Your iPhone’s Phone app is getting a big update in iOS 18, and my favorite new feature is the searchable call history. Previously, you could go to the Phone app’s Contacts tab and search for a person’s name, but the search feature was missing in the Recents tab. That’s unfortunate, because your call history is in the Recents tab. So up until iOS 17, if you wanted to quickly look up someone who called you, you had to scroll through a long list and spot the contact manually. Finally, that’s changed with the upcoming version of iOS.
How to search your call history in iOS 18
You can actually try searchable call history now with the iOS 18 beta, but I suggest not installing it on your main device, as it can introduce instability to your phone.
To search your call history once you have iOS 18 installed, open the Phone app and go to the Recents tab. You’ll see a search bar at the top. Type any name or number, and your iPhone will show you matching entries from your call history. My favorite use of this feature is to search for a date such as July 4, 2024, or a month, since the app condenses the results to just the timeframe you’ve chosen. This is great if you want to quickly look up someone you called on a particular day.
At the time of writing, this feature is still in the works and doesn’t always display the right results. However, you can expect it to be fixed by the time iOS 18 is available to the general public later this fall.
Other improvements to the Phone app
The Phone app has also received a few other useful features in iOS 18. If you go to the Keypad tab to dial a number, you’ll notice that the iPhone supports T9 dialing. This means that when you dial a number on the keypad, your iPhone searches your contacts and shows a matching result below the typed number. You could use this to type half a number and dial the rest automatically.
In iOS 17, the space below the phone number was reserved for a button to add the number to your contacts. That button has been moved to the top-left corner of the display in iOS 18. In phones that support Apple Intelligence, which is currently stated to be limited to iPhone 15 Pro and newer devices, iOS 18 has also introduced call recording. This will inform the listener that the call is being recorded and will supply you with a call recording and a transcript.
