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You Can Bring Back the Minimal Apple Mail iPhone Layout
Get back your old-school, text-only email inbox.
The Mail app on iPhone got quite a visual overhaul in iOS 18.2. Suddenly, there was a whole AI-powered Priority mailbox, smart Categories up top, and an icon from every sender. For longtime Mail app users on the iPhone, that's a big shift—with seemingly minimal returns.
The contact photos feature is perhaps the worst offender here, as most icons are just stock Apple icons. Even if you get an email from Lifehacker, it won't show the Lifehacker website logo, like it does when you visit the website in your browser. And this is the case with the vast majority of email addresses.
Thankfully, Apple seems to have listened to these complaints—in iOS 18.5, they are adding a toggle to remove contact photos altogether. And you don't need to go all the way into Settings to do this, either.
As of this writing, iOS 18.5 is only available as a developer beta, though it should be available as a public beta soon enough. Anyone can now sign up and download the iOS developer beta, though I generally don't recommend it. Developer betas are more susceptible to early bugs and issues, since Apple releases these versions of the betas first. These things are usually ironed out by the time the public beta hits. The public beta is also easier to install, and more stable. To access this feature, I would suggest you wait for the 18.5 public beta, or the wider stable release that will be sometime in early-to-mid May.
How to disable contact photos in the Mail app
To get rid of the contact photos, open the Mail app and tap the three-dotted Menu button, then uncheck Show Contact Photos.
Instantly, the column of icons on the left edge will disappear, and the email contents will take up all the available space. Ah, the good old days.
Alternatively, you can also use the Settings app to disable this feature. This option has existed all the way since iOS 18.2 launched, but it's hidden quite deep in the Settings app. Here, go to Apps > Mail and then disable the Show Contact Photos option.
How to remove Categories and other Mail AI features
But you might notice you're still not back to how the Mail app used to be. That's because of the Categories View and the Priority Mail section.
Both those features can be disabled from the same Menu popup, and you don't need to be using iOS 18.5 either. Every iPhone running iOS 18.2 or higher will see these options in the menu. Here, switch to List View to get rid of the Categories section, and then uncheck Show Priority to remove Priority Mail.
To find out more about removing all the AI features in Mail, check out our detailed guide.
