iOS 18 Gives Your iPhone's Phone App This Hidden Trick

Apple released iOS 18 to the general public in September, a week after the company announced its new iPhone 16 lineup, Apple Watch Series 10 and more at its “Glowtime” event. The operating system brought a bunch of new features to your iPhone, like the ability to customize your lock screen and schedule messages to send later. It also gave you an easy way to search through your call history with a new search bar in the Phone app.

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.

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 and voicemails from that particular date.

For more on iOS 18, here’s my iOS 18 review, what to know about T9 dialing in the operating system and our iOS 18 cheat sheet. You can also check out what to Apple might bring to your iPhone in iOS 18.1.