iOS 18.2 Mail Sorting Features Strangely Absent on iPad and Mac

Apple's new Mail sorting features in iOS 18.2 are notably absent from both iPadOS 18.2 and macOS Sequoia 15.2, raising questions about the company's rollout strategy for the email management system.

mail categories macos
The new feature automatically sorts emails into four distinct categories: Primary, Transactions, Updates, and Promotions, with the aim of helping iPhone users better organize their inboxes. Devices that support Apple Intelligence also surface priority messages as part of the new system.

Users on iPhone who updated to iOS 18.2 have the features. However, iPad and Mac users who updated their devices with the software that Apple released concurrently with iOS 18.2 will have noticed their absence. iPhone users can easily switch between categorized and traditional list views, but iPad and Mac users are limited to the standard chronological inbox layout.

The omission is especially odd because Apple used an example of the feature running in macOS when it announced in late October the first set of Apple Intelligence features available with the release of iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1.

Noting the disparity, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman suggests that engineering resources might be behind the selective rollout, rather than technical limitations. Indeed, implementing the feature on iPad in particular shouldn't require significant additional development effort.


Apple typically strives to maintain feature parity across its ecosystem, particularly for core applications like Mail, so it remains a curious state of affairs, and Apple has not provided any updated timeline for when the new Mail features might expand to other platforms.

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Top Rated Comments

daneoni Avatar
4 weeks ago
Turned it off on iPhone so i'm not particularly mad
Score: 34 Votes (Like | Disagree)
hieranonymous Avatar
4 weeks ago
Apple is an absolutely massive entity. How is it chronically stretched so thin in even the most mundane areas of development? Hire more engineers.
Score: 31 Votes (Like | Disagree)
SRQrws Avatar
4 weeks ago
Maybe at the last minute they realized most people don't want it.
Score: 23 Votes (Like | Disagree)
darthbane2k Avatar
4 weeks ago
I wasted an hour this morning trying to figure out why I wasn't seeing this on my M4 iPad Pro
Score: 20 Votes (Like | Disagree)
MichaelQ Avatar
4 weeks ago
Not that big a deal - first thing I did was to turn this off.
Score: 17 Votes (Like | Disagree)
ps3zocker Avatar
4 weeks ago

What’re you talking about lmao
It was. Home Screen widgets and the new Lock Screen are just two examples of features that came to iPhone first and iPad a year later.
Score: 16 Votes (Like | Disagree)