Apps

Aside from the new Widgets app and the additions to Safari and Photos previously mentioned, most of the new app features in visionOS 26 are shared with Apple’s other platforms, especially iPadOS and iOS. Here are some of the most notable changes, many of which you can read more about in Federico’s iOS and iPadOS 26 review.

List view in the Files app now includes customizable columns.

Files: List view has been overhauled with the ability to show and hide columns for various metadata as well as resize columns. Folder icons can be customized with color tinting and symbols, including SF Symbols and emoji. And you can set the default app for a particular file type, which is a welcome and long overdue addition. These enhancements bring Files more in line with the Mac’s Finder and improve the experience of managing files on visionOS greatly.

Shortcuts: The new Apple Intelligence ‘Use Model’ action makes Apple’s Foundation models accessible to all users, just as they’re now accessible to third-party developers. AI tools like text summarization and image generation can also be added to automation workflows.

The Info panel in Messages now organizes data into tabs.

Messages: The detail view that appears when you tap on a contact or group photo at the top of a conversation has been redesigned with tabs to separate out photos, links, documents, and more. You can now set photos and other images as backgrounds for your chats in iMessage. These backgrounds sync across devices and include a spatial depth layer on visionOS. And if backgrounds don’t add enough fun to your group chats, you can now create polls for your friends to take part in, too. Speaking of group chats, typing indicators now show which group members are typing at any given time.

Reminders: When you share content to Reminders via the share sheet, Apple Intelligence can now suggest reminders for you to create based on what you share. Task categorization is expanding beyond grocery lists to any list, too, giving you the ability to use AI to organize tasks for work projects, packing, and anything else you use Reminders for.

Notes: Markdown support is finally coming to Notes! Well, partially. The app can now import Markdown files, converting them to rich text, and export notes to Markdown format, though Markdown syntax isn’t supported in the Notes app itself.

Maps: The Maps app can now log locations you visit in case you want to track where you’ve been or look up information on a place you stopped by a few days ago. While your iPhone is probably the primary source for this data, it does sync via iCloud and is available in the Maps app on visionOS.

The TV app now features poster-style artwork for titles.

TV: The TV app has a refreshed look with vertical posters representing films and shows in lieu of widescreen tiles. The Continue Watching row continues to employ the wider tiles but now displays show artwork instead of preview frames from individual episodes, which is a downgrade in my opinion. The Library tab now features a small cell appended to the bottom of posters showing the runtime of films and number of episodes in a series. visionOS 26 also introduces the ability for video apps to dynamically mask videos to perfectly match aspect ratios even when they change mid-video, a technology I haven’t yet seen in action but think will make for some epic viewing experiences.

Music: AutoMix intelligently transitions between songs, using beat matching and time stretching to seamlessly move from one song to the next. This feature is really cool when it works properly, but it can be quite distracting if it ever goes wrong. I have it turned off most of the time, but when I put on a playlist that I think could benefit from it, I enable it on the Now Playing screen. The Music app now offers Lyrics Translations for select songs as well.

Podcasts: Playback speed options have been expanded to allow for listening at 0.8x, 1x, 1.3x, 1.5x, 1.8x, and 2x speeds, though the app doesn’t include the full fine-grained speed control offered on iOS.

It’s worth noting that no first-party apps have been converted from iPad compatibility mode to native visionOS apps this year. Calendar, Reminders, Books, Podcasts, Shortcuts and many more system apps continue to remain non-native to Apple’s newest platform over a year and a half after its release. Last year, one of my hopes for the next visionOS cycle was to see all of Apple’s apps debut visionOS versions, and the fact that none of them have done so is concerning. I appreciate the ability to run iPad apps on my Vision Pro and rely on that capability every day, but I wish Apple would step out and really lead the way in visionOS app development because the native app experience is so much better than running apps meant for a different form factor in compatibility mode.

There are also a number of apps that debuted on other platforms this year but haven’t made their way to visionOS:

• Games
• Preview (now on iOS and iPadOS)
• Phone (now on iPadOS and macOS)
• Journal (now on iPadOS and macOS)

Meanwhile, visionOS is also the only Apple platform without the Contacts, FaceTime, Find My, or Calculator apps.⁶ I don’t know of a compelling reason why all of these apps shouldn’t be available on visionOS. At the very least, they run on the iPad and thus should be capable of running on Vision Pro in compatibility mode. The lack of these apps on the platform puts it out of step with the rest of Apple’s ecosystem, undercutting one of the big themes of this OS release. I would really like to see these apps, especially Journal, come sooner rather than later – and I’d love to see what a visionOS-specific version of each of them could look like.