Your Phone App Gets a Hidden Upgrade in the iOS 18 Beta

Apple released iOS 18’s fourth public beta on Aug. 12, about two months after the tech giant announced the software at its Worldwide Developers Conference in June. The update introduces a bunch of new features to the iPhones of developers and beta testers, like the abilities to customize your lock screen and schedule messages to send later. And it gives you an easy way to search through your call history with a new search bar.

Before iOS 18, your Phone app’s Recent calls tab was a running list of all the calls made to and from your iPhone. So if you wanted to quickly find someone who called you, you had to scroll through a potentially long list of calls depending on how far back the call was and how often you use your iPhone for calls. But iOS 18’s introduction of a search bar in Recents takes the guesswork out of this.

But iOS 18 is still in beta, and I recommend downloading a beta only on something other than your primary device. Because this isn’t the final version of iOS 18, the update might be buggy and battery life may be short, so it’s best to keep those troubles on a secondary device. I downloaded iOS 18 on my older iPhone XR to keep those issues away from my iPhone 14 Pro.

Here’s what to know about the search function in your iPhone’s Recents tab.

Can I search recent calls on my iPhone?

With iOS 18, yes. To search your recent calls, go to your Phone app and tap Recents across the bottom of the menu. Tap the search bar across the top of the page to open a new menu that shows the sections Calls and Voicemails. Both of these options also have the option to See All.

You can use the search bar to search for a specific contact’s name, a contact’s number or dates. For example, typing “mom” or “dad” pulls up all the phone calls and voicemails from your mom or dad, as well as their contact card. Similarly, typing “August” or “July” into the search bar pulls up all calls and voicemails from that month.

You can also type a specific date, like “July 5”, and that pulls up calls from that particular date. However, my iPhone didn’t show any voicemails in that search, even though I had one from that date.

But iOS 18 is still in beta, so this could be a bug in the software. Apple will likely release more betas of the software before releasing it to the general public this fall, which is plenty of time to address any issues. As of now, there’s no word on exactly when Apple will release the update to the general public.

For more on iOS 18, here’s my hands-on experience with the public betas, what to know about T9 dialing in iOS 18 and our iOS 18 cheat sheet.