previewing iOS 18 at WWDC 2024 in June, Apple called the revamped version of Photos the most significant overhaul in the app's history.
It's hard to argue with Apple's claim, as the tabbed interface found in the iOS 17 version of the app has given way to a single-screen view where your photo library, albums and dynamically adjusting photo collections are all just a scroll away. Whenever faced with a redesigned version of something we're all accustomed to, our first instinct may be to muster up our best Comic Book Guy impersonation and declared that what we're looking at the worst update ever . As I noted in my iOS 18 public beta hands-on , the new look Photos certainly takes some getting used to.
Maybe over time, I thought, my initial resistance may melt away as I get accustomed to where Apple's moved things. It's been about two weeks since the iOS 18 public beta became available, and while that may not seem like a lot of time, I have been dabbling with the developer beta for a month before that. At this point I'm not prepared to declare the Photos overhaul an unqualified success, there are more things I like about the new-look app than I don't like (though the things I don't like I really don't like.
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