Apple has released the first developer beta of iPadOS 18.4. This release was expected to include the much-anticipated updates to Siri that would allow it access to your personal context and app intents for smarter interactions. However, in beta 1, there’s no sign of these features, nor is there any mention of them in the release notes.

The wait continues….

Updated Mail App for iPadOS

iPad users now get access to the updated Mail app that iPhone users have had since iOS 18.2. It looks like you’d expect, with a series of categories on top of the message list that automatically group your messages. There are four categories:

Primary – These are what the system has determined are your most important messages. You will most likely spend most of your time here.

Transactions – Reciepts, order confirmations, shipping notices, that all surfaces here

Updates – subscription alerts, social media updates, newsletters, surface here

Promotions – Junk mail…I mean, helpful and not at all spammy promotional content.

I haven’t been a huge fan of this update on the iPhone, so I’m curious if I’ll find it any better on iPad. To get rid of the categories, tap on the ellipsis at the top of the inbox view to go back to the Mail app as it used to be.

New Image Playground Style

The Image Playgrounds app adds a new style that, if I’m not mistaken, I think we either saw in an early beta or an early marketing image when iPadOS 18 was announced over the Summer. There’s now a new Sketch style that, as you might imagine, allows you to create an image in the style of a sketch artist.

Apple News+ Food

For subscribers to Apple’s News+ service, there’s now a dedicated section in the app for surfacing both food and nutrition-related content, and curated recipes from participating food publishers. Recipes are presented with step-by-step instructions, presented in an interface that feels a lot like the lyrics interface in the Music app.

Ambient Music

Collections of ambient background music can be added and invoked via Control Center. The available collections are Sleep, Chill, Productivity, and Wellbeing.

New Podcast Widgets

Apple Podcasts adds new widgets, in various sizes, for displaying episodes from a specific list (latest episodes, downloaded episodes, etc.), or from a specific podcast that you follow.

Priority Notifications

A new Apple Intelligence feature will visually separate notifications that are determined to be important or of high priority on the lock screen/Notification Center. In Beta 1, this feature is off by default and can be enabled in Settings.

App Default for Translation apps

There’s now a new Translation option in the App Defaults section of Settings for users to change the default app for handling text and speech translations.

Default Language in Maps

Apple Maps supports setting a default language, separate from the language setting on your iPad.

Shortcut for Opening Message Conversation

The Shortcuts app adds a new action for opening a specific conversation in the Messages app.