iOS 18: 6 India-centric features you must try

Apple released iOS 18 last week to all the supported iPhones. It brings a slew of new features such as home screen customisation, the ability to hide and lock apps, a dedicated passwords app to store passwords, and more.

ALSO READ: 18 cool iOS 18 tips to help you get the most out of your iPhone

While there are quite a few notable features that have been showcased and mentioned several times since the first announcement back in June at WWDC, there are many India-centric changes that you may have missed. In this article, we are listing all the India-centric features of iOS 18 that you must know about.

6 India-centric iOS 18 features to look out for

While iOS 18 on its own has introduced a bunch of innovative features, check out Apple’s latest India-centric additions to the update:

1. Lock screen changes

iOS 18 offers lock screen customisation like never before. It also supports numerals from 12 different Indian languages, including Devanagari, Bangla, Gujarati, Meitei, Odia, Ol Chiki, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Gurmukhi, Arabic, and Arabic Indic.

2. Multilingual keyboard with support for local languages

iOS 18 running on iPhone 12 or newer devices support phonetic typing with Latin characters in English and two additional Indian languages. If there are multiple message threads in different languages, the keyboard will remember the script in the previous conversation and switch to it automatically. It supports Indian languages like Bangla, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Tamil, and Telugu.

3. Alphabetical keyboard layouts for local languages

iOS 18 has alphabetical layouts for 11 Indian languages. The keyboard now alphabetically arranges keys for Bangla, Gujarati, Kannada, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Punjabi, Odia, Malayalam, and Urdu.

4. Improved language search

You can now look for specific words using familiar spellings while typing using the keyboard. If a word has more than one spelling in the same language, users can look it up for the other variants of it. This feature supports Devanagari, Gujarati, Assamese, and Bangla.

5. Translate app supports Hindi

The Translate app in iOS 18 supports Hind translations, making it more useful in India. You can also translate text in Safari and native apps like Notes in the Hindi language.

6. Multilingual Siri

Siri now supports more languages, including local ones like Marathi, Bengali, Kannada, Hindi, Gujarati, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, and Punjabi.

These are all the new India-centric features in iOS 18. With these features, Apple’s iPhone software skin feels more local and familiar.

Other than this, iOS 18 has several other notable features. As mentioned above, it brings home screen and lock screen customisation. Users can also hide and lock apps with a passcode or FaceID, making things more private.

It also introduces a revamped control centre with the ability to fully customise and personalise it, as per your choice. Further, it also brings a dedicated Passwords app for the iPhone to store and sync passwords. iOS 18 also adds support for RCS Messaging, allowing Android and iOS users to message each other like never before.