iOS 18.4 Introduces AI-Powered App Store Features: Review Summaries and Download Pausing

iOS 18.4 upgrades the App Store with these two new features - 9to5Mac

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. 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. 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.

iOS 18.4 Brings AI Summaries to App Store, Lets Users Pause Downloads

Review Summaries on App Store uses AI to summarise user reviews 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. 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.