I have it off, it still uses 5GB of storage...

Hey, just pay extortion prices for more storage!

Mail is dogshit. Photos is dogshit. Image playground is streaming hot dog shit. Etc etc.

You can modify the Photos app to be just like pre iOS 18 just by using “Customize and Reorder”.

Absolutely nothing has changed about mail if you turn off Apple Intelligence and Image Playgrounds is just an app that you don’t have to use.

I did not know that, thanks. But still - if I have to research now how to do that it‘s still going in the wrong direction, no? Besides, it‘s rare that Apple gives a choice, usually you have to adapt at whatever they decide.

So Apple shouldn’t make things more customizable?

There is no way to get the old Photos interface back.

I see mail now has mandatory images next to each mail item, how can that be turned off?

Settings -> Apps -> Mail -> Show Contact Photos

Wow as simple as that, thank you.

Bluetooth is horrible. I see spinning loader (connection indicator) even when I switch bluetooth off. It’s been stuck at it for days. You’d think that this would be core functionality and ultra stable by now.

reboot your phone at that point ...

Mail has been terrible since inception. It’s just more terrible now. Photos in iOS 17 was fantastic but the new version in iOS 18 is unforgivably bad. It’s the new “pc load letter”…

Not an Apple user here. What's changed? Can you share more details about what made them "dogshit"?

Mail got category buttons on top that split your inbox so now to check your mail you have to click around because shipping notification are in a separate list from work emails. Photos had a perfectly fine interface with tabs that got changed into a long list of often redundant categories. Thankfully it can be customized a bit. New control center (wifi toggles etc.) was replaced with a customizable grid of widgets that is buggy, slow and looks ugly and unprofessional in comparison with the old interface. Gimmick. Home screen icon size and color is customizable now and it looks out of place. Gimmick. If you have a dark theme enabled then icons in settings become themed and look different than icons on the home screen with is weird and inconsistent with the rest of the interface. All animations were reworked and feel like crap. There is a delay to every action and it feels like animation smoothness takes priority over interface responsiveness. Home screen swiping animation stutters every time. Even though there is not a single new feature available for EU users other than the interface changes the entire OS feels sluggish, bloated and unfinished. Performance is terrible. This update made my iPhone 12 slow down to a crawl. Feels like running Vista on a Windows XP machine and since they dropped security updates for iOS 17 I had no choice but to upgrade. This combined with the recent news about iPhones listening to people at homes makes me want to get rid of my phone entirely. I don’t want a new iPhone and I sure as hell don’t want an Android.

Mail: top right (...) menu -> List View

Yes I had to do that, which is my entire point - everything worked, and they made it worse.

Your definition of worse is others definition of better.

Clearly there are more than a few of us.

> Photos had a perfectly fine interface with tabs that got changed into a long list of often redundant categories

“Pin” the categories you want access to.

amen

home screen icon theming hit like an empty bus

Usually when they shamelessly copy from Android they made some improvements, this isn’t even close to material on Pixel, which is pretty nice.

(Not a fanboy of either; use both.)