still learning iOS 18.3 beta disables news notification summaries after high-stakes errors Summaries are often incorrect or strange; Apple is working on improvements. Andrew Cunningham Jan 17, 2025 11:37 am | 88 iPhones running iOS 18. Credit: Apple iPhones running iOS 18. Credit: Apple Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreApple released new beta versions of iOS 18.3 to developers and the public yesterday, and one of the changes coming with the new software update will (at least temporarily) disable Apple Intelligence notification summaries for all apps in the App Store's News and Entertainment category, at least temporarily.Apple said earlier this month that it would be instituting updates to how these notifications are handled after complaints from news organizations, and the company has apparently decided to turn them off entirely while it decides what those updates will look like. Most prominently, one user's notification summary from the BBC suggested that Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had died of suicide; this was not true. Other examples have been cropping up since then.For the notification summaries that remain, Apple is instituting changes to make it clearer when users are reading summaries and to make it easier to turn those summaries off. Notification summaries in iOS 18.3 will be italicized to help further distinguish them from individual non-summarized notificationsbefore, there was a small icon next to the text to indicate you were looking at a summary. Apple is also making it possible to turn off summaries on a per-app basis directly from the lock screen without diving into the Settings app to do it.In our own extensive testing with Apple Intelligence notification summaries in iOS 18.1 and macOS 15.1, we observed many instances of summaries that were inaccurate or just plain weird. When you're just getting updates from your Discords or group text threads, errors tend to be pretty low-stakes, at least. But when you're getting notifications about war, murder, and politics, these kinds of errors have the potential to mislead and misinform.The iOS 18.1 and 18.2 updates (along with iPadOS 18.2 and macOS Sequoia 15.2) enabled most of Apple's promised Intelligence features across all the hardware that supports them. For the iPhone, that's still only 2023's iPhone 15 Pro and 2024's iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro.The iOS 18.3 update is currently in its third beta release. The iOS 17.3, 16.3, and 15.3 updates have all been released in late January, so it's likely that we'll see the 18.3 update (and corresponding updates for iPadOS, macOS, and other Apple software) released at some point in the next few weeks.Andrew CunninghamSenior Technology ReporterAndrew CunninghamSenior Technology Reporter Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue. 88 Comments