iOS 18.4 launched earlier this week with a ton of new features and changes, including two App Store additions that should make downloading apps and updates just a little bit nicer of an experience than before.
#1: Apple Intelligence-generated review summaries
The number of Apple Intelligence features across Apple’s devices keeps growing. In iOS 18.4, that includes an AI upgrade to app and game reviews.
As we’ve reported was coming, now when browsing an app or game’s App Store listing, Apple Intelligence offers a summary of all the submitted user reviews.
The new ‘Review Summary’ synthesizes feedback submitted by users into a short, simple paragraph summary of how the app fares among users.
I’ve enjoyed having a similar feature available inside Amazon’s shopping app for a while, as it’s a convenient way to get an overview of what people think of a product. Adding it to apps and games makes a lot of sense and should help users save time reading reviews.
#2: Pausing app downloads and updates
Most of the time, if you’re downloading a new app or updating an existing one, it’s not a problem to let that download run until it’s finished.
In some cases though—whether due to poor connectivity, network congestion, or some other issue—it would be nice to be able to pause a download.
Before now, the only way to pause a download was to stop it entirely, thus forcing you to restart from scratch when you’re ready to continue.
But in iOS 18.4, there’s a new pause button to temporarily halt an app or update’s download, then resume it without losing your original progress.
It’s a small change, but a nice one for those times you hit a snag with a download.
What do you think of these iOS 18.4 App Store changes? Let us know in the comments.
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