iOS 18.4 Update Brings AI Review Summaries in App Store, Lets Users Pause Downloads

Apple released the iOS 18.4 update for iPhone on Monday with a plethora of new features. In addition to Priority Notifications, new toggles in the Control Centre, and the availability of Visual Intelligence on the iPhone 15 Pro models, the update introduces two new features for the App Store which can potentially aid users in making a decision of whether to download an app and managing downloads when facing network congestion or poor connectivity.

New App Store Features in iOS 18.4

The iOS 18.4 update brings two new App Store features to the iPhone — Review Summaries and the ability to pause downloads. According to Apple, the former leverages large language models (LLMs) to compile information such as highlights and key points from reviews left on app pages by users which appears with the Automatically summarised from reviews text.

It generates a comprehensive summary in the form of a short paragraph, enabling them to quickly get an idea about the app without having to scroll through individual reviews. The company says Review Summaries are refreshed “at least” once a week for apps and games with enough reviews. Users can tap and hold the summary if they discover a problem with a summary.

This feature has been introduced as part of a phased rollout and is currently available in English for a limited number of apps and games on the App Store in the US. There is no word on its availability in other languages and regions.

In addition to Review Summaries, another notable addition to the App Store is the ability to pause app downloads. It is a convenience feature which enables iPhone users pause app downloads when facing poor connectivity, network congestion, or other problems. Prior to the update, the only option to pause an app from downloading was to stop the download entirely.

This caused a problem especially when downloading large-sized apps as the progress reset every time a download was stopped. However, the iPhone maker's latest iOS 18.4 update enables users to pause them instead.

Other features of the update include ambient mode, Visual Intelligence on the iPhone 15 Pro models, an Apple Vision Pro app, new toggles in the Control Centre, and new emojis.