In an effort to provide more tools to professional users, Apple has introduced a very interesting feature in iOS 18 And iPadOS 18. Near native utility for formatting external drives straight from the application Files iPhone or iPad.
The ability to format drives was discovered by Caleb Cadle while testing the latest beta software for the iPad. And although at first it was thought that this could be exclusive to the Apple tablet, 9to5Mac confirmed that it is also available in preview versions of the iPhone operating system.
This means that when connecting an external drive to devices running iOS/iPadOS 18, users will have a built-in feature to reformat them. This is something that has been demanded for a long time and that Apple has finally agreed to. Interestingly, Cupertino residents did not mention this feature during the presentation of both operating systems at WWDC 2024.
The operation of the option to format disks from an iPhone or iPad will be similar to that available in Disk Utility macOS. External drives will be listed in the sidebar of the Files app on iOS/iPadOS 18, and users will need to long press on the drive they want to format, or right-click if you’re using a mouse or trackpad on iPad, and select ” Erase.” .
Once this is done, the program will open a new window. There they can enter a new drive name and choose from three available formatting options. It’ll be the same APFS, exFAT And MS-DOS (FAT). Then you just need to click “Delete” and wait for the process to complete.
iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 will include a built-in feature for formatting external drives.
It’s likely that with the new iOS 18 and iPadOS 18, Apple is looking reduce dependence on external devices. For example, Mac or PC. If you’ve recorded professional-quality videos from your iPhone and want to transfer them to your computer for later editing, you can format your external drive directly from your phone and then move the footage there without worrying about running out of space.
If you edited video from your iPad Pro M4 using Final Cut Pro 2 and want to save the final render to external storage, you can format it without any hassle or disruption to your workflow. Of course, we’re only mentioning a few potential scenarios, but they serve to illustrate the importance of this utility.
Cadle suggests that enabling the built-in ability to format external drives from an iPhone or iPad This may indicate that more utilities will be added to the Files app later.. In any case, it is too early to say whether there are actually opportunities to use tools such as First Aid (First aid) or Recovery (Recovery) may find a place in iOS/iPadOS 18 or later.
Yesterday, Apple released the second beta version of its new developer operating systems for the iPhone and iPad. The first public beta of iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 will arrive. in Julywith an eye to releasing stable versions in September.
Source: Hiper Textual
I’m Ben Stock, a highly experienced and passionate journalist with a career in the news industry spanning more than 10 years. I specialize in writing content for websites, including researching and interviewing sources to produce engaging articles. My current role is as an author at Gadget Onus, where I mainly cover the mobile section.
