iOS 18.2 appears to fix one of the stranger design elements of the Photos app, hopefully pleasing lots of frustrated users of the recently released update.
With the release of iOS 18, Apple worked to change and improve many of its core apps. One of these was Photos, which received a fully revamped UI. The reaction to the change has been mixed, but that might soon change with the news that Apple is improving the video player in the upcoming iOS 18.2 update.
In the current version of iOS 18, videos in the Photos app have a white or black border (depending on if you're in light or dark mode) when you initially play them, which can only be removed by tapping the video and entering the full screen. However, according to a report from 9to5Mac, this has been changed in the latest iOS 18.2 beta. Now, videos in the Photos app are always displayed in full screen, and tapping them simply removes the control panel.
It's not a major change, in truth it's more like going backward as this was the same way videos worked in older iOS versions. While I didn't have much of an issue with the way it works in the current iOS, enough people clearly disliked it enough to push Apple to backtrack. However, as this is a beta change, there's no guarantee yet that this will apply in the eventual public release of iOS 18.2.
iOS 18.2 is bringing more than just changes to the Photos app; it's also bringing a fair few of the promised Apple Intelligence features. For instance, the recent public beta has given us access to Visual intelligence on the iPhone 16 series, as well as the promised ChatGPT integration with Siri. The beta also allows access to Apple's Image Playground and Gemoji making it easy to generate images on an iPhone.
iOS 18.2 is a pretty big update, so much so that it's easy to miss some of the smaller changes. While the video player might not bother everyone, it will help to make the best iPhones even better for those who disliked the original change.
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