iOS 18.4 has one killer upgrade that will make your life easier — here's how to set it up

There's one iOS 18.4 feature I'm looking forward to trying — here's how to set it up

iOS 18.4 may be missing some promised Siri updates, at least for now. But there are plenty of other changes coming to your iPhone courtesy of this update, which is now available as a public beta. And the best of the bunch may be the arrival of Priority Notifications.

Priority Notifications is an Apple Intelligence feature so not everyone will benefit from it. But if you have an iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max or any iPhone 16 (including the new iPhone 16e), your notifications will soon be presented in a way that makes the most important ones stand out.

In a nutshell, Priority Notifications taps into AI to figure out which incoming messages are urgent. The ones deemed to be important or requiring your immediate attention will float to the top of the stack on your lock screen so that you see those notifications first.

Additionally, Priority Notifications will use summary capabilities to highlight the most important part of the alerts you receive.

Long before Apple Intelligence's debut with iOS 18.1, I was looking forward to the arrival of Priority Notifications, as I figured it had the potential solve a few problems with Apple's current method of notifications.

I've found the previous notification summary feature to not be all that useful in highlighting important info. And I also find myself flooded with replies in group texts where it would be helpful to have the truly critical messages stand out from the others — more signal, less noise, in other words.

I've only started using the iOS 18.4 beta, so I'm still getting a flavor for Priority Notifications. But I'm happy to share what I've learned so far as well as the steps you need to take in order for Priority Notifications to work on your phone.

How Priority Notifications work

Let me share an early interaction with Priority Notifications to illustrate how the prioritized alerts work.

My daughter takes dance classes, and we're in a carpool with other families to share drop-off and pick-up duties. Without getting into tedious details of my daily life, a scenario arose the other night where we had to pick up my daughter separately, but we wanted to make sure the other dancers in the carpool still had rides home. So the text messages started flying to make sure everyone was on the same page.

Because these texts were time sensitive, Priority Notifications leapt into action, and you can see the highlighted alert above confirming that we were picking up my daughter while her other friends confirmed that they had transportation of their own. (I've blacked out individual names for privacy reasons.)

In that sense, Priority Notifications succeeds at its mission. The information we needed to see was at the top of the notification stack when we needed to see it, so there was no confusion about who was picking up who.

But it's not a complete success, and the feature's summary tools are a big reason why. "Confirmed ride for [name redacted] and three dancers" makes sense in retrospect, because I know that those kids got a ride home.

But in the moment, the summary proved unclear. Did it mean my wife and I were trying to confirm that the dancers had a ride home? Or that other parents were confirming the ride? At-a-glance information is not very helpful if you've got to carefully parse what a summary means.

Apple's taken some criticism for the quality of its text message summaries, which aren't always as clear as other summary tools for Mail and phone call transcripts are.

If that aspect of Apple Intelligence can't be improved, I think Priority notifications might be better served by showing you full alerts instead of summaries. But we'll see if that aspect of the feature improves during the iOS 18.4 beta.

How to set up Priority Notifications

To experience Priority Notifications yourself, you've got to do a little groundwork after you've installed iOS 18.4, whether we're talking about the current beta or you wait until the full release of the app. Here's how to get started.

And that's all there is to it. If you decided Priority Notifications isn't to your liking, just head back to Notifications in the Settings app to turn the feature off.

If you're looking for more tips on using Apple Intelligence features, we can show you how to use Visual Intelligence to identify plants and animals or how to use the Image Playground feature to generate images. If you're new to Apple Intelligence because you just bought an iPhone 16e, here are some more Apple Intelligence features to try out first.