What to know
- The Phone app’s ‘Recents’ tab in iOS 18 now has a ‘search’ field that lets you search for contacts and look for specific call entries.
- The searchable call history has been a long-requested feature. With it, you can enter either the person’s name or their number to search through the call logs.
- You can also narrow down your search month or a specific date, and get results for that timeframe alone.
The iOS 18 update is proving to be one of the biggest updates ever for iPhone users. Along with a slew of major features, there are also several smaller changes that seek to address the concerns that iPhone users have had for years.
One such small, but extremely important update is the ability to search your call history from the ‘Recents’ tab. Here’s how you can make use of the call history to look for contacts and recent callers in iOS 18.
How to Search your calls in iPhone
- Required: iOS 18 update
A ‘search’ field in the Phone app’s call history has been a long time coming. Here’s how to use it to search for specific entries:
- Open the Phone app. Tap on the Recents tab. At the top, you’ll see a new Search field. Tap on it.
- Enter the name or phone number of the contact you want to find.
- And just like that, the Phone app will filter the contacts and find the entries that match your call history.
- You can also search for a particular date (for example, May 31, 2024) or a month and get results for that timeframe.
Image: Apple
Before iOS 18, the Phone app only let you search for contacts from the ‘Contacts’ tab. But if you wanted to look for a specific entry in the Recents tab (where the call history is shown), you had to manually scroll through your call history, which often felt like finding a needle in a haystack.
With this new method, you can now search for a contact from the Contacts tab, the Keypad, and now, the Recents tab as well, and potentially save yourself the long and laborious process of looking for a specific call entry manually.
With the addition of T9 dialing as well, it feels like iOS is finally catching up to Android. In any case, it’s these little details that actually matter and come in handy in the real world. We’re glad that Apple has heard the common user and made the necessary tweaks.
