iOS and iPadOS 26: The MacStories Review

My first job, I was in-house at a fur company with this old pro copywriter, Greek, named Teddy. And Teddy told me the most important idea in advertising is “new”. Creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion. But he also talked about a deeper bond with the product: nostalgia. It’s delicate, but potent.

– Don Draper (Mad Men Season 1, Episode 13 – “The Wheel”)

I was reminded of this Don Draper quote from one of my all-time favorite TV scenes – the Kodak Carousel pitch – when reflecting upon my contrasting feelings about iOS and iPadOS 26 a few weeks ago. Some of you may be wondering what I’m doing here, starting my annual review of an operating system with a Mad Men reference. But here we are today, with an eye-catching iOS update that, given the circumstances, is betting it all on the glittering allure of a new visual design, and a tablet operating system that comes full circle with old, almost nostalgic functionalities repurposed for the modern age.

I’ve spent the past three months using and working with iOS and iPadOS 26, and there’s this idea I keep coming back to: the old and new coexist in Apple’s software strategy this year, and they paint a hyperrealistic picture of a company that’s stuck in a transition phase of its own making.

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From a software perspective, Apple didn’t exactly have a great 2024 or beginning of 2025. And personally, I certainly didn’t kick off the year thinking that by September, I’d be happily working from my iPad Pro again. But let’s take a step back in time for a second, shall we?

In hindsight, Apple’s 2024 was characterized by an unusually vaporware-adjacent presentation of AI features at WWDC that were meant to change the narrative surrounding the company’s lackluster progress in artificial intelligence. As pressure mounted from regulators on one side (the DMA saga also kicked off last year) and Wall Street on the other, there we had a roster of executives on a virtual stage reassuring us that Apple wasn’t behind on AI; in fact, they had been waiting to ship a version of AI that was far more useful – and far more integrated – than the chatbots we’d seen to date. To be fair, it looked great! And thus the mission was accomplished. The online discourse was steered away from the “Apple is falling behind on AI” discussion and onto a more hopeful, quintessentially Apple angle: the AI made by Apple was going to be late to the game, but better than everybody else’s…eventually.

It was a beautiful moment of optimism, while it lasted. As the rest of 2024 rolled on, it became clear that the promise of Apple-developed Foundation models with on-device AI, Private Cloud Compute, and a Siri knowledge graph integrated with App Intents was maybe going to be more of a 2025 affair. Meanwhile, the few Apple Intelligence features that the company did manage to roll out landed with a big thud. Image Playground performed like a generative AI model from three years prior. Notification summaries got the company in hot water with the BBC and other news organizations, forcing them to pull the feature. (Spoiler alert: it’s back in iOS 26.) Siri was redesigned for Apple Intelligence…without actually being more intelligent. It’s ironic that what was considered by many (including yours truly) the “best” feature of Apple Intelligence – its ChatGPT integration – often performed worse inside Siri than in the ChatGPT app itself.

And that’s Apple Intelligence alone. One of the key hardware/software additions to the iPhone 16 lineup – the Camera Control button – arrived in an incomplete and confusing state. And I probably don’t need to rehash the story again, but while all of that was happening, iPadOS had been seemingly forgotten by Apple, left lingering in a hybrid not-an-iPhone-but-also-not-a-Mac state that failed to justify the existence of the M4 iPad Pro and all of its untapped power. While I was ultimately able to work around the limitations of iPadOS to get all my work done on the iPad Pro, I – and other longtime iPad users – began 2025 wondering whether we’d be better served by macOS after years of disappointment in the iPad’s wasted potential.

There was a lot riding on Apple’s software strategy in 2025. Now that we’re entering the final phase of the Apple product launch year, I believe that, in hindsight, their three key moves from the first half of 2025 are – at least from a marketing perspective – the best approach they could have followed.

First, the new AI Siri features were officially delayed to “the coming year”, and at WWDC, executives explained why they needed more time than anticipated to get them right. Then, Apple unveiled a new design language that – to varying degrees of success – unifies its user interfaces across platforms. Finally, the company embraced the iPad’s modular nature with a complete reimagining of the device’s software in iPadOS 26, borrowing from the decades-long traditions of macOS to bring new windowing and multitasking features to the tablet. You have to hand it to Apple PR: that’s a pretty effective marketing strategy to, once again, steer the public conversation and attention to a place that’s more comfortable for Apple.

But my reviews aren’t about marketing; they’re about the reality and everyday practicality of using these operating systems. Beyond the renewed promise of Apple Intelligence and a future version of Siri, what is it actually like to use the new AI features shipping in iOS 26 today? Once the novelty of Liquid Glass wears off, does the new design meaningfully improve our interactions with apps? Is iPadOS 26 truly the miracle answer to all of our iPad woes that we thought it could be at WWDC?

These are the questions I hope to provide an answer to with this review. You can always look at iOS and iPadOS as reflections of Apple’s trajectory throughout the years, and that’s more true than ever in the OS 26 release cycle. These operating systems tell the story of a company in the middle of its own internal transitions – with new roles for executives and several new devices on the horizon – that is also sitting quietly while the rest of the tech industry is transitioning to AI-infused software everywhere.

My goal this year is to tell the story of these two operating systems, explain what they represent in this moment in time for Apple, and evaluate them for what they accomplish.

Let’s dive in.

Exclusive Extras & Support MacStories

eBooks, Making-Of, Drafts Actions, and Apple Intelligence Shortcuts

As we do every year, we’ve put together some fun extras to make this week extra special for Club MacStories members who want to dive deeper into this year’s OS updates and reviews. And for Club MacStories Plus and Premier members, we’ve got even more in store to help you improve your automations and workflows using techniques from Federico’s review, as well as exclusive ways to experience our other OS reviews.

Today, Club MacStories members can download a complete, interactive eBook edition of iOS and iPadOS 26: The MacStories Review to read on their favorite device or app. And this Saturday, Club Members will receive a special edition of our MacStories Weekly newsletter featuring a behind-the-scenes making-of story with details on how Federico researched, wrote, and compiled his review of iOS and iPadOS 26, including his use of Drafts, Notion, LLMs, and more.

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Apple Intelligence shortcuts will be released next week.

Club MacStories Plus and Premier members get even more perks.

Throughout the week, members will receive a set of eBook editions of the macOS 26 Tahoe, watchOS 26, and visionOS 26 reviews from the MacStories team to read however they like. And next week, Federico will publish two special stories exclusively for Club Plus and Premier members: a collection of Drafts actions he used to make his review and a new lesson in the Automation Academy centered on Apple Intelligence shortcuts, showcasing the new ‘Use Model’ action and teaching members how to take advantage of it themselves.

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The support of our Club members throughout the year means the world to us and helps make it possible for the MacStories team to do what we do. In addition to the exclusive content we publish for Club members year-round, we look forward to offering extra perks like these alongside each fall’s reviews.

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Design

Here’s the thing: I always struggle to write about design. I think I’m a better writer – who can produce better, more useful output – when I write about using apps rather than what they look like. But there’s no way around the fact that Liquid Glass, Apple’s new cross-platform design language for the 26 series of OSes, has been and continues to be the narrative in the Apple community this year.

For nearly three months this summer, I couldn’t bring myself to write about Liquid Glass, for a variety of reasons. For starters, it was a work in progress: as we’ve seen on social media since WWDC, Apple spent over two months tweaking and fine-tuning the appearance of Liquid Glass until they pretty much landed on today’s shipping version in August. Second, I struggled with Liquid Glass because I didn’t have enough third-party apps to use as examples and evaluate the impact of Apple’s updated design language on my workflow. That goes in tandem with my third point: the more I rely on web apps – especially on my iPad Pro – because of their AI features, the less I find myself being exposed to Apple’s native apps and, therefore, their Liquid Glass appearance.

While my reliance on modern web apps and services in lieu of Apple’s own apps for productivity hasn’t changed, all the other points have been addressed in recent weeks. Apple has finalized the debut version of Liquid Glass, and I’ve been able to test nearly 70 third-party apps with Liquid Glass, many of which you’ll find mentioned in this review and covered over the next few weeks on MacStories.

In short, I’m ready to analyze and talk about Liquid Glass now. And the first thing I’ll say is that, beyond its (gorgeous) bells and whistles, Liquid Glass doesn’t dramatically alter the look of our phones the same way iOS 7 did 12 years ago. If you were looking for a sweeping, ground-up redesign of the iOS experience, Liquid Glass is not it.

If you were looking for a sweeping, ground-up redesign of the iOS experience, Liquid Glass is not it.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and it’s consistent with the design strategy we’ve observed in Tim Cook’s Apple for the past decade. Here’s what I wrote in the Design chapter of my iOS 13 review, when – in a pre-pandemic world – Apple introduced dark mode and iPadOS:

Today, I believe Apple feels a responsibility to foster their ecosystem without disrupting it again. If that’s the case, the cost of a sweeping redesign may be too high to justify: user patience, goodwill, and loyalty – key components of a service-oriented business – are too precious a resource to jeopardize every few years. Plus, what if most users – those who make up the “billion pockets” – don’t actually like having to learn a radical new design every few years?

I may be wrong, but in considering how judiciously Apple has iterated iOS design in recent years, I think their trajectory fits this different mindset. iOS 7 was, in many ways, a bitter medicine that set Apple up for the next several years, but it overshot some design principles in the name of aesthetic purity. As a result, Apple has used the last five major releases of iOS to refine what worked in iOS 7 and rethink what didn’t. iOS 13 follows the same playbook: the string of refinements continues throughout the OS with changes aimed at taking advantage of OLED displays, making UI elements more intuitive or ergonomic, and extending the functionality of menus and share sheets. But it doesn’t fundamentally disrupt the experience.

That is as true today for Liquid Glass as it was six years ago, and it’s where I want to begin this chapter before diving into the specifics of Apple’s new material.

I’ve long maintained that, as long as Apple continues to be a massively successful company with 2.35 billion active devices, we’re never going to have another “iOS 7 moment” where, ostensibly overnight, someone’s mobile operating system changes to the point of being unrecognizable and hard to use. The scaling laws of Apple’s user base simply don’t allow that; some may argue that Tim Cook’s conservative approach to product evolution won’t allow that, but I digress. Apple is simply too big to potentially confuse a lot of people with design changes right now – especially when a large chunk of Apple’s revenue originates from services predicated upon the idea of users remaining loyal customers over time.

But there’s a fine line between feeling the responsibility of design consistency and falling into the trap of thinking that you can never innovate again because your customers are used to things being a certain way.

The way I see it, Liquid Glass is that kind of fine line. It’s new, but it’s not sweeping; it’s familiar with iOS’ visual legacy, but it also repositions and redesigns UI elements to feel distinct enough from what came before. And given the scale at which Apple operates now, and the complexity that iOS has reached, Liquid Glass introduces new problems that were perhaps impossible to avoid unless…well, you don’t ship anything new, ever again.

At the same time, Liquid Glass also serves as a great reset for Apple’s design language, and it’s being pitched as a multi-platform design architecture that – theoretically – should bring more consistency across different Apple experiences on different devices. The results, as my colleagues John, Devon, and Jonathan will outline in their respective macOS, visionOS, and watchOS reviews, will highly vary.

I’m sure you’ve seen your fair share of Apple observers this summer who either claim that Liquid Glass is an unabashed disaster and Apple should have a “Snow Leopard year again” (boy, do they love that particular expression) or that Liquid Glass “changes everything” about how you use your iPhone or iPad.

In this review, my goal is to explain why neither is true, what Liquid Glass actually is and does to your favorite apps, and how it positions Apple for the future.

What Is Liquid Glass?

I can’t stress this enough: the first thing you need to understand about Liquid Glass is that it’s not a drastic, groundbreaking redesign that changes the look of your iPhone overnight, like iOS 7 did for millions of people in 2013.

Liquid Glass is a new “material” that Apple designed for all its platforms, which has been implemented in nearly all interface elements of iOS and iPadOS – from toolbars and buttons to sliders, menus, and even icons. For developers, implementing Liquid Glass is based on new design principles that have resulted in an updated overall aesthetic for their apps. For this reason, it’s fair to think of Liquid Glass as a new material and design refresh rather than a massive redesign of the look of Apple’s OSes. Liquid Glass is more subtle than that, and trickier to explain because of it.

Liquid Glass is a material that is used across the entire OS.

Let’s start from Apple’s material breakthrough. Liquid Glass is a material that combines the optical properties of glass with fluid dynamics. Think of it as a mix of visionOS’ “glassy” UI (which, per Apple, did inspire the company to create Liquid Glass) and the Dynamic Island’s fluid, almost organic UI. Since it’s rooted in real-world physics and the actual properties of glass and fluids, Liquid Glass is more akin to a rendering system – almost like a videogame engine – than a simple “style layer” in Figma or Sketch. Liquid Glass can simulate glass to blur and refract content behind it in real-time; it can reflect colors and light around it; it responds to a device’s movement via the gyroscope and accelerometer; it also responds to the user’s touches and clicks with fluid, morphing animations for menus and buttons. All of this happens in real time on a wide range of devices that can be updated to iOS and iPadOS 26 today. After three months with Liquid Glass, my impression is that Apple wanted to build a new kind of UI that could be both more consistent and contextual while also, frankly, just being cool to look at.

The way Apple pitched it at WWDC, Liquid Glass is a product of the times we’re living in with the Apple ecosystem. Let me explain. In 2013, Retina displays and their ultra-sharp definition were the inspiration behind iOS 7 and its flat, precise UI. Setting aside the fact that all user interface is fashion and styles simply come and go over time, it’s undeniable that Retina displays were a good match for a design language that emphasized sharp lines, plain text, and simple iconography. As we’ve seen in my annual reviews, Apple spent several years walking back some of the most extreme choices of iOS 7 and progressively re-adding elements such as drop shadows, translucencies, and rounder menus, but the core of iOS 7’s aesthetic always remained.

Apple’s realization with Liquid Glass (again, according to their pitch) is that we’re living in the Apple silicon era, and the chips in our phones are capable of doing so much more with a rendering system than iOS 7’s flat and rigid user interface. We’ve seen Apple get more comfortable over the years with this idea of increasing the computational cost of its UI rendering system without sacrificing performance and user experience. From the iPhone X’s fluid interface locked at 60 fps to the Apple Pencil’s smooth ink on the iPad Pro and, again, the Dynamic Island’s own take on mini multitasking, modern Apple hasn’t been afraid to flex what its own chips can deliver in real time thanks to their massive performance headroom.

The Liquid Glass effect in Photos.

Whether you like it or not, Liquid Glass is the ultimate flex: only Apple is in a position today to build a real-time rendering system that combines the laws of physics of two real-world materials, make it look cool, and deliver it at scale across six operating systems and billions of devices at once. In the 12 years since iOS 7 (when Apple was only making two operating systems!), the company has put itself in a position to be able to deliver something like Liquid Glass today. I’m not saying that it’s perfect; I’m saying that the effort and scale behind it is unprecedented in the tech industry.

Beyond the material itself, though, there is also a style – an aesthetic – that Liquid Glass carries, which you’ll find implemented with varying degrees of success and consistency across iOS and iPadOS. And there are some recurring themes in the adoption of Liquid Glass that I’ll try my best to highlight in this review by looking at Apple’s apps as well as third-party examples.

At a high level, everything in iOS 26 is a bit chunkier, more spaced out, and rounder than before. The last part is extremely important: Apple seems to be very proud of and excited about this idea of “concentricity” in its refreshed UI, with circular and rounded elements that match (whenever possible) the corner radii of iPhones’ and iPads’ bezels, and which tend to be inset from the display. Apple has been so persistent about this idea of concentric UI this summer, it has raised a few eyebrows from those who believe it may hint at something else down the road when it comes to displays and their bezels, or a lack thereof.

But enough about the theory behind Liquid Glass. Let’s get into the real stuff now.

The Lensing Effect and Floating UI

The only way we can begin talking about the practicality of Liquid Glass is by examining its two key characteristics, one of which appears “useless” at a surface level and another that is more pragmatic.

Liquid Glass is predicated upon the lensing effect of real-world glass, and all UI elements built with Liquid Glass in iOS 26 float on the topmost layer of the interface. These are the basic facts you have to understand about Liquid Glass: it reflects and refracts (i.e., bends) light, and it floats above everything else. There are exceptions for lensing (depending on the intensity of the Liquid Glass material used by an app and other factors), but you’ll always find Liquid Glass components floating above something else. In iOS and iPadOS 26, tab bars, sidebars, and toolbars are always displayed as Liquid Glass floating elements.

Lensing has been the most contentious aspect of Liquid Glass this summer, heavily criticized by people (including myself) as it related to the legibility of text and general accessibility of the iOS UI. If you’ve heard folks use expressions such as, “Apple has toned down the Liquid Glass in this beta”, or, “Legibility is worse with Liquid Glass”, it generally all comes down to the material and its lensing effect.

puts on non-existent physics professor hat

Lensing is a phenomenon that occurs in the real world when light travels through a glass lens. It has several consequences that can be observed in Alan Dye’s introductory video on Liquid Glass – where Apple design team members are physically holding glass objects on top of screens and printed text – as well as in Liquid Glass’ digital rendition in software.

From Apple’s original Liquid Glass promo video.

Obviously, glass is transparent, so – again, depending on whether an app is using the “clear” or “frosted” look of Liquid Glass – you’ll always see something underneath. When Liquid Glass is in its most pure, clear rendering mode, it simulates real-world optics and the physics of glass:

Light refraction means that “light” (in our case, pixels from the display) traveling through Liquid Glass bends in different directions based on the curvature of the glass object. This is why you’ll see text often get “distorted” when passing through Liquid Glass. You can witness this when selecting text with the new magnification loupe or by slowly swiping across an iOS 26 tab bar and looking at the “selection bubble”.

Spherical aberration makes content that is farther away from the center of the “lens” (i.e., the glass object) out of focus and blurred. It’s not very pronounced, but since Apple seems to be using a convex shape for Liquid Glass elements rather than a concave one (as also seen with Alan Dye’s glass toys), it is noticeable. Convex shapes are very subtle in iOS 26, but they’re often reinforced by specular highlights.

Chromatic aberration bends different wavelengths of colors by different amounts, causing colors to “fringe”. You can see this when slowly swiping down to reveal Notification Center at the edges of the glass panel or when slowly moving from one selected tab to another by looking at the edges of the bubble. (Technically, Apple calls this “spherochromatism”.)

Without getting farther into the weeds here, if you’ve run the iOS 26 beta this summer, I’m sure you’ve seen the effects of lensing in elements such as the tab bar in the Music and App Store apps, the Safari address bar, and any button that adopts Liquid Glass’ “one true” clear look. When they pass over content, items below them get distorted and blurred.

Liquid Glass in the Music tab bar.

Liquid Glass in Safari’s updated address bar.

An example of lensing and other visual effects of Liquid Glass.

A Liquid Glass tab bar in the Sequel app.

Now, on one hand, this is part of the graphical fidelity flex from Apple’s part I mentioned above: this stuff looks great in motion. All of these optical properties of glass are rendered in real time at 120 Hz on modern Liquid Retina displays, with the kind of buttery smooth performance that we expect from a design-first company such as Apple. The moment you install iOS 26 and look at how the magnification loupe distorts text around its capsule, or how the bubble above a selected item in a tab bar deforms the icon and text underneath…you’d be hard-pressed to not crack an initial smile, at the very least. Liquid Glass looks cool, animates nicely, and – importantly – feels new. There is no denying that the engine behind it and the cross-platform rollout is quite the achievement.

Liquid Glass looks cool, animates nicely, and – importantly – feels new.

The problem of glass and lensing is when the physical simulation meets the reality of digital content. Put simply, the applied version of Liquid Glass is not equivalent to Alan Dye holding a clear glass capsule on top of a giant Photos icon. Liquid Glass elements often contain glyphs or text (or both!) that need to pass over other text, glyphs, and colors that Apple cannot closely control. When that happens, despite Apple’s best efforts to dynamically control iOS’ rendering pipeline and glass intensity, there are still moments when legibility suffers because of Liquid Glass.

You’ve probably seen the shots of this problem in action, usually within the Safari address bar or Music’s tab bar and tab accessory (more on this later) when scrolling on top of text or images. With a transparent material that slightly blurs and bends content underneath, along with content contained within the glass itself, text can often be hard to read. There’s only so much contrast you can apply to, say, notifications if the material being used is the clear version of Liquid Glass and you have a complex wallpaper (like a photo or geometric pattern) in the background. When Music’s pink accent color in the tab bar is overlaid on top of album covers that are also red or pink, there’s not enough blur in the world to save you from a transparent material that takes on the color of whatever’s underneath it. It’s going to be pink on red, and it’s not going to look great.

Depending on what’s behind Liquid Glass, legibility may suffer.

The list of examples could go on and on. The issue of Liquid Glass being problematic for legibility and contrast is inherent to the material itself. It cannot be entirely solved unless a transparent, glass-like material that needs to have the optical qualities of glass is replaced with something else. If glass has to stay, and if we’re modeling UIs after the physics of glass, then we’ll have to accept refracted light with warped text under regular text, chromatic aberrations, and other byproducts of glass.

The issue of Liquid Glass being problematic for legibility and contrast is inherent to the material itself.

It is undeniable that some legibility issues exist with Liquid Glass today.

But here’s where, after three months of using Liquid Glass on my iPhone and iPad, I believe I disagree with some of my peers in the Apple community. I do not think the version of Liquid Glass shipping today is a disaster that will end up having catastrophic consequences for Apple (a common refrain on Mastodon). Fundamentally, I think that the intrinsic issues of Liquid Glass are counterbalanced by a UI that looks great, animates even better, and, overall, makes iOS easier to use for all the reasons I’ll elaborate on in subsequent sections. I find it hard to look at iOS 26 in motion with elements like tab bars and not think that it’s one of the coolest pieces of motion design I’ve ever seen on a phone.

Refractions in an iOS 26 tab bar.

If you only consider very specific screenshots of Liquid Glass looking “bad”, and if you extrapolate your conclusions from those isolated instances of low legibility, I think you’ll be missing the forest for the trees of this design language. I am not saying that Liquid Glass is an unassailable masterpiece without defects. I’m saying that in everyday life, despite its issues, this UI works well and looks stunning. It’s not just eye candy.

Liquid Glass’ focus on “morphing” interface elements that occupy less screen real estate is, in my opinion, the design principle we’ll see Apple refine over the next several years. You have to look beyond the shimmering surface of Liquid Glass to understand what Apple is doing: even if the glass part of Liquid Glass is dialed back or joined by another material (Liquid Frost? Liquid Metal? Oh.), I’m willing to bet that the focus on morphing, compact UI will stay for years (and future devices) to come.

Liquid Glass and Dark Mode

In the majority of screenshots in this review, I will be using my iPhone and iPad in light mode: I’ve always struggled with the lower contrast of dark mode, and I use it very rarely on all my devices.

Dark, tinted Liquid Glass.

Regardless, Liquid Glass’ design principles and aesthetic fully apply to dark mode as well, with obvious color adjustments to account for darker hues and different color palettes. When using dark mode, Liquid Glass effectively becomes tinted glass that features the same optical properties as the standard light appearance.

But back to the present for now. Before moving on to the specifics of different Liquid Glass elements in the iOS and iPadOS interface, I want to stress the importance of two traits of this material. The first one, which I mentioned before, is the adaptability of Liquid Glass. As you’ll see in screenshots and videos in this story, Apple is doing a lot of work behind the scenes with different levels of “glassiness”, plus an algorithm that calculates light and dark colors, shadows, and blur in real time. I’m convinced that this aspect will continue to be tweaked over the iOS 26 release cycle as Apple gathers feedback and fine-tunes for the edge cases of third-party app content.

The second aspect of Liquid Glass, which affects all the elements I’ll cover below, is that it floats above everything else. In using Liquid Glass, you’ll have to undo years of visual memory for tab bars that blend in with an app’s navigation or buttons that appear on the same Z-index as an app’s main content. From this perspective, I think it’s kind of funny to consider how Liquid Glass is the least “flat” the iOS interface has been in over a decade. There is a sense of depth – and, dare I say, skeuomorphism – to Liquid Glass that doesn’t require Corinthian leather or other realistic textures to be effective.

The most basic test to get a sense of all these ideas together is a simple one: logging into a webpage in Safari. Compare and contrast the same action between iOS 18 and 26:

This action is representative of several of the underlying principles of Liquid Glass. In iOS 18, despite it being 11 years removed from iOS 7, everything is flat and stuck together, with three separate, full-width bars stacked on top of the system keyboard. In iOS 26, it’s the opposite. The material features different levels of transparencies; every element is distinct and floating on top of the content, with clear boundaries; the keyboard’s panel and the predictive suggestion bar are rounded and inset, yielding a pleasing, more consistent effect with the iPhone’s nearby rounded display corners; and despite these changes, the UI is more compact overall, displaying more content from the original webpage.

This simple screenshot covers all the basics of the specific areas I’ll explore in depth below. The big picture is clear (no pun intended): with Liquid Glass, Apple is going all-in on smaller UI elements that float around content (and look cool in the process).

Buttons, Toolbars, and Tab Bars

Ah, buttons .

Remember how shocked we all were when, in 2013, Apple decided this was going to be what “buttons” looked like?

Remember how…that lasted 12 years?

Finally, with Liquid Glass, we’re going back to buttons that actually look like buttons: circular or pill-shaped elements that you can intuitively press to, well, do stuff. Aside from the fact that buttons are no longer mere colored text labels, there are other qualities of Liquid Glass’ buttons worth appreciating that I think make them superior (that is, easier to use and more accessible) to how things used to be.

For one, they’re larger and easier to see. Their rounded shape makes them more inviting to the touch.

Buttons have shapes in the Liquid Glass design language.

Speaking of which, when you press (or click) a button in Liquid Glass, it animates with a highlighted and “elevated” state that visually communicates the action you just performed.

Liquid Glass button animations.

But there’s more. With iOS 26 and Liquid Glass, Apple is replacing the ‘Done’ button (usually displayed in the top-right corner of a view) with a larger, circular checkmark button, and they’re swapping the equivalent ‘Close’ button with an ‘X’ one. Broadly speaking, in different areas of the OS, you’ll find the maligned “Jony Ive text buttons” replaced with glyphs from the SF Symbols collection. There are still instances of text-based buttons in iOS 26 (see Mail’s ‘Select’ action), but even when an icon isn’t used for a button, the word is always enclosed within a tappable shape. Over the years, Apple has been progressively moving away from text-only buttons in iOS (see the button shapes in Photos or Music), and it’s great to see the company universally and consistently embrace the idea that buttons are supposed to look like buttons instead of words. Good riddance.

The ‘Done’ button is done in iOS 26.

Toolbars are also changing in iOS 26, and they share many of the same properties as buttons in Liquid Glass: they’re rounded, they float, and they’re always contained within a shape. It used to be that a “toolbar” could be a row of thin glyphs laid out horizontally and embedded within a title bar or a bottom toolbar that was anchored on-screen. Now, toolbars are literal floating bars with rounded corners that contain multiple controls, float above content, and can group related controls together.

The new look for buttons and grouped toolbar items in iOS 26.

Glass effect aside (you either like it or don’t), I’m a big fan of Apple’s new approach here with making any UI element a physically separate “object” floating above an app’s content. The grouping is effective at laying out an app’s command hierarchy; I personally find the “self-contained” appearance with toolbar commands inside a Liquid Glass capsule more accessible than iOS 18’s commands that bled into an app’s content view (such as the ones in Notes).

My favorite third-party app example here is Drafts. In iOS 18, toolbar items at the bottom of the screen were essentially a row of glyphs; in iOS 26, toolbars are more visually distinct from the main body of a note, and related items are grouped together.

In case it’s not evident yet, I think Liquid Glass does a vastly better job at visual affordances than any of Apple’s iterations on the iOS 7 design language from the past decade.

I think Liquid Glass does a vastly better job at visual affordances than any of Apple’s iterations on the iOS 7 design language.

Which brings me to tab bars. When you think about it, all the UI elements I covered in this section are technically buttons in that you press or click them to do something, which means that, at a high level, tab bars are also made of buttons that you press. What’s unique about tab bars is that they provide a sense of space in an app’s UI. You can press an item in a tab bar to switch sections of an app, but you can also look at a tab bar to instantly get a sense of where you are. Or, at least, that’s how tab bars were originally conceived in iPhone OS in 2007.

The tab bar of iPhone OS 1.0 on an original iPhone. Photo courtesy of my friend Noah Herman.

iOS 26 brings a series of notable changes to tab bars: they’re floating “pills” rather than fixed bars anchored at the bottom of the screen, they can be collapsed and expanded, and they support “accessories” that can float above them or be nested next to them when a tab bar is minimized.

The new tab bar design in iOS 26.

Making tab bars floating elements is a good idea. The rounded and floating look is consistent with the rest of Liquid Glass, but also, functionally speaking, the fact that a tab bar can be as long or short as needed based on the number of items inside it is great.

In older versions of iOS, tab bars with two or three elements looked kind of silly; there was a lot of empty space around those items, which incentivized developers to either fill the tab bar with useless options or, worse, eschew tab bars altogether and make navigation in their apps a chore.

Thanks to iOS 26’s tab bars, if a developer wants to make one with two items because their app has two sections, they can do so without the risk of the bar looking like wasted space. It’s just going to be a small capsule at the bottom of the screen that makes navigating an app’s UI faster and more comfortable. Apps like Sequel and Activas are great examples of this. They only have two items in their tab bars, but they don’t look out of place because the bar itself is a small element. In fact, thanks to iOS 26’s scroll edge effect, Activas can even show you a preview of the content around the tab bar when scrolling the app’s main page.

Tab bars with two items don’t look out of place now, and they make navigation inside apps easier.

I believe the new look of tab bars will make it less awkward for developers to simplify navigation in their apps even if they don’t want to use four or five tab bar items. And I also personally find the rounded, translucent look more visually pleasing than before.

I’m less certain about the idea of collapsing tab bars into the currently active tab when scrolling. Apple’s own Music app does this. When scrolling down, the tab bar collapses and only the current tab item remains visible as a small circular button; the tab accessory (more on this below – it’s the mini player) slides down next to it, while the search button always remains visible as a separate entity from the tab bar.

The new collapsing tab bar in iOS 26.

I’m not sold on this idea, but we need to have a conversation about how tab selections work in iOS 26 since that may help us understand Apple’s approach.

Regardless of their state, tab bars in iOS 26 showcase the active tab with a colored glyph (like in iOS 18) plus a highlighted shape. At any moment, you can long-press on an iOS 26 tab bar to turn the highlight shape into a “selection bubble”, a Liquid Glass element sporting the familiar lensing and chromatic aberration effects. When holding down, you can then slide your finger across the tab bar and see what happens “inside” the bubble. It’s pretty cool, it’s pretty useless, and only Apple can render this sort of pretty thing in real time without skipping a frame.

Switching between tabs.

I have to mention the long-press behavior as I believe it relates to the (optional) mode of collapsing a tab bar. When a tab bar is collapsed, it frees up even more space for content, and we know that has long been one of Apple’s priorities on iOS (see iOS 14 and compact UI). The tab bar gets expanded by default if you reach the top of a page again, or if you tap the selected item, but what if you need to quickly switch between sections of an app while the tab bar is minimized? You can long-press the minimized tab and swipe to instantly move to other tabs.

Swiping on a minimized tab.

I’m not sold on this idea because I’m afraid that what I just described may be challenging for most people to discover. Who’s going to guess that you can long-press on a minimized tab bar in the Music app to switch from Home to Library? But perhaps I’m overthinking this, and people will be okay with tapping the active tab to re-invoke the full tab bar to switch sections. Even then, that adds one extra tap to what used to be an instant interaction. Such is the tradeoff, however, when you want to minimize UI as much as possible: some interactions will take longer or be hidden from view.

Will that tradeoff be worth it? I’m not sure, but it’s quite telling that, of the dozens of third-party iOS 26 apps I’ve tested, I’ve only run into one that implements the same tab bar behavior as the Music app: Focus. This app uses the new tab bar accessory API to display the equivalent of Music’s mini player above the tab bar, only in this case, it’s a timer for the currently active productivity session. When you scroll down in the app, the tab bar is minimized, and the timer gets “docked” next to it, sliding in between the current tab and the search button.

An example of a third-party app (Focus) implementing the new tab bar with related accessory item in iOS 26.

When scrolling in the app, the accessory is docked next to the current tab bar item.

While I may be unsure about the long-term impact of collapsing a tab bar into the active tab by default, I also have to admit that the combination of iOS 26’s tab bar and tab accessory feels great in a third-party app like Focus. With these new elements, the currently active timer is always accessible when browsing different sections of the app thanks to a safe area at the bottom of the screen that requires less space than iOS 18’s old tab bar alone.

On balance, I do think these tab bars are an improvement over iOS 18; even in their expanded state, they take up less space on-screen, and their design lends itself better to apps that want to use fewer items in the tab bar. The Music-like implementation with a tab bar accessory carries some intrinsic discoverability issues, but the transition from expanded to minimized state with a docked accessory is fantastic. I’ll be curious to see how users and more third-party developers will react to this change.

Sliders and Loupes

Let’s keep going with more specific design components of Liquid Glass. Apple left no stone unturned with this design refresh; for the sake of posterity (mine and yours), I need to go through them all.

Sliders have been modernized for Liquid Glass with a few visual and “tactile” updates. The slider knob is now pill-shaped. It almost looks like it’s been squished and elongated; on/off toggles received a similar treatment this year. More importantly, though, when you grab a slider knob in iOS 26, it transforms into a Liquid Glass “bubble” that grows larger under your finger and refracts content underneath it. It looks great, and even though it’s mostly an aesthetic change, I like how this larger element is easier to see under your fingertip when grabbing it.

Interacting with sliders.

Sliders also have momentum with Liquid Glass. If you grab the slider bubble and flick it in either direction, it will accelerate and stop depending on how fast your throw is. In hindsight, it feels obvious that sliders should support momentum-based adjustment just like scrolling does throughout the rest of the OS.

Interacting with sliders in Liquid Glass.

Speaking of bubbles, the text magnification loupe has been redesigned once again as a result of Liquid Glass. After being unceremoniously removed in iOS 13, restored in iOS 15, and improved for developers in iOS 17, the text loupe – you guessed it – is now a Liquid Glass bubble in iOS 26.

The new look for the text magnification loupe.

Like other Liquid Glass elements, the loupe swiftly bounces on-screen when invoked, and the text within gets magnified and distorted across the edges with the aforementioned lensing effect of Liquid Glass. It works well, looks great, and is fun to use.

Views, Effects, and Search Bars

The most common element of an iOS or iPadOS app – the table view – is getting a subtle design refresh in iOS 26 that’s in line with the overall Liquid Glass ethos. Individual cells have rounder corners, and groups are slightly more spaced out and inset than before, with slightly larger glyphs as well.

The result is a friendlier look that gives everything a rounder appearance. I’ll be curious to find out if some folks see this as a “Fisher Price look”; I could see that argument. Personally, I find iOS 18’s old look too rigid and angular now, but that’s recency bias for you.

Also in iOS 26, most table views in Apple’s default apps (and optionally in third-party apps) no longer pin the title bar when scrolling down; instead, they implement a new scroll edge effect that blurs the area between the main content and the top toolbar. You can see this effect at play in apps like Safari, Messages, and Settings. Look at the top of the screen, and you’ll notice that content will be variably blurred as it traverses the toolbar area, with Liquid Glass toolbar items remaining visible and elevated per the system’s layer-based architecture.

Without a fixed title bar, iOS 26’s scroll edge effect helps making apps feel more spacious, showing more content at once.

Once again, the result is a more spacious UI that feels like the culmination of Apple’s work with compact UI that started all the way back in iOS 14. Without sacrificing the visibility of any toolbar items (just look at the Messages app), the iPhone’s screen almost feels bigger thanks to the removal of the solid toolbar and the addition of the scroll edge effect. Developers can choose between two different styles for the edge effect (soft and hard), and they can also opt not to use it. Widgetsmith – the sponsor of this review, and an app I’ve been using for several years – implements this effect with great results in the app’s updated ‘Widgets’ and ‘Wallpapers’ views.

Widgetsmith is a great example of a third-party app that implements several Liquid Glass UI paradigms at once. In this image alone, you can see a new tab bar, redesigned buttons, scroll edge effect, lensing effect, and rounder table views.

Scroll edge effects are used profusely in the new updated Widgetsmith (right). I should also note that I personally enjoy this new ability to apply styles from one widget to others a lot.

I should also mention the background extension effect, a new visual trick for sidebars and inspectors available on iPadOS 26. With this effect, Liquid Glass sidebars on iPad can mirror and blur adjacent content, giving you the illusion that content from the main area of an app is “extending” under the sidebar. It’s a clever trick: the system is effectively creating mirrored copies of background content, blurring them, and placing them under Liquid Glass to give iPad UIs a sense of “expansion” that is not based on any additional data. To see this in action, open the TV app on iPad and take a look at the sidebar when watching a trailer on auto-play.

The background extension effect. It looks better with a trailer playing, but I can’t capture that due to DRM.

Back to iOS views. With iOS 26, Apple is formalizing work they pioneered with Maps in iOS 10 and refined with the (initially maligned, then beloved) Safari redesign in iOS 15: search bars are moving to the bottom of the screen on iPhone, and they’re either visible by default or can be invoked with a dedicated search button on the trailing edge of a tab bar. Open non-tab-based apps like Messages and Notes, and you’ll see what I mean. The search bar is always docked at the bottom of the screen, readily available for your thumb to comfortably tap into, with a scroll edge effect to boot.

The new placement for search bars in iOS 26.

More search bars and buttons at the bottom of the screen.

There are some exceptions to this trend, such as the Shortcuts app and the App Library, where the search bar is still pinned at the top of the screen. My understanding is that Apple thinks some apps’ layouts don’t work well with bottom search bars. While I can see that argument with the Files app (which has search filters that would also need to be placed at the bottom), I disagree with omitting a bottom search bar from Shortcuts and the App Library.

I love this change, and I hope it gets consistently implemented by third-party developers too. I’ve long been a proponent of bottom-oriented UI on Apple platforms; it’s more ergonomic and makes interactions faster. In a funny twist for Alan Dye’s reputation in the Apple community, this change is actually the opposite of hiding UI elements, something that Dye gets frequently accused of. Search bars at the bottom of the screen are more visible than ever in iOS 26: you don’t need to swipe to reveal them, and they transition nicely above the keyboard when tapped. Big thumbs up from me.

The Video Player

The system video player is receiving a Liquid Glass treatment in iOS 26 that doesn’t meaningfully alter any functionality of the video playback controls. Does it make them look cool or get in the way of content more? Yes.

The new look for the video player.

Visually speaking, the change is kind of obvious: existing controls are now slightly larger and contained inside Liquid Glass buttons that aggressively refract content underneath whenever they’re invoked on top of a video. Here, Apple’s work on Liquid Glass’ real-time rendering can be truly appreciated. As you tap play and pause, video gets warped, blurred, and distorted under the Liquid Glass buttons. It’s another graphical pipeline flex on Apple’s part.

The visual effect looks cool, but I don’t love how intrusive these controls are.

At the same time, when you’re watching a video, you probably don’t want playback controls to get in the way of content too much…? In this case, I think iOS 18’s more discreet, subtle controls were superior. They obfuscated less content and weren’t as in-your-face as the Liquid Glass ones are.

My problem here is that I continue to dislike Apple’s video player design with floating buttons in the middle of the video. The company should follow YouTube’s approach by moving more controls to the bottom of the video player; that’s the way to retain access to controls without covering video content.

Menus and Share Sheet

The most important change for all kinds of menus in iOS 26, beyond the Liquid Glass appearance, is that Apple finally conceded to the idea of left-aligning glyphs on the leading edge of each menu item.

Left-aligned glyphs in menus.

I’ve long maintained that glyphs on the trailing edge of menu items were a terrible UX choice. In left-to-right languages, your eyes naturally scan lines, well, left to right, and symbols are easier to visually parse than text labels. In the previous design, the easy visual elements were placed at the end of the line rather than where they could be the first items your eyes would see. This has been rectified in iOS 26; in addition to being more rounded and spaced out (of course), menus now always place the glyph for each item before its text label.

These newly-aligned glyphs are everywhere.

Tap and hold to invoke any kind of context menu on the iPhone, however, and you’ll notice something else, too: the background around the context menu is no longer blurred.

The content area is no longer blurred around menus.

I’m guessing Apple’s rationale here is that the combination of bigger menus and the Liquid Glass material is enough to make them visually stand out more against any background content. I’m fine with this decision, but I can see why some people may prefer the old design that drew more of your attention away from the background content and onto the menu and associated items.

I’ll expand on this in the next section, but the edit menu (formerly known as the copy and paste menu) has also been updated with an interaction change in iOS 26. Previously, if you wanted to access the overflow actions in the edit menu, you’d have to either scroll the tiny menu horizontally or press the arrow buttons to move between menu pages. In iOS 26, there are usually five top-level items: Cut/Copy/Paste, Replace, and Writing Tools (as an Apple Intelligence symbol), with AutoFill appearing if Paste is not available. If you want to access the overflow actions, you need to press the right-facing icon, which will open a full-blown secondary menu instead.

When you press a button to view more options in the edit menu, it expands into a bigger context menu in iOS 26.

I like this change! At this point, though, given the breadth of options available in the edit menu system-wide, I wish I could customize the order of the options, including which ones I want to demote to the sub-menu. Also, with this menu, is Apple accidentally rebuilding the classic macOS Services menu?

Conversely, I am not so sure about what’s happening with the share sheet in iOS 26. From a material perspective, you know the drill by now: it’s made of Liquid Glass, it’s larger and more rounded, and – like other half sheets in iOS 26 – it is now inset from the edges of the display.

Rounded Corners Everywhere

As you start exploring iOS 26, pay attention to the corner radius of menus, windows, sheets, groups in table views, and more. Apple seems very proud of the fact that corner radii everywhere match the curvature of their Liquid Retina displays. However, in a weird design oversight, the corner radius of the share sheet does not.

That’s all good stuff. The share sheet is also a nice demo of one of Liquid Glass’ built-in behaviors: when transitioning from half sheet to fully expanded sheet, the material becomes opaque instead of translucent.

When the share sheet is expanded, the material is more similar to iOS 18’s. However, everything is more rounded, and glyphs are left-aligned.

I’m not fully sold on the implementation of the half-size share sheet. In iOS 26, action extensions (the monochromatic ones) come in two layout modes. Your favorite actions are displayed in a row of icons under share extensions; when you expand the share sheet vertically, all other actions are displayed in a list, just like in iOS 18, now with glyphs on the left side.

While I do appreciate splitting actions between favorites and everything else, I’m concerned about the discoverability of all this and the placement of a specific button in the half-sheet layout.

To reveal the full share sheet, you can either swipe vertically on the share sheet (I found out by accident; the system never tells you), or you can press a ‘More’ button that is placed by default as the fourth “favorite” in the row of circular action extensions. The problem is that this button gets swapped with the actual fourth favorite when the full share sheet is revealed! If you’re relying on muscle memory to reach for the fourth favorite action in the new share sheet, you should know that the first tap opens the full sheet and a second one – via a button that is now higher on-screen than before – performs the action.

Managing your favorite extensions in iOS 26. Watch what happens to that ‘More’ button (left) when the share sheet is expanded.

I don’t think this design and tap-to-expand flow is good enough. I’d rather see Apple place separate buttons in the share sheet to let you expand it and customize it, keeping the fourth favorite action consistently in place.

Here’s another bit of hidden trivia for you: if you don’t add four favorite actions to the new share sheet, the system will automatically pull in the first available ones from the list, starting with app-specific actions and moving to system-wide ones.

The Home Screen and App Icons

Liquid Glass has also been an opportunity for Apple to rethink its icon system and build upon last year’s addition of dark and tinted icons. In iOS 26, Apple’s vision for modernized and customizable icons is more fleshed out, with new options that take advantage of the glass material and a much nicer-looking take on color-tinted options.

Without getting too much into the inner workings of icons since this is not a WWDC design session, Apple has a new system for designers and developers to create app icons. Icons are based on a layered look where multiple layers are rendered with the Liquid Glass material, taking on the properties of the material as seen elsewhere in iOS 26. That means specular highlights and light refraction are rendered within app icons on the Home Screen – even though you may not see them at small sizes. In fact, the best way to take in all the details of Liquid Glass is arguably the new Icon Composer developer tool, which allows app makers to preview how icons will be “glassified” by Apple’s design system.

Icon Composer for Mac. Source: Apple.

As a user, you will be able to see other changes on the Home Screen, too. For starters, all of Apple’s system icons have been redesigned for the new age of Liquid Glass. Some of them aren’t that different from years past (looking at you, Music and Safari), while others (like Mail, Shortcuts, and Photos) are appreciably taking advantage of the Liquid Glass material and style.

Can you spot the differences?

The underlying characteristic of all icons in iOS 26 is that they’re moving away from “flat” shapes and symbols; instead, all the layers of an icon appear as small slabs of tinted glass that can reflect what’s underneath. Personally, I love this look. A good example of this rendering engine is the Freeform icon. Despite its small size, there is an evident sense of depth to the icon with an ink scribble sitting on top of everything and the blue glass shape subtly reflecting the orange circle under it.

I like this icon a lot.

In addition to the material and colors, Apple is also tapping into the gyroscope and accelerometer to provide specular highlights and render reflections on Home Screen icons in real time. Slowly tilt your iPhone around while on the Home Screen and look closely around and inside the icons. You’ll see specular highlights with a shimmering border around each icon, and the layers inside them will adjust their reflections according to your movement. It’s a useless effect that is also very cool.

Automatic Liquid Glass for iOS 18 Icons

Just like last year, Apple is doing some optimizations behind the scenes to automatically give some Liquid Glass material to app icons that haven’t been updated with a native Liquid Glass icon yet. In my tests, I noticed that icons for ChatGPT, Google Drive, YouTube, and others that hadn’t been updated for iOS 26 already sported a glass material on the Home Screen. My understanding is that, in the same way Apple had an algorithm in iOS 18 to determine which icons could be automatically flipped to a dark version, the company is using similar visual heuristics this year for icons that have “basic” glyphs on top of simple backgrounds.

In looking back at my iOS 18 Home Screen on my old test iPhone, I do not miss the old, flat look of icons at all. While we aren’t going back to a pre-iOS 7 realistic style, I prefer this newfound balance of abstract shapes with some depth to them. I also appreciate how Apple considered other details of the icon experience on the Home Screen. Icons have rounder corners, and in jiggle mode, even the minus button to remove an app has been rendered with Liquid Glass and lets the top-left corner of an icon shine through the frosted glass panel. I may be an outlier these days, but it’s details like this that remind me there are people at Apple who still care.

There are also new options for Home Screen icons that both extend last year’s tinting modes and bring the new Liquid Glass material into the fold.

Last year, I (and many others) lamented the fact that tinted icons looked terrible. I couldn’t understand why Apple decided to tint the glyphs inside each icon and keep the icon background always dark rather than the other way around. The company listened: in iOS 26, you can now choose between light and dark tinted modes. The dark mode carries over from last year, and it still looks awful; not even Liquid Glass can save it. The new light tinted mode, on the other hand, is hot. Icon glyphs stay in an off-white color while the rest of the icon changes hue based on the usual color and intensity sliders.

Quite literally, a night and day difference.

What’s so nice about this mode is that, thanks to the Liquid Glass material, you can make subtly colored icons that look like they’re made of frosted glass and are floating on top of your Home Screen wallpaper. And because the tinting mode applies to widgets as well, the same will be true for widget panels. Just look at the screenshots below, and you’ll see how much of an improvement this new tinted mode is over last year’s abomination. You’re still going to need a certain amount of good taste to design a great tinted Home Screen, but it’s much easier to create something that looks nice now.

Widgets look great with the new ‘Clear’ mode, too. I especially like how Widgetsmith’s widgets can feel like native components of the iOS 26 Home Screen thanks to the clear material.

In a nice touch, iOS 26’s Customize panel now also includes a button that automatically picks a fitting color for tinted icons from your wallpaper. Just press the photo icon under the color sliders, then adjust accordingly.

Case-Matching Tinted Icons

As of the public version of iOS 26 (Apple added this option after last week’s iPhone event), Home Screen icons support another tinting mode: you can now match your icons’ appearance to the color of the Apple case you’re using with your iPhone.

Connect an official Apple case (left), and you’ll get an option to color-match icons to the case.

In the ‘Tinted’ section of the ‘Customize’ screen, you’ll notice a new iPhone case symbol; select it, and icons will be automatically tinted based on the color of your case.
This option appears to be exclusive to Apple cases that, thanks to MagSafe and proprietary integrations, can pass additional data to a paired iPhone (similar to the animation you see on the Lock Screen when putting on an Apple case). I tested this feature with a dark green silicone case on my iPhone 16 Pro Max, and I was able to color-match the icons with the case.

But that’s not all. In addition to improved tinting, Apple is embracing the Liquid Glass material with a new ‘Clear’ mode for Home Screen icons. It’s fairly self-explanatory. When you enable this mode, icons will shed any colored layer and will be entirely rendered with a transparent glass material. As with tinted mode, there are two styles to choose from: light and dark clear icons, with an ‘auto’ toggle available as well if you want them to switch based on the system’s light and dark appearance.

The two new ‘Clear’ appearance modes for icons.

Once enabled, the ‘Clear’ appearance is applied system-wide to all app icons.

I’m a huge fan of this mode. It’s great for bringing a more minimalistic and distraction-free vibe to the Home Screen, and I’ve enjoyed using it late in the evening as a way to “unwind” from my apps and notifications. And again, since the clear material applies to widgets as well, I like how widgets almost look like components that are natively integrated with the Home Screen. This illusion has been especially effective for me with Widgetsmith, which I’ve been using to design all kinds of widgets for iOS 26 and this review. When rendered in clear mode, the app’s Apple Music Cover Flow-inspired widget and its time zone widgets feel like they’re part of the system rather than something you’ve tacked onto the Home Screen. It helps, of course, that when you’re in this mode, icons and widgets are rendered with the same material as the glass panel of the Customize menu.

Speaking of that menu, when customizing the Home Screen in iOS 26, you can now access a shortcut to quickly edit the Home Screen wallpaper. How was this not possible before?

Having used a variety of third-party apps with iOS 26 widgets, a common complaint I’ve heard from developers is that they cannot offer clear-themed widgets unless the device’s Home Screen appearance is set to ‘Clear’. I’d love to be able to use app icons in light or dark mode but render widgets in clear mode. Hopefully, this further degree of customization is something Apple will consider for the future as they continue to expand how much people can personalize their Home Screens.

All the Icon Changes from iOS 18 to iOS 26

As a bonus for this review, I teamed up with Basic Apple Guy to offer a comprehensive look at all the Apple icon changes from iOS 18 to iOS 26. You can find the full-resolution images below, and you can click the button underneath each image to open it in a new tab if you want to inspect the details more closely.

The Lock Screen

There are some pretty sweet-looking changes to the Lock Screen experience as well in iOS 26, which further reflect Apple’s commitment to Liquid Glass and the advancements they’ve made in computational photography and 3D rendering, also thanks to the Vision Pro.

Aside from the fact that everything is rendered with Liquid Glass (including the ‘Customize’ button on the Lock Screen gallery that reflects the Lock Screen above it – seriously neat), the Lock Screen’s clock in the default font can now be extremely tall if you want it to be. Not all wallpapers support this option (like the Earth ones, for example), but on those that do, you can just grab the clock and resize it to take up almost half of the Lock Screen.

Huge clock.

I love my giant Lock Screen clock, and I’ve been using it for months. It’s particularly nice if you have an iPhone with an always-on display and want to quickly check the time from a distance when you’re not wearing an Apple Watch. Even more impressive is the fact that the new font has been crafted for Liquid Glass, so it can dynamically adjust its weight, width, and height, as well as the reflections of each numeral, to nestle into whatever scene you’ve set as your Lock Screen wallpaper. When you enable the new clock mode, Lock Screen widgets will be placed at the bottom of the page, right above Lock Screen controls.

You can choose to keep Lock Screen widgets at the top (with the default clock) or put them at the bottom with the bigger clock.

The other visual trick Apple is really proud of this year – and, admittedly, it works well – is the ability to turn any photo, even ones that were taken years ago, into spatial scenes. Using vision techniques running on the Neural Engine on-device and per-pixel depth maps, a spatial scene adds a 3D effect to any 2D photo that you can experience by tilting your iPhone around. With six degrees of freedom, the effect responds to your device’s movement and will tilt the various layers of the photo differently. It’s essentially a fancy parallax effect, powered by AI, that can also be applied to photos you took decades ago as long as they have enough resolution and aren’t too grainy.

A spatial scene on the iOS 26 Lock Screen.

I don’t like using photos as my Lock or Home Screen wallpapers (they’re too busy, and I take too many screenshots for work), but spatial scenes are a fun trick, and they work exceptionally well alongside Liquid Glass elements on the Lock Screen.

Lastly for the Lock Screen, there’s a new mode for Apple Music and third-party apps to display immersive, animated album artwork that interacts with Liquid Glass on the Lock Screen. Tap on the album art in the Now Playing widget, and the Lock Screen will transition to artwork mode like before. Now, however, if the app and the media item being played support it, artwork can extend edge to edge and animate inside the Lock Screen, complete with scroll edge effects and glass interactions.

The new full-screen animated artwork for Apple Music on the Lock Screen.

Since Apple made this API open to third-party developers, not only should the likes of Spotify be able to support it if they want to, but I think we’re going to see some interesting spins on the idea by indie developers. Jordi Bruin, for instance, created Frames, a simple utility that plugs into this framework to play videos on the Lock Screen as full-screen “album artwork”.

Expect to see more third-party apps built around the idea of playing videos on the Lock Screen.

The app’s support for Shortcuts actions opens up some fascinating possibilities. You can, for example, automatically play a video of a person on the Lock Screen whenever they send you an iMessage thanks to personal automations and the Frames app. I guess that Apple never intended for this API to have this kind of use case, but it’s always great to see indie developers push the boundaries of the platform.

The Transforming Nature of Liquid Glass

So far, I’ve largely focused on how Liquid Glass looks and how its design structure has impacted the layout of apps, especially on iOS. But what I think deserves equal attention is understanding how Liquid Glass works and if there is anything more to it beyond its appearance.

Or let me put it this way: I’ve mostly focused on the glass aspect so far. But what about the “liquid”?

There are two qualities of Liquid Glass that I want to emphasize in this section: fluidity and its shape-shifting nature. Both will initially catch your attention because of their looks, but – as someone who’s been reviewing these OSes for over a decade – I think there’s something deeper going on.

Glass is rigid and brittle by nature; Liquid Glass is anything but. Liquid Glass is fluid and malleable, and you’ll notice this about the material everywhere in iOS 26’s animations when you start paying attention. Numbers on the Lock Screen passcode bounce up and down for a second when the screen comes up. Swipe between pages in Control Center, and tiles will swiftly stretch and bounce as they “land” on-screen. The force with which you unlock the Lock Screen itself affects how quickly or slowly icons fly in on the Home Screen. Even sidebars on iPad bounce around slightly when you scroll inside them.

An example of different Liquid Glass animations.

These animations are ubiquitous in iOS 26, and while they’re nice to see, they’re not the most interesting aspect of Liquid Glass when it comes to motion design. The unique trait of Liquid Glass – what actually makes it “liquid” – is its fluid shape-morphing nature that mimics droplets of water and can transform UI elements based on the context of the screen.

Stay with me here as I run through a variety of examples. In Liquid Glass, for instance, toolbar items don’t open menus when clicked; they morph into menus. Tap a button in a toolbar, and rather than opening a menu below it, the button itself becomes the menu and transitions back to a button when the menu is dismissed.

In iOS 18, buttons opened menus next to or below them; in iOS 26, buttons morph into menus.

Similarly, Liquid Glass can morph shapes of controls in real time based on proximity, mimicking the real-world behavior of water. When two elements get close to each other, Liquid Glass blends them into a single shape. To test this, open Notification Center and slowly swipe on a notification. You’ll notice the ‘Clear’ button appear first as part of the notification cell itself; keep swiping, and it’ll detach with fluid dynamics from the notification, becoming its own entity. Swipe in the other direction, and the two elements will be fluidly joined again as soon as they’re close to each other.

Feels like water, doesn’t it?

This behavior is exactly what makes Liquid Glass liquid. And it’s used throughout iOS 26 not only to look cool (because it does), but to convey the state of the user interface and better express where certain items come from.

Would you believe me if I told you that, in computer graphics, this technique is called metaballs? And that it was invented for Carl Sagan’s TV series, Cosmos? And that it’s the equivalent of mitosis in biology?

When you navigate across apps updated for iOS 26, you’ll notice that, unlike in iOS 18, controls like buttons and toolbar items don’t usually appear out of thin air, nor are they redrawn on-screen when you switch between views. Instead, most controls are always placed in the same position, but they fluidly shape-shift based on the context of the current screen to display controls that make sense for whatever you’re doing.

Let me show you with a video. In the main screen of the Notes app, you have a back button and ellipsis button at the top, with a search bar and compose button at the bottom. Watch what happens when you open a specific note:

The ellipsis button morphs into a toolbar and a button, while the search bar shape-shifts into a formatting toolbar since it makes more sense to have that when you’re editing a note. Go back, and the same happens in reverse.

Once you notice this, you’ll see it everywhere in iOS 26. Reminders’ top toolbar morphs into an overflow menu; the ‘Select’ button in Mail disappears into another button when you open a specific message; Music’s profile picture turns into a toolbar when you open a playlist or album that you likely want to download or add to your library.

Liquid transitions are everywhere in iOS 26.

Some folks may not like this dynamic nature of the user interface in Liquid Glass, and they may ascribe the transforming nature of the iOS 26 UI to Alan Dye’s proverbial tendency to get rid of UI chrome as much as possible. I don’t think that’s an accurate assessment. As long as the controls that you need are readily available, does it matter that certain UI elements morph into others based on the context of the app and what makes the most sense? I don’t think it does.

Most people this summer have focused on the glass part of Liquid Glass. I think that the liquid is going to carry this design system forward for the next few years.

In fact, I’d argue that Liquid Glass’ dynamic morphing of controls is highly beneficial to UI discovery and learning patterns. With controls that morph and spring to life, Liquid Glass draws the user’s attention to an interface that had become overly flat, homogenous, and difficult to visually parse over the years. Liquid Glass’ transitions – beyond looking great and being a feat of engineering – make iOS and iPadOS easier to use, with more intuitive interactions and a more well-defined relationship between buttons and menus.

Most people this summer have focused on the glass part of Liquid Glass. I think that the liquid is going to carry this design system forward for the next few years.

I came back home from WWDC three months ago thinking that Liquid Glass was going to be a problematic distraction to draw the Apple community’s attention away from the fact that the company was lagging behind in AI. I spent weeks (rightfully) criticizing the state of Liquid Glass on iOS and iPadOS 26 at the time. In the meantime, Apple kept refining and iterating on Liquid Glass, ultimately landing on a visual balance that does carry some inherent legibility tradeoffs, but I do not consider them deal-breakers for the everyday experience at this point.

In the past three months, I’ve realized that Liquid Glass – beyond simply looking gorgeous on modern Apple hardware – is more than meets the eye. Sure, Liquid Glass takes to its logical conclusion an embrace of translucency and blur that started well over a decade ago with iOS 8 and iOS 9, and sure, it builds upon Apple’s recent penchant for fluid animations that started with the iPhone X and later, including the Dynamic Island. But beyond all that – beyond the spectacle of 120 Hz transitions and Gaussian blur and real-time lensing – I think Liquid Glass hints at a future where interfaces will be discrete, contextual to what you’re doing, and capable of naturally blending in with your physical environment.

It’s a fun thought exercise to try and rationalize the reason behind Liquid Glass. If there is a masterplan behind all this, I think it points to glasses – and it starts with fluid, glass-y interfaces on a phone because this is how Apple rolls. Or maybe it’s just supposed to feel new, and to create an itch.

Regardless of the reason, I genuinely believe that Liquid Glass looks great and makes modern iOS apps easier to use. And best of all: it’s fun.

Apple Intelligence

It’s fair to say that Apple’s AI strategy hasn’t exactly panned out so far. The company would like to remind us that they’ve been shipping machine learning features – only later retrofitted as “AI” – for years, and that they’ve been doing so across multiple apps in their operating systems rather than via chatbots. All of that is true. Apple also outlined an interesting vision for LLM-powered, Siri-centric functionalities based on users’ context and apps, and that felt like a genuine innovation in the AI space that – theoretically – only Apple could deliver at scale thanks to their vibrant third-party app ecosystem. But that Siri never shipped, and it’s still unclear when – and in what form – it will.

The proof is in the pudding, as they say, and the reality is that – like it or not! – people love the current generation of chatbots. If ChatGPT is on track to being used by 700 million people every week, who are we, professional Apple commentators, to say that no, actually, this current wave of AI is a fad but Apple’s AI will be so different, and so much better, when, eventually, it ships?

The way I see it, Apple Intelligence is going to have traditional LLM features with a chatbot in the future because it has to. And I think there’s a good chance I’ll be writing about it in next year’s review. For now, what we have in Apple Intelligence is a ragtag assortment of text and vision features – some of them powered by the company’s (not-so-intelligent) Foundation models, some of them reliant on ChatGPT – that are being integrated across iOS and iPadOS primarily via a new Foundation Models framework, Visual Intelligence, and Shortcuts. Apple has to enact this strategy now; without a core chatbot product, they have to show that they can pull off something unique with cross-pollination of apps and system services…even though it is actually not that unique anymore following Google I/O and the Pixel 10 phone series.

There aren’t any groundbreaking changes in Apple Intelligence this year, but there are some good additions that I’ve been using more than I expected. I’ve even come to rely on some Apple Intelligence features in my everyday workflow, which is not something I would have said last year.

Let’s take a look.

Visual Intelligence

For my taste, the Camera Control button on modern iPhones is only good for two things:

A single click to instantly open the camera from anywhere on iOS and

A long-press to open Visual Intelligence.

I’m not a heavy Visual Intelligence user, but it has been useful for “simple” visual queries that I want to get an answer to using ChatGPT. For more complex visual analysis tasks, I still prefer to rely on ChatGPT’s visual analysis based on tool-calling and OCR, but if I want to snap a picture and ask ChatGPT a quick question about it, Visual Intelligence is usually good enough.

Apple realized there’s an angle worth seeing through here, and they’ve improved Visual Intelligence in iOS 26 in some key ways. The first notable change is that screenshots have been integrated with Visual Intelligence so you can now ask questions about what’s on your screen rather than being limited to taking pictures. In the updated full-screen screenshot UI, you’ll now see two buttons at the bottom for asking a question or searching similar results on Google or other apps. (More on this below.) Markup tools have been removed from the bottom of the screen and can now be invoked via a toolbar at the top. Instead, at the bottom you’ll now see a message that tells you about the ability to highlight parts of a screenshot to search.

Visual Intelligence is now integrated in the full-screen screenshot UI.

If you don’t like this default full-screen screenshot flow, you can disable it in Settings ⇾ General ⇾ Screen Capture, where you’ll also find a toggle to disable the automatic Visual Look Up that happens under the hood to identify objects, places, and other data in your screenshots.

Integrating Visual Intelligence and Look Up with screenshots makes sense for Apple. Some of the most impressive consumer applications of LLMs in the past year have been the real-time screen- and video-sharing capabilities of Gemini and ChatGPT. Apple needs to show they’re in the picture too, but at the same time, they really aren’t since you’re not sharing your screen in real time with an LLM in iOS 26; you’re just sending a screenshot for analysis. Still, I’ve been using this feature for the past three months, and it is nice to be able to ask ChatGPT a question about what’s on screen without having to open the ChatGPT app and manually upload an image.

You can use ChatGPT to ask questions about the contents of screenshots.

One of my favorite tricks for Visual Intelligence in screenshots is asking the AI to extract bits of text that certain websites don’t let me select and copy in Safari. Visual Intelligence can now also detect if a lot of text is shown on screen and will offer a handy ‘Summarize’ shortcut at the bottom, which I’ve occasionally used for summarizing PDFs I get from my condo’s building manager or long paragraphs of specific webpages. It’s pretty good for that. In an interesting detail, Visual Intelligence knows whether it’s appropriate to offer a summarization button because Apple’s on-device grounding model classifies each image as soon as it’s fed to Visual Intelligence.

Summarizing text from screenshots with Visual Intelligence.

When text is shown, Visual Intelligence will also display a ‘Read Aloud’ shortcut for text-to-speech, and that’s been quite bad in my experience. The voice Apple is using doesn’t seem to understand linebreaks in paragraphs, and it pauses for a second whenever a word wraps on a new line in Safari. It’s clearly a far cry from the latest SOTA TTS models from the rest of the industry.

Using text-to-speech with Visual Intelligence in iOS 26.

There’s also integration with Apple’s Translate app/system framework, which will translate whatever is shown in the screenshot to your default language. You can tap on any of the translated blocks to load a modal Translate UI that lets you change languages, copy translations, and more.

Using Translate in Visual Intelligence.

Asking ChatGPT about on-screen images has been hit or miss, too. I thought it’d be fun to use Visual Intelligence to take screenshots of people’s Home Screens on social media and ask the AI about app icons, but ChatGPT with Apple Intelligence frequently hallucinated results. Part of the problem, I guess, is that the integration I tested was still based on GPT-4o rather than GPT-5, but also that Apple Intelligence doesn’t support any reasoning models for superior image analysis (even if you’re logged in with a ChatGPT Plus, Business, or Pro account). Furthermore, there is also the problem of persistent chats: I like to revisit my conversations with ChatGPT over time, but using it in Apple Intelligence often feels like shouting into a void. Once again, there is no central Apple Intelligence LLM app on iOS, and it’s not clear when or if ChatGPT queries from Apple Intelligence will show up in the ChatGPT app or on its website. iOS 26 doesn’t improve that. So this screenshot integration is fun and useful if you’re in a pinch, but it’s no replacement for the traditional, iterative, more powerful LLM chatbot experience.

All these text-related additions to Visual Intelligence make a lot of sense in the screenshot environment, but they also work in Visual Intelligence’s classic camera mode. Since Apple is so behind in AI, they don’t work in real time in the viewfinder, like Gemini or ChatGPT; you have to freeze the frame first, then use Visual Intelligence. One of the new integrations that I think works well in camera mode is data detectors for calendar events: take a picture of a flyer or any other sign with a date and time on it, and Visual Intelligence will extract relevant details and offer to create a calendar event for it.

Visual Intelligence can recognize dates in real time, then freeze the frame to let you create a calendar event.

Now, Apple has been doing this sort of stuff with data detectors for ages now, and we’re not really talking about AI in the LLM sense here, but the company can use all the wins they can get these days. So, of course, data detectors for dates recognized in an image get lumped into the broader AI discourse, too, which is alright since the feature works well and other LLMs (except for Perplexity) haven’t chosen to integrate with EventKit, but it’s amusing when you remember that Apple has been doing this stuff since iOS 10 and improved it in iOS 15, well before AI and LLMs were common topics. Such is the situation Apple is in right now.

I should note that Apple has done a pretty good job with the ability to highlight parts of an image to search in Visual Intelligence: just scrub with your finger over an area of an image, and you’ll be able to find results on Google based on that area of the image.

In this case, I highlighted the Metroid Prime logo, and Google presented related search results from Google Images.

The interaction here is reminiscent of Clean Up in Photos in that you can either scrub or draw a shape around an object to highlight it. When you do, Apple sends the selected pixels (plus some of the surrounding ones to form a square shape) to an external provider, which is a nice touch. I’ve been using this to highlight the aforementioned app icons from people’s screenshots in Visual Intelligence, and Google results were always better than ChatGPT’s responses.

The final addition to Visual Intelligence I’ll mention is support for third-party app extensions in Visual Look Up. This feature has also been hit or miss in my experience, and I’ve had more crashes than successful queries in recent betas of iOS 26, but it is interesting nonetheless. Third-party apps can now provide extensions that sit next to Google in Visual Look Up and allow you to pass an image to their respective apps. I’ve been able to test Alyx, a coffee-logging utility, and Calorific, a calorie-counting app, to take pictures of beverages and food with Visual Intelligence and pass them to those apps for analysis. It worked, but the classification of each image depends on which AI those developers have integrated into their apps.

Third-party apps integrated in Visual Intelligence. Both recognized my espresso.

I’ve also been able to test apps that offer non-AI functionalities in Visual Look Up. Bezel, for instance, can show what a screenshot would look like with a physical Apple device frame and different wallpapers – kind of like an integrated version of my Apple Frames shortcut. I’m not sure I’d ever use this for my work over the automated workflows I’ve made with Apple Frames, but it’s a cool demo of this new extension point in iOS 26.

Bezel has an interesting implementation of Visual Intelligence integration.

Visual Intelligence, alongside text-based LLM interactions, will be one of the most important areas for Apple to invest in as they further their AI plans and work on building AI-powered glasses. The changes in Visual Intelligence for iOS 26 aren’t groundbreaking and, on balance, do not offer anything that can’t be accomplished with a good chatbot and image uploads elsewhere, but they also show early signs of a bigger plan that I hope Apple continues to evolve.

Foundation Models, Apps, and Shortcuts

The most interesting part of Apple’s AI strategy this year is that they’re opening their Foundation models to developers and users with a framework for apps and a new action in Shortcuts. I’ll be blunt: both Apple’s small on-device model (~3B parameters, available in third-party apps and Shortcuts) and the bigger one (~17B parameters?) in Private Cloud Compute (only available in Shortcuts) are not great models. I wouldn’t even call them “good”. They’re small models with an old knowledge cut-off date that support a limited subset of languages and have a small context window. (The on-device one has a 4,096-token context window.) They have heavy-handed guardrails that frequently refuse to generate a response if you use Apple product names. The local model does not support vision features at all.

They are passable models that have been trained for basic tool-calling and structured data output in Swift in the 26 series of operating systems. You’re not going to replace ChatGPT or Claude with Apple’s Foundation models. But, despite their archaic nature, these models do show the first signs of Apple’s plan: weaving LLM capabilities throughout the apps you use every day rather than piping every interaction through a chatbot. The jury’s still out as to whether this approach will work, but in iOS 26, Apple is at least shooting their first shot.

Here’s how it works: third-party apps can now prompt Apple’s on-device Foundation model and get a local response in seconds without the need for an Internet connection. This model is shared across all apps, meaning that as long as you have enabled Apple Intelligence on your device, you won’t have to re-download a model inside each app over and over, wasting space on your device. This is precisely what Apple should have done with a small model for on-device usage, and I’ve been able to test dozens of apps that integrate directly with Apple Intelligence in iOS 26.

The Foundation model that developers can use supports prompting and processing of each app’s data. For instance, a developer of a journaling app can choose to let the model privately and securely process journal entries on device and return some suggestions or summaries. The model has been trained by Apple to let developers create custom “tools” for it – essentially, external features that can help the model perform tasks it couldn’t on its own – as well as to instruct the model to return data in a specific format that they can use in their apps’ code. As I’ll demonstrate later, this also has implications for users who want to prompt Apple’s models in the Shortcuts app.

Examples speak louder than words here, and especially when it comes to LLMs, it’s best to see what they can accomplish in practice. Lire, my go-to RSS client for iPhone and iPad, now integrates directly with Apple Intelligence for article summarization (in addition to featuring an excellent Liquid Glass redesign). Whenever I come across a clickbait-y headline that doesn’t merit a full read-through of the story or a long article I just want to skim before saving, I can press Lire’s new ‘Summarize’ button, which uses Apple’s model to read the article and summarize it. Even better, since Apple’s model supports prompting, I was able to write my own prompt to tell Apple Intelligence in Lire to summarize articles with an opening sentence followed by a bulleted list. Revolutionary? No, but it works offline, it’s fast, it’s free for developers, and it doesn’t require downloading any additional model.

Summarizing articles in Lire.

Chronicling, Rebecca Owen’s excellent all-in-one tracker that we’ve covered many times on MacStories, is adding a feature called Smart Events that lets you log events with natural language using Apple’s Foundation model. Here, Chronicling is using Apple Intelligence to detect event names, dates, times, and counts and simplify the logging process for users. For instance, if I want to use Chronicling to log my coffee consumption and write, “I had espresso at 12 PM and 3 PM”, the Foundation model will enable Chronicling to log two separate events in the appropriate category with the correct times.

Logging coffee with natural language in Chronicling.

There was nothing stopping Rebecca Owen from building this feature before iOS 26, but that would have meant either (a) shipping the app with an on-device model built in, leading to a larger download size for customers, or (b) relying on a third-party cloud LLM, which would have resulted in additional costs for her and privacy concerns for users. With iOS 26 and the Foundation models, none of these issues arise, and the model works well for tasks with this kind of narrow scope and limited access.

However, that’s not stopping third-party developers from using the Foundation models for more complex apps. A standout example for me has been Activas, a new app from indie developer Brian Hough that combines HealthKit with Apple Intelligence and lets you discover insights or have conversations with the Foundation model about your health – entirely offline. I’ve been so impressed with Activas and its AI integration; it has surfaced trends about my health in a simple yet actionable way, and it serves as a good demonstration of how even a small language model can be useful with the right system prompt and tool definitions. (NVIDIA agrees.)

While I was writing this review, Activas noticed that I was walking less every day, and it noted that with an insight card in the app’s main view. Although Activas doesn’t let you have full-blown, freeform conversations with the model (where you’d likely run into its limitations very quickly), it cleverly lets you swipe through preset messages that generate a response, taking your HealthKit data into account. It’s pretty neat, and I can totally see Apple creating something bigger and more intelligent along these lines for next year.

Chatting with Activas is powered by Apple’s Foundation models.

There are even developers who are daring to use Apple’s small on-device model for actual freeform, ChatGPT-like conversations. The latest version of CARROT Weather, in addition to touting a Liquid Glass redesign, integrates with the Foundation model to allow users to have conversations with CARROT in the style of a chatbot. When you’re asking about the weather, that’s pretty cool; ask about the forecast for the weekend, and CARROT’s AI will give you back an appropriate response. But this is where the limitations become most apparent: ask even a basic follow-up question, or try and talk about anything else, and you’ll either get a nonsensical response or a boilerplate “I can’t fulfill that request” message. Such is the nature of a small model these days. You’re probably going to see a lot of developers claim that they have built “ChatGPT, but offline powered by Apple Intelligence”, and believe me when I say this: those apps are going to suck.

The Foundation model isn’t always super smart.

Thankfully, I’ve heard more from developers building actually novel and interesting ideas thanks to the Foundation model than I have from grifters. Awake, a new app from the team behind Structured, integrates with AlarmKit (more on this later) to wake you up in the morning, but it also uses the Foundation model to give you a morning brief based on the weather, the current time, and your calendar events. I also like the concept behind PocketShelf. This utility lets you take notes as you’re reading a book (while also displaying a timer and playing white noise – clever!), and when you come back to a book you’ve been reading, the Foundation model is used to summarize your notes and tell you where you left off.

Awake’s briefing is powered by Apple Intelligence under the hood.

You’re going to see a lot of similar use cases in apps that integrate with the Foundation models in iOS 26: summarization, basic in-app searches based on custom tools, tag suggestions, and so forth. And you’re going to see these because that’s as far as developers can realistically push the on-device Foundation model before running into intelligence limitations or Apple’s content guardrails.

Things get a lot more interesting for power users when we consider the addition of the ‘Use Model’ action in the Shortcuts app. I’m going to share some examples of Apple Intelligence-powered shortcuts later in this review and with Club MacStories members, but I want to cover the technical aspects here because they’re fascinating. In Shortcuts, Apple built an action that lets you prompt the on-device model, the bigger one running in Private Cloud Compute, or ChatGPT (which is powered by the latest GPT-5 model as of the public release of iOS 26). This alone is great, but here’s what makes this integration extra special: in addition to freeform prompting and the ability to ask follow-up questions, you can pass Shortcuts variables to the action and explicitly tell the model to return a response based on a specific schema or type of variable. Effectively, Apple has built a Shortcuts GUI for what third-party developers can do with the Foundation model in Swift code, but they’re letting people work with the Private Cloud Compute model and ChatGPT, too.

The new ‘Use Model’ action in Shortcuts for iOS 26.

This action has major implications for people who work on Apple platforms and have built workflows revolving around the Shortcuts app; with the Use Model action, there is now a fast, pervasive “AI layer” you can sprinkle on top of any shortcut, with any action, to build shortcuts powered by LLMs that can adapt to non-deterministic tasks. This action is Apple’s formal embrace of a new kind of “hybrid automation” I’ve been writing about for a while now, and I’ve been having so much fun with it.

At a high level, you can use the Use Model action to prompt a model and get a response. Since all three supported models know how to interpret Shortcuts variables and return structured output, I recommend using ChatGPT if you can since GPT-5 is the smartest one and has a larger context window. In the text field of the action, you can write any prompt you want and include any Shortcuts variable. Using a very simple shortcut I created, I can get the current article I’m reading in Lire, extract some properties from it, then ask ChatGPT via the Use Model action:

Summarize the following article in two sentences or less.

The title of the article is: Title

The author is: Author

And here is the main body text of the full story:

[Title]

[Text]

I pinned this shortcut to my iPad’s dock and made it available via the Action button on my iPhone. When I want to quickly summarize the article I’m viewing, this is the response I get:

My shortcut to summarize the article I’m reading in Lire.

I will release my shortcuts based on the ‘Use Model’ action as part of this review’s exclusive extras for Club Plus and Premier members next week.

This is a nice example of what you can do with prompting and variables. Data from Lire is sent to the model, and I didn’t have to write a single line of code to tap into the natural language capabilities of LLMs.

You can also summarize text in different formats using new dedicated ‘Writing Tools’ actions in Shortcuts. This has the same effect as prompting in the Use Model action, but you won’t have to write the prompt yourself. In addition to summarization, there are Writing Tools actions for generating tables, rewriting text, proofreading, making lists, and adjusting tone.

On a similar note, I created a shortcut that lets me easily add Accessibility captions to images on social media. This shortcut uses a prompt and a Photos variable to send an image to ChatGPT, which is configured to return ‘Text’ via the action’s ‘Output’ field. In this case, I can tap into ChatGPT’s superior vision and OCR features to access a fast and accurate caption maker that ensures pictures I post on social media always have captions for screen readers:

Describe this image in detail.

Keep the description short (1 long line of text) and focus on the key subject.

Mention of other distinctive elements around it.

I’ll use this as the caption of the image for screen readers on social media.

Format it accordingly.

If the screenshot is primarily text, include the text verbatim.
[Photos]

Image descriptions powered by ChatGPT in Shortcuts.

The true potential of the Use Model action as it relates to automation and productivity lies in the ability to mix and match data from apps (input variables) with structured data you want to get out of an LLM (output variables). This, I believe, is an example of Apple’s only advantage in this field over the competition, and it’s an aspect I would like to see them invest more in. Regardless of the model you’re using, you can tell the Use Model action to return a response with an ‘Automatic’ format or one of six custom formats:

Text

Number

Date

Boolean

List

Dictionary

With this kind of framework, you can imagine the kind of things you can build. Perhaps you want to make a shortcut that takes a look at your upcoming calendar events and returns their dates; or maybe you want to make one that organizes your reminders with a dictionary using keys for lists and values for task titles; perhaps you want to ask the model a question and consistently return a “True” or “False” response. All of those are possible with this action and its built-in support for schemas. What I love even more, though, is the fact that custom variables from third-party apps can be schemas too.

I will share many different shortcuts I’ve built for this in my upcoming course about Apple Intelligence and Shortcuts for Club members. But to give you an idea here, I’ve created an AI-powered search mode for GoodLinks using just Shortcuts, the Use Model action, and the existing version of GoodLinks from the App Store. I started with GoodLinks’ ‘Find Links’ action and the following prompt:

You are an intelligent archive assistant.

Your job is to search the entire archive of articles the user has already read and find only the articles relevant to the user’s query. Sort them by published date.

User Input

[Ask for Input]

Archive

[Links]

I then configured the ‘Use Model’ action to return GoodLinks’ own ‘Link’ variable as the output:

Searching my GoodLinks archive with natural language.

Now, when I run this shortcut, I can ask in natural language something like, “What have I read about the iPad?” and send that to ChatGPT via Apple Intelligence. After a few seconds, ChatGPT will return the appropriate GoodLinks schema, which I can present with a ‘Choose from List’ action. Since the items in the search results are native GoodLinks articles, I can open a selected search result directly in the app.

I will cover a lot more about this topic and how to work with variables and Apple Intelligence in my upcoming course for Club Plus and Premier members.

As I hope these examples have demonstrated, Apple’s integration with ChatGPT and the system they’ve built in Shortcuts is the most exciting area of Apple Intelligence this year – and the reason why I’ve ended up using Apple Intelligence a lot more than I expected a few months ago.

Apple needs a traditional LLM experience because, clearly, people want that sort of interaction on mobile now; the major AI labs have noticed too, and they’re iterating quickly on this idea. At the same time, I hope Apple continues down this track of seamlessly integrating individual apps with LLMs.

Maybe 2026 will be the year?

And More…

There are a handful of other Apple Intelligence features worth mentioning in iOS 26:

News summaries return. Notification summaries for News and Entertainment apps are coming back in iOS 26 following a very public spat with the BBC. This time around, all AI-generated summaries will be italicized and include a ‘Summarized by Apple Intelligence’ annotation.

“Private message from Federico Viticci” – yeah, sure, Apple Intelligence.

There is also a new onboarding flow for users to set up notification summaries with Apple Intelligence after updating to iOS 26. I don’t love the terse style of notification summaries, but I leave them on because, on average, they’re more useful than they are silly.

Hybrid and customizable Genmoji. Apple is adding two features to its AI-powered Genmoji: the ability to mix your favorite emoji together to create something brand new and more descriptive controls for Genmoji of friends and family, such as options for hairstyles. I don’t really use Genmoji, but I can tell you that my iPhone 16 Pro Max still gets very hot when trying to generate some, which, ideally, is something the iPhone 17 Pro’s redesigned thermal system will address. Apple’s Genmoji feature has some guardrails in place, but it’ll also generate some ridiculous and nasty combinations of emoji if you just put together some existing characters in the right order. Whatever happened to the Genmoji below should give you a pretty good sense of where things stand.

AI-powered Reminders features. Apple’s task manager is receiving two interesting Apple Intelligence-powered enhancements in iOS 26: with a combination of on-device processing and Private Cloud Compute, the app’s share extension can now find actionable items in anything you share with it, and the app can automatically categorize tasks inside lists for you.

The share extension is fascinating. Share some text or a Safari webpage with it, and it’ll find things that look “actionable” inside it and offer to save them for you. This works whether you share a recipe from Safari (it’ll suggest ingredients to buy) or you pass some meeting notes from the Notes app to the extension. It works surprisingly well, and I was able to use it both in English and Italian.

Sometimes, Apple Intelligence in Reminders’ share extension extracts the steps for a recipe; sometimes, it extracts the ingredients.

The main Reminders app can also offer to categorize tasks into sections when you’re inside a list, too. I tested this when I saved dozens of WWDC session videos to the Reminders app, and it did a pretty good job at creating sections based on different areas of Apple’s operating systems. The automatic sections can be turned off at any time and be re-generated as many times as you want.

System-wide translation. We’ll explore this in a standalone article on MacStories soon, but Apple is betting heavily on system-wide translation aided by AI on its platforms. In iOS 26, there’s an impressive array of system apps that have received built-in translation support: Messages can automatically translate incoming texts and translate as you type your responses; FaceTime features live translation captions that appear in real time during a conversation; the Phone app also offers real-time spoken translations with transcripts when on speaker. There is a lot Apple is doing here for multilingual users with fascinating Accessibility implications, and we’ll dive deeper into all the details with a dedicated story soon.

iPadOS

I’ve been both very critical of and enthusiastic about the iPad platform over the past year or so. In May 2024, I published a story about all the shortcomings of iPadOS as they related to the ways I needed to get work done on my iPad Pro. From my perspective, that story was the encapsulation of years of pent-up frustration with various limitations of the iPad’s software that had been ignored by Apple in small, iterative iPadOS releases following the contentious launch of Stage Manager in iPadOS 16. Then, at the end of 2024, I wrote about how I overcame those software limitations thanks to external hardware connected to my 11” iPad Pro. That article was, in many ways, bittersweet: I had found ways to get all my work done on the iPad – including recording audio and video podcasts – but, quite literally, at what cost?

Over the first half of 2025, I saw myself and other longtime iPad users progressively lose faith in the iPad and Apple’s understanding of what power users wanted from it. This is why I (and others) spent some time getting to know macOS again. If Apple didn’t want to meaningfully improve iPadOS, the only way out seemed to be switching back to a desktop operating system with better multitasking, more native apps, and a greater degree of control over the everyday experience.

After three months spent using iPadOS 26, I can say this: while this update doesn’t turn iPadOS into macOS and there continue to be notable advantages to the Mac platform, iPadOS 26 is a monumental release for the iPad that finally shows a vision for what a new breed of modular desktop operating system should be. iPadOS 26 succeeds in the challenging task of preserving the iPad’s intuitive nature while unlocking tremendous functionality for advanced users, who are no longer penalized for attempting to use an iPad as a laptop replacement. In fact, thanks to iPadOS 26, I don’t think the laptop analogy is even that apt anymore.

iPadOS 26 is a monumental release for the iPad that finally shows a vision for what a new breed of modular desktop operating system should be.

The new iPadOS transforms the device into the hybrid, modular type of computer I’ve long wanted to see Apple formally embrace. There are still shortcomings in iPadOS 26 compared to macOS for specific tasks, but it has been a pivotal update for my everyday iPad experience and workflow. Let me explain why.

The Transition from Full-Screen, Split View, and Slide Over

An iPad running iPadOS 26 can still be used in full-screen mode with one app at a time. This is the familiar iPad experience consistent with the gesture-driven app navigation Apple invented with the iPhone X in 2017. If you don’t want to use any form of multitasking whatsoever, you don’t have to; you can still use an iPad with one app at a time, Steve-Jobs-in-2010-style.

During the iPadOS 26 setup flow – or at any point in the Settings app under ‘Multitasking & Gestures’ – you can enable a ‘Full Screen Apps’ mode, which, as the name implies, always opens apps in full-screen and lets you swipe between them via the Home indicator, like on an iPhone.

The new preferences for full-screen apps and multitasking.

When in full-screen mode, you can still invoke the Dock, Spotlight, or the Command-Tab switcher to move between apps in ways that aren’t supported on iOS, but by and large, this is the closest the iPad’s stock software experience has been to Steve Jobs’ original demo in 2010 in some time. I imagine that this mode will be particularly appreciated by elderly folks who may not want to multitask on their iPads and iPad mini owners who aren’t interested in using multiple windows on it. (It is possible, but more on that later.)

With iPadOS 26, however, Apple simplified the experience even further by getting rid of the Split View and Slide Over modes altogether. Originally introduced with iOS 9 a decade ago, redesigned in iOS 11, and reimagined in iPadOS 13 with support for multiple apps in Slide Over, these two modes have long been a staple of the modern iPad experience and were, for many years before iPadOS 16, the only way to multitask on an iPad. I’ve used Split View and Slide Over for years and liked them a lot; in fact, I started using both modes even more after Stage Manager’s initial debacle. There was something to the simplicity and stability of Split View that – despite its limitations – made it more reliable and predictable than Stage Manager for me. And that’s not to mention the simplicity of Slide Over combined with the flexibility of switching between multiple apps.

But those systems weren’t perfect, particularly for users who, again, just wanted to use an iPad in full-screen mode with one app at a time. The gesture required to create splits – a long-press and drag on an app icon in the Dock – often resulted in accidental activations of Split View for less tech-savvy users, who suddenly found themselves using two apps instead of one. Plus, between full-screen mode, Split View, Slide Over, and Stage Manager, the iPad ended up with too many multitasking systems to choose from.

So in iPadOS 26, Apple decided to scrap Split View and Slide Over altogether, leaving users the choice between full-screen apps, a revamped Stage Manager, and the brand new windowed mode. At some level, I get it. Apple probably thinks that the functionality of Split View can be replicated with new windowing controls (as we’ll see, there are actual tiling options to split the screen into halves) and that most people who were using these two modes would be better served by the new multitasking system the company designed for iPadOS 26.

At the same time, though, I can’t help but feel that the removal of Slide Over is a misstep on Apple’s part. There’s really no great way to replicate the versatility of Slide Over with the iPad’s new windowing. Making a bunch of windows extra small and stacked on the side of the screen would require a lot of manual resizing and repositioning; at that point, you’re just using a worse version of classic windowing. I don’t know what Apple’s solution could have been here – particularly because, like I said above, the iPad did end up with too many multitasking systems to pick from. But the Mac also has several multitasking features, and people love the Mac, so maybe that’s fine, too?

Slide Over will be missed, but perhaps there’ll be a way for Apple to make it come back. Maybe on a hybrid iPhone-iPad device?

The New Windowing

Alright, let’s talk about the real deal now. Apple ripped the band-aid off with iPadOS 26 and added traditional windowing to the platform. If you’ve ever used a Mac, you know what to expect: windows can be freely resized and positioned wherever you want on screen; there are the familiar red, yellow, and green controls in the top-left corner of every window; you can open an “unlimited” (more on the double quotes later) number of windows, make them overlap, place some of them slightly off screen – yeah, it’s Mac windowing, running on iPadOS.

Glorious, overlapping windows.

At a surface level, it may look like time is indeed a flat circle and that we’ve spent 15 years trying to reinvent multitasking only to end up where we started in the first place. There is some truth to that: Apple has tried a lot of different multitasking systems over the iPad’s entire existence and a decade of iPad Pro and ultimately realized the traditional model – the Mac one – was perhaps the best, most obvious solution all along. But I’m not going to sit here and argue that the iPadOS 26 story is, “Apple turned the iPad into a Mac”, and call it a day, because that would be a shortsighted angle. There are merits to the exploration of the iPad’s nature over the years; it’s because Apple tried different takes on multitasking that they can now deliver a system that ostensibly looks like macOS, while under the hood, it’s been completely reimagined and re-engineered for the iPad’s hardware and interaction methods.

The fact that iPadOS’ new windowing isn’t exclusive to keyboard and trackpad input says a lot about the effort already, but there’s more. Apple didn’t go into detail about this at WWDC, but with iPadOS 26, the company got rid of the windowing engine that powered iPadOS 16’s Stage Manager (and subsequent iterations) and replaced it with a new one built around a window prioritization system.

This new engine taps into several low-level iPadOS frameworks and coordinates across the CPU, NAND, GPU, and battery to optimize window rendering and understand which windows should be prioritized based on user activity. The result is a more powerful and efficient system that, in my experience with the iPadOS 26 beta this summer, allows for up to 12 windows to be active on screen on my M4 iPad Pro. Keep in mind that this is happening on a device that is 5.1 mm thin, sports an OLED display, has a 10-hour battery life, supports three different input methods (external trackpads and keyboards, touch, and Apple Pencil), and offers cellular connectivity. To stop at saying that, “Apple just copied the Mac”, without accounting for the unique modular nature of the iPad and what sets it apart from a Mac would be reductive and only good for clicks from certain social media algorithms.

The new windowing system is also the reason Apple has been able to bring more advanced capabilities to older iPad models and even the iPad mini. There’s going to be a dedicated section on the iPad mini later in this chapter, but in short, Apple did the impossible and actually brought windowing to their smallest and least powerful tablet. With some obvious limitations in size and performance, the new windowing does work on an iPad mini as well.

Small windowing.

All this to say: with iPadOS 26, Apple went back to the drawing board. The iPad’s windowing system may look familiar – and that’s the point! – but there’s a lot more going on that deserves an accurate exploration.

When you enable the new ‘Windowed Apps’ mode, the iPad’s full-screen default sticks. Apps you open for the first time will continue to launch in full-screen mode, taking up the entire display. This is not a bug; Apple wants to preserve that balance between the iPad’s simplicity and the additional power available to users who want it, and that includes defaulting to full-screen for any app you’re opening for the first time.

In addition to switching modes in the Settings app, you can put a control in Control Center to toggle between full-screen and windowed mode. You can also long-press this control to choose between windowed mode and Stage Manager. Windowed mode is the default option, and Stage Manager is only shown if you long-press the control.

You’ll notice a couple of differences, though. A full-screen app in windowed mode features the familiar “grab indicator” in the bottom-right corner that allows you to grab a window with your finger or pointer and resize it to any dimensions you want – this time with fluid, Mac-like resizing that adjusts the window’s size frame by frame. Gone are Stage Manager’s choppy window transitions. In iPadOS 26, windows fluidly change their size, and you can precisely control how you want to resize them without having to choose from a selection of “preset sizes”, as was the case with iPadOS 16’s windowing on-rails.

An app in full-screen mode. Notice the resize indicator in the bottom-right corner.

When an app defaults to full-screen while in windowed mode, you’ll also notice that you can move the pointer along any edge of the window to transform it into a resize control. Start resizing a window, and you’ll see the Dock and your Home Screen wallpaper appear.

Resizing the window. Notice the pointer along the right edge of the window.

Furthermore, once you’ve resized a window, the familiar traffic light controls will appear in the top-left corner of the window, nestled within the app’s top toolbar. That’s it; you’re windowing now.

Seen these before?

There’s a lot to unpack here, but I want to start with two basic concepts: opening apps in windowed mode and understanding what the window buttons actually do.

Unlike the old Stage Manager, iPadOS’ new windowing mode doesn’t impose any limitations on the number of windows you can open in the same workspace. In fact, there is no concept of “workspaces” at all; just like on macOS, you have your “desktop” (in this case, it’s more like a layer of the Home Screen), and you open as many windows as you want inside it. The new system doesn’t do anything to organize your windows into “sets”. When you open an app, its window is placed alongside any other existing windows on screen, and iPadOS will try to preserve its position and size from any previous usage of the same window (even across relaunches and system reboots).

In simpler terms, whether you click an app in the Dock, open it from the Home Screen, or launch it via Spotlight, its window (or most recent window for multi-window apps) will always be added on screen, in the same “workspace” as everything else. It is, in fact, just like macOS.

When I’m working with iPadOS 26, I frequently end up with this kind of workspace.

For some users, this will likely be a breath of fresh air (”Finally, an OS that doesn’t get in the way of my windows!”), while for others, it’ll be added complexity (”Oh no, I have to manage all my windows now?”). This is likely why Apple kept Stage Manager around and made it an optional layer of the new windowing engine, which I’ll cover below. But there’s no way around the fact that, yes, in iPadOS 26, if you’re an advanced user, the responsibility of managing windows now falls entirely on you.

In iPadOS 26, if you’re an advanced user, the responsibility of managing windows now falls entirely on you.

The traditional, more laborious way of managing those windows is exactly what you expect: you have to grab windows by the title bar, move them around, resize them – you know, the usual. And if you’re the type of user who wants to have a lot of windows open at once, you should also keep in mind that you’ll be doing a lot of managing of those windows. You’re playing with power now, and this is what you get.

But there are also system tools and hidden gestures that can help your window management. First up are the window buttons. They’re revealed when a window is resized or when you swipe down from the center of a window to open the menu bar (more on this later), but unlike in macOS, they’re not immediately interactive. You have to hover over them with the pointer (or tap them with your finger) to expand them, then you can click the buttons:

By default, window buttons always start in a minimized state and you have to expand them to use them.

This is one of my first complaints as a heavy iPad Pro user: I wish I could permanently pin these buttons without having to perform the secondary interaction to expand them. The behavior of the window buttons is also slightly different from macOS:

The green button makes a window full-screen, which is the equivalent of manually resizing a window or hitting Globe + F on a Magic Keyboard. If a window is full-screen, the green button toggles it back to its previous window size.

The yellow button “minimizes” a window. Since the iPad’s Dock, unlike the Mac’s, doesn’t support minimized window thumbnails, minimizing a window in iPadOS 26 essentially means you keep the window running but remove it from the screen. You will see a fancy morphing animation if the app’s icon is in the Dock, though. This command is mapped to Command + M on external keyboards.

The red button closes a window, with an exception: if the window you’re closing is the only or last one for an app, the button will also terminate the associated app. If the app has multiple windows open instead, the red button will only close the selected window. This command is mapped to Command + W.

There are more window-related commands available by long-pressing the traffic light buttons as well as in the menu bar, which I will cover in subsequent sections. Overall, I feel like these basic defaults make sense, but I wish I didn’t have to click around so much every time I want to expand the traffic light buttons.

Before diving into the menu bar and additional window layouts, I want to mention two other aspects of iPadOS 26’s windowing. The first one is that you can double-click or double-tap on the title bar of any window to quickly cycle between full-screen mode and the window’s previous size:

Double-tap (or click) a window’s title bar to cycle between sizes.

The second is the ability to “destroy” your current workspace full of windowed apps by swiping up with three or four fingers to go home. Swipe the first time, and your workspace will open like a “curtain”, revealing the Home Screen underneath. You have two options now: you can either swipe up a second time to get rid of all windows in your workspace and boot them back to the app switcher as individual windows and start fresh with zero windows on screen, or you can pick another app (via its app icon or widget) from the Home Screen that you want to add to the workspace.

Swipe up once from the bottom of the screen when in windowed mode, and your apps will “open up” to reveal the Home Screen. Swipe again, and you’ll close all windows.

The second method is an idea Apple has been refining for a while. The company first added the ability to temporarily use the Home Screen as a launcher for another app with Split View in iPadOS 15; then, they revised the interaction with Stage Manager in iPadOS 16.

You can change this swiping behavior if you want to. In Settings ⇾ Multitasking & Gestures, there’s a toggle labeled ‘Close All Windows After Swiping Home’. If you turn it on, you won’t have to swipe twice to close all windows and remove them from your workspace.

Even without getting into the menu bar or tiling, these are already a lot of options for power users who have long demanded this kind of fine-grained control over app windows and layouts. At the same time, this is not the kind of system that forces – whether accidentally or not – people who don’t want this iPad experience to use it. And even if you’re an advanced user who wants to quickly get rid of all your windows and return to a more focused environment, that’s easy to do as well.

That being said, there is a lot more to iPadOS 26’s windowing that we have to continue exploring.

Exposé and App Exposé

There is still a traditional app switcher in iPadOS 26, but it is preceded by – at long last – proper, Mac-like Exposé. When you swipe up on the Home indicator and hold (or swipe-up-and-hold with three/four fingers on the trackpad or press Globe + Up on a keyboard), you’ll see a bird’s-eye view of all your open windows in the workspace before a collection of all your other recently opened apps in the app switcher. That’s Exposé.

Exposé for iPadOS 26.

This familiar design works well to preview the windows you’re working with. Just like in the app switcher, you can swipe up on any window to close it, or you can click it to bring it to the foreground. Notably, Exposé is not Mission Control; there is still no concept of multiple “Desktops” on iPadOS, which is something I hope is in the cards for the evolution of the platform.

There is, however, App Exposé, which is the latest Apple rebrand of a feature that has existed on and off for years and was most recently known as The Shelf. If an app supports multi-windowing, you have three options to view and manage them:

Right-click the dock icon and click ‘Show All Windows’

Press Globe + Down on an external keyboard

Click the icon underneath the window of an app in Exposé

Regardless of which method you choose, App Exposé is a bird’s-eye view of all the open windows that belong to a specific app. This view will visually separate the windows in the current workspace (right side) from the ones that are still in the regular app switcher (left side).

You can use this menu to show all windows for an app in the dock.

Or you can do it from Exposé by clicking the icon of the app, which will reveal other windows from the same app. I wish I could also see the titles of windows in addition to their app icons.

While I’m here, I should also mention Apple’s new hybrid design for navigating between windowed and full-screen apps. In this case, Apple took another great lesson from macOS multitasking and elegantly applied it to iPadOS. If you’re in windowed mode, you can hit the green stoplight button to maximize a window and turn it into its own full-screen “space”. Doing so allows you to swipe horizontally on the Home indicator (like on the iPhone) to quickly switch between the current full-screen window and other full-screen apps. If you resize the full-screen window at any point, however, it returns to the original workspace, re-joining the windowed apps as if it never left.

This is one of my favorite little touches of iPadOS 26 so far, and it feels like a crossover between the Mac’s classic Spaces feature and a miniaturized version of Stage Manager. When I want to temporarily focus on a particular task, I can enter full-screen mode and even swipe between multiple full-screen apps. I’ve been doing this when writing in Notion by either pressing the green button or hitting Globe + F. With this design, I can alternate between full-screen apps and my windowed workspace; when I’m ready to jettison the full-screen app back into the workspace alongside other windows, that can be done too.

Maybe I’m projecting, but I think this spatial design that gives equal importance to full-screen and windowed spaces may come in handy for a device that, theoretically, should also be able to alternate between single- and multi-window experiences.

Window Tiling

When I don’t want to spend time resizing and rearranging my windows, I love that I can take advantage of tiling to quickly arrange my workspace. While researching this review over the summer, I frequently had two LLMs open (Claude and Perplexity), plus Notion and Safari. Rather than carefully and manually arranging those windows on my iPad’s display or external monitor, I could just head over to the “traffic light” window controls, right-click them, and choose from a variety of tiling configurations.

Long-press the window buttons to access new layout options.

You can recreate the old Split View with the ‘Fill & Arrange’ controls. Also pictured: Perplexity’s superior web search results an hour after the Nintendo Direct wrapped up.

Tiling isn’t a new feature for Apple, but it is new for the iPad this year, and the company is betting heavily on it as a way for power users to make more sense out of their complex workspaces when they need to. There are two types of tiling supported by right-clicking the window buttons: ‘Move & Resize’ and ‘Fill & Arrange’. The first option simply moves and resizes the current window and comes with presets for the horizontal and vertical halves of the screen.

This is something you can do now.

The second option is, in my opinion, more interesting in that it resizes the current window but also takes care of laying out other windows for you. This is where Apple’s replacement for Split View comes in. There are three split presets in this menu: halves, thirds, and quarters. Pick the symbol with two halves of the screen, and iPadOS will tile the current window plus the other most recently used window in a 50/50 split configuration that is essentially the old Split View, including a resize indicator in the middle of the windows to change their dimensions.

This layout should be familiar to longtime iPad users.

What’s different here is that you’re tiling windows on top of the other windows in your workspace, which you can, in fact, see through the empty space in between the tiled windows. Tiling is an optional UI layer on top of windowed mode. You can disengage tiling at any point by resizing a window manually, or – since your other windows are all there – you can switch to another tiling preset.

Finally, iPadOS includes an option to tile three windows as columns – which is something that I always wanted from the old Split View system – as well as a third option for splitting the screen into quarters, with each window taking up a quadrant of the display. The latter has been excellent to multitask with four windows at once on my external monitor.

This configuration is doable, but a little cramped even on a 13” iPad Pro.

I frequently end up working on my external monitor with bunch of windows. Also: shout out to putting more icons in the iPadOS 26 dock.

When I need to focus, I love splitting the external display into quarters. It’s like using four full-screen iPad apps at once.

When researching vacation spots for this summer, I had Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity open. Thanks to iPadOS 26, I was able to quickly turn those windows into three columns, ask the same question across three different LLMs, and compare all of their answers at once.

Comparing the results of three LLMs easily thanks to iPadOS 26.

Speaking of device orientation, iPadOS 26 remembers your preferred tile or window layout for portrait and landscape modes separately. If you tile two windows above each other in portrait mode but prefer to keep them overlapping in landscape, you can now do that with iPadOS.

I should also mention that there are hidden gestures to quickly move and resize windows as well as make them full-screen or minimize them. Grab a window by the top, then flick it with the correct velocity to the right or left side of the screen to quickly tile it there. Alternatively, you can flick a window down to minimize it or flick it upwards to make it go full-screen. Here, let me show you with a video:

The new flick gestures of iPadOS 26.

When I say that iPadOS 26 is a monumental release for the iPad, this is what I mean: there are so many more options now, and all of them are accessible via multiple input methods, on a variety of iPad models, with support for external monitors, and with support for different window layouts in different iPad orientations. The breadth of available configurations and interactions is, frankly, astounding…and overwhelming at first.

And we’re not done yet!

The Menu Bar

With iPadOS 26, following years of concepts and wish lists, Apple has added a whole menu bar to the iPad that is reminiscent of the Mac but also uniquely tuned for touch and pointer access.

The new menu bar in iPadOS 26.

The new menu bar is not always visible on screen (which is one of my complaints for now, but more on that in a bit), but you can reveal it by swiping down from the top of any window’s title bar or by hitting Globe + M on a Magic Keyboard. The menu bar is the new place for users to discover app-related commands organized into categories as well as their associated keyboard shortcuts, replacing the keyboard “cheat sheet” panel that Apple introduced in iOS 9 and redesigned in iPadOS 15.

Not only does the menu bar serve as the new home for discovering and learning app commands (a longstanding limitation of iPad apps), but it can also be used to find and activate system-level commands for text editing, window management, and more.

I mean, just take a look at the full glory of commands for managing windows, along with keyboard shortcuts to quickly center windows or move them to a specific half of the screen, and tell me you’re not smiling. There are dedicated menu entries and keyboard shortcuts for everything.

Can you believe this is an iPad now?

If you’re a Mac user, you may argue that the iPadOS 26 menu bar isn’t really a menu bar in the sense that you cannot put menu bar apps or, as of macOS Tahoe, your favorite controls in there. You’d be right, and I hope that’s something Apple will consider for the future of the menu bar on iPadOS; there’s enough space on an iPad Pro to make the menu bar always visible and add controls on either side of an app’s commands. Still, even only as a launcher for app and system commands, I’ve greatly benefitted from the menu bar this summer.

The menu bar in Lire.

The menu bar shines with modern iPad apps that have been optimized for the platform: in Lire, it’s a great way to enable and discover different view modes or article actions; in Drafts, I can trigger actions from the menu bar; in CARROT Weather, I can use it to search for or cycle between locations.

You can run actions from Drafts’ menu bar.

I also appreciate how the menu bar’s ‘Help’ menu – which you can use to type the name of an app’s commands and trigger them – can be instantly activated with Command + Shift + ? to focus into the search field and start typing.

Searching for commands from the menu bar’s Help menu.

Will the menu bar see widespread adoption among third-party iPad apps? That’s part of a bigger problem with the iPad’s third-party ecosystem that I’ll touch upon later. I hope it will, and I hope Apple will continue to merge the functionalities of the menu bar between macOS and iPadOS.

This is a good start, but the iPadOS menu bar could – and should – be so much more.

Stage Manager Lives On

Not only did Apple keep Stage Manager around for iPadOS 26, but Stage Manager is now…pretty great, even?

Enabling Stage Manager from Control Center.

In another instance of taking a page from macOS, Apple has kept Stage Manager alive in iPadOS 26 and turned it into an optional “visual” mode whose sole purpose is to organize your windows, just like on the Mac. Regardless of whether you enable Stage Manager or not (it’s off by default), iPadOS 26’s windowing engine stays the same; you can always open a larger number of windows than before and freely move them around or resize them however you want. The only thing Stage Manager does now is organize windows into sets of functional workspaces that you can mix and match as you please. Stage Manager no longer dictates how many windows you can open or where they should go on screen.

Stage Manager for iPadOS 26 uses the same windowing engine as regular windowed mode.

As a result, I now enjoy working with Stage Manager on my iPad Pro. When I feel like I need to split my windows into separate workspaces – such as one for work and another for social media apps – I can enable Stage Manager and use the familiar strip of window thumbnails on the left side of the screen to group related windows together. I very much agree with this change.

Rather than being the windowing system, Stage Manager is a feature on top of windowing; it’s optional, and I think it fulfills its destiny on the iPad now. Nothing else is new about it, and I’m guessing it’ll likely be replaced with something else at some point. For now, this is the best version of Stage Manager Apple has ever shipped; if you haven’t used it in a while, now’s the time to give it another chance.

Working with Windows (and Their Issues)

iPadOS 26’s windowing has been a game changer for me this summer. I’ve researched and written the majority of this review on my iPad Pro running iPadOS 26, which I’ve used both standalone and plugged into an external monitor at my desk. The versatility afforded by having more than four windows open at once, especially when working on my larger ASUS display, has allowed me to spend less time thinking about iPad multitasking and more time actually, you know, getting work done.

I know, right? What a concept. Mac users have known this about classic windowing for ages; for iPad users like myself, not having to worry about Split View or Stage Manager’s weird rules has been liberating.

On my M4 iPad Pro, I was able to consistently use 12 windows at once before the system ran out of memory and ejected a window from the workspace back into the app switcher. Apple spent years working on this new windowing engine for iPad apps, and it shows. On so many occasions over the past three months, I found myself working with my iPad Pro at my desk and realizing that the novelty of iPadOS 26 had worn off (in a good way!) and I was working with 10 windows at once without even realizing it. The system Apple created is both powerful and intentionally not opinionated. At long last, if you know what you’re doing and want to make an absolute mess of your workspace with a barrage of overlapping windows, you can. If you’re a power user, Apple no longer holds your hand and tries to steer you away from complexity; instead, iPadOS 26 embraces the potential for complexity – because that’s how serious work happens sometimes.

That’s not to say iPadOS 26 doesn’t give you the tools to manage its new complex nature. With the updated, Mac-like triangular system pointer, it’s easier to click on small UI elements and precisely press buttons. The pointer no longer magnetically snaps to nearby interface elements, but it still helpfully shows what you’ve hovering over thanks to the delightful animations of Liquid Glass. And in another nice touch, if you’re working between an external monitor and the iPad’s screen or have a wallpaper that makes the pointer hard to find at a glance, you can now “shake” the pointer (again, just like the Mac) to temporarily make it huge and easy to spot.

Thiccc pointer.

I’ve spent several days doing intensive work on my iPad that involved multiple Safari windows, Notion, Claude, Shortcuts, and various PDF documents open at once, often with some Oasis playing in the background. What I’ve appreciated most about iPadOS 26 is the combination of two approaches: the “you’re on your own” philosophy when it comes to desktop-style windowing and the guided assistance of Apple’s multitasking tools.

Ultimately, what I like about windowing is that I am in control of what I want to make my workspace look like, not some designer at Apple. If I want to place a window so that half of it is actually off screen and only a portion of it is visible, I can. I’ve done this over and over with the Shortcuts app and a shortcut I created that taps into Claude Sonnet 4’s support for 1M-token context windows. This shortcut searches my entire archive of iOS reviews, but it takes about a minute to run and give me a response. When I was writing and had a question about an old version of iOS or iPadOS, I could leave the shortcut running in a tiny window, drag it off screen so that I could only see a portion of the editor as a way to confirm that it was still running, and wait for its response.

By keeping the Shortcuts editor slightly off-screen, I can keep an eye on an ongoing API call.

Similarly, if I want to make Ivory iPhone-sized but take advantage of Notion’s desktop-style layout to its full extent, I can. And when I feel like I need to make more sense out of my windows, I can quickly tile them into quarters for a more organized view. If you’ve ever used a traditional desktop OS, all of this quickly becomes second nature and feels like the obvious solution that Apple should have shipped years ago.

That’s not to say that the system is perfect. Due to the design of iPadOS 26 (and windows in general on Apple’s platforms), I often find it hard to understand where, exactly, I’m supposed to grab a window by the “title bar” to drag it around. I almost wish that Apple offered a system like the great Swift Shift app for Mac, which lets you hold down a keyboard modifier and drag anywhere inside a window to move it.

Where am I supposed to grab a window?

Likewise, I would like to see stronger drop shadows and/or borders around windows. I often find it hard to distinguish one window from another, especially when a bunch of white windows are overlapping.

I also wish the system gave advanced users more tools to manage windows and details about them. For instance, iPadOS 26 doesn’t tell you whether you’re approaching system memory constraints when working with lots of windows at once. If you run out of RAM, one of those windows will simply be terminated and jettisoned back into the app switcher. I wish there was some kind of way for me to know that rather than having to guess where one of my windows went.

Furthermore, iPadOS 26 loves opening new windows: by default, apps now create a new window for each document that you open, which is great – until you’re drowning in windows. I think the modern iPad user’s life would be a lot easier if these two things happened:

Apple should open up a window management API for third-party developers to create their own window managers and window utilities, just like they can on macOS. Imagine if, with the right permission model, I could download the equivalent of BetterTouchTool, Moom, or Mission Control Plus from the App Store for iPad!

There should be Shortcuts actions to control windows and script multitasking to your liking. The Mac version of Shortcuts has long featured actions to find and control windows. These actions are nowhere to be seen in iPadOS, an omission that is all the more irritating now that the iPad and Mac’s windowing systems are so similar to each other.

If we consider iPadOS 26 a new beginning for the iPad, these are the typical growing pains for a platform that just received support for classic windowing and multitasking. The disappointment grows stronger, of course, when you realize that the iPad is 15 years old.

Regardless, working with iPadOS 26’s windows makes me feel like my hands are no longer tied behind my back. I can open a whole bunch of windows and make them overlap, and when I’m done, I can easily close them all and go back to using an iPad like a normal tablet. That’s the strength of the device and what, fortunately, Apple realized with iPadOS 26’s windowing: it’s in the iPad’s own nature to be a modular computer that can adapt to different workflows.

When considered through that lens, iPadOS 26’s windowing may have been inspired by macOS, but the iPad’s hardware makes it the best flavor of windowing Apple’s ever built.

Local Capture and Podcasting

There are aspects of iPadOS 26 beyond multitasking that I want to cover in this review. First up is local capture, another feature I always wanted to have on the iPad, and which I also thought Apple would never add.

With local capture, I can now use my iPad Pro to record audio and video podcasts with the setup I’ve been using for the past decade. When I’m on a Zoom call, iPadOS can record my local audio and video tracks from a connected microphone and camera, saving them to a single audio/video file. As I and others have widely documented over the years, this has historically been a problem for podcasters; due to the iOS/iPadOS audio and video architecture, as soon as you jumped on a VoIP call, you could no longer record inputs from connected devices. As a result, we’ve long resorted to workarounds that typically involved offloading the recording task to external hardware and then importing those files back into iPadOS and the Files app. It was expensive, time-consuming, and finicky at best.

This is all changing with local capture, a feature enabled by a toggle in Control Center that takes care of the entire process end to end. You can activate local capture before starting a call, in which case the recording will start automatically as soon as the call becomes active, or you can start a call and then turn on local capture manually in Control Center. In either case, the result doesn’t change: you’ll end up with a file (saved in your Downloads folder) that contains the video track from a connected camera and the audio track from a connected microphone. That’s all there is to it.

Local Capture only exists in Control Center, which is a little odd.

By default, iPadOS 26 saves both the audio and video tracks in a single MP4 video file. If you don’t want the video, you can long-press the Local Capture control to expand it and flip an audio-only toggle that will just save the local audio track.

I tested local capture for episodes of AppStories and Unwind, and it worked as advertised. When I was done, all I had to do was take the file and upload it to Google Drive so John could edit it and mix the podcast episode. I didn’t have to record video and audio separately on my Sony camera and audio interface; iPadOS’ local capture took care of everything and allowed me to stay on our Zoom call at the same time.

Local Capture saves files in your downloads folder.

Local capture works, but as things stand now, I wouldn’t trust it for recording my four weekly podcasts, for a variety of reasons – both technical and conceptual.

Conceptually speaking, I don’t love the idea that local capture is a toggle in Control Center rather than a full-blown app or system-wide audio recording layer. Reducing something so vital for a podcaster down to a mere toggle in Control Center makes it look cheap and like an afterthought.

From a technical standpoint, having local capture hidden in Control Center also makes it hard to see what is happening behind the scenes when you’re recording.

When I’m producing my shows, I like to see that the recording session is still happening, how much time has passed, and so forth. Local capture doesn’t show any of this, and because it’s hidden away in Control Center, I have to hide the apps I’m currently using on the iPad to see whether or not it’s still active. And since Control Center cannot be invoked on external displays, I can’t easily check in on local capture when I’m recording podcasts at my desk.

I also ran into issues when recording podcasts with my audio interface connected to the iPad. As you can tell from this episode of Unwind, my gain was extremely hot, and I didn’t sound great. My audio interface was set up the same way that I’ve been using it every week for years when recording on my Mac. For some reason, those settings don’t work well with local capture on the iPad. And because Apple does not expose any preferences for local capture, there’s no such thing as a “gain slider” that I can tweak to adjust my input’s gain or test what it sounds like. In fact, there is no Apple-made way to test local capture at all except jumping on a VoIP call! That’s not to mention a third-party developer API: apps like Audio Hijack still cannot exist on the iPad despite the availability of local capture. It is, literally, just a Control Center toggle.

Apple should also offer more options for creators. I understand that the company wanted to ship a highly optimized, one-click version of this feature that doesn’t require you to understand anything about file formats, encodings, or folder locations. But I also think that when you’re shipping a functionality specifically targeting podcasters (as called out by Apple at WWDC), you have to meet them halfway with some additional degree of control. For example, I’d like to:

Choose whether I want to record a single file with audio and video or separate files for each track,

Choose the file extension and encoding used for the recording,

Have a page in the Settings app where I can select a destination folder and set basic properties for file naming criteria, and

Start local capture with an automation in the Shortcuts app.

In the grand scheme of things, I guess I should just be happy that Apple is finally acknowledging the existence of podcasters who want to record their shows on an iPad, and I absolutely am. But as we know, podcasters are a nitpicky bunch, and there’s plenty more that Apple could do to grow local capture beyond a toggle in Control Center.

Local capture is a good addition to iPadOS, but it doesn’t change the fact that an iPad still can’t play multiple sources of audio at the same time, that there is no Mac-like settings panel for controlling input and output levels, and that third-party developers can’t take advantage of local capture. I hope this feature gets iterated on quickly and not forgotten about for the next few years.

Other iPadOS Improvements

Here’s a collection of other iPad-specific improvements I want to call out:

Resizable Columns

In apps that support iPadOS’ native multi-column mode, you can now resize the sidebar on the left side as well as the column in the middle of the screen.

Resizing columns in Lire.

You can test this with apps like Mail and Lire. Move your pointer to the edge of the sidebar or column, and the pointer’s shape will change to a resize control, allowing you to make the sidebar slightly larger or freely resize the middle column. I like this change a lot.

Files Improvements

I’ll have more to say about this in the Apps chapter, but the Files app is getting some fantastic changes in iOS and iPadOS 26 that improve upon the issues I outlined last year.

The app’s list view now supports resizable columns and collapsible folders. These features have existed for years on the Mac, and I’m glad to see them on iPad too.

Files for iPad supports adding additional columns to list view, too.

My favorite addition to Files for iPad, however, is – at long last – the ability to add your favorite folders to the Dock. You can add a folder to the Dock by right-clicking on it and selecting the ‘Add to Dock’ option from the context menu or by simply dragging it into the Dock. Once it’s there, you can click on a folder anywhere in iPadOS to expand it inline and preview its contents, which you can then open, copy, delete, or drag away from the folder without having to open the Files app at all. It also works the other way around: if you want to save a new file into one of your favorite folders in the Dock, you can just drop it there to instantly add it.

Adding a folder to the dock.

This feature is excellent, and what I love about it is that it’s configurable, too. You can choose to open folders in the Dock with a “fan” layout or as a grid; there are sorting options, and you can apply sorting or view settings on a per-folder basis. For instance, I have my ‘Temp Files’ folder set to fan mode, while my Downloads folder opens as a grid.

Fan mode. I love the animation when you’re scrolling the list of documents.

Dock options for folders.

Grid mode.

There are still plenty of features missing from the Files app (smart folders, Shortcuts-based quick actions, batch renaming, etc.), but between these iPad-specific additions and others I’ll cover in the Apps chapter, I think we’re on the right track with this app now.

New Apps: Journal and Preview

I’ll talk more about Preview in the Apps chapter, and John will cover Journal extensively in his macOS Tahoe review, but here’s the gist: Preview is Quick Look on steroids, and it’s now available on both the iPhone and iPad; meanwhile, Journal is graduating from being iPhone-only to a cross-platform utility, and in addition to iCloud sync, it also supports handwriting and sketches with the Pencil on iPad.

I’m not a Journal user, so I’ll leave the rest to John. But I can say that I like the addition of Preview as a system app a lot, especially on iPad because of the Apple Pencil. The app can do all the things you could previously do in Files and Quick Look, such as browsing or annotating PDFs, but by offering a central place to do it all, Preview is more intuitive than before. The app is a good showcase of the improved Liquid Glass appearance for the document browser, and its share sheet – like Safari’s first did in iOS 13 – lets you pick multiple formats for exporting documents by clicking an ‘Options’ button at the top.

The new Preview app for iPad.

On iPad, Preview uses a right sidebar to display an inspector panel for the current document:

Preview’s inspector pane.

I also appreciate that Preview is a handy image editor in addition to being a PDF viewer. You can create an image based on the contents of the clipboard from the app’s main screen, and you can make basic edits to images such as drawing on them, resizing and copying them, and more.

Finally, I have to mention the Easter egg hidden in plain sight in Preview for iPad. This is totally unnecessary and quintessential old-school Apple at the same time: if you want to see a perfect demo of the Liquid Glass rendering engine and lensing effect, grab the magnification loupe from the app’s main screen and drag it around.

You’ll thank me later.

Using the iPad mini, Again

I want to quickly mention how surprising and refreshing it has been to use iPadOS 26 on an iPad mini. I did not expect the update to be an enjoyable or productive experience on Apple’s most diminutive tablet; and yet, not only does iPadOS 26 with multiple windows run well on it, but it also serves as a strong showcase of iPadOS’ inherent touch-first nature.

I’ve been testing iPadOS 26 on Apple’s latest iPad mini, and I haven’t had any issues opening 7–8 windows in the same workspace at once in windowed mode. Obviously, due to the physical constraints of Apple’s 8” tablet, iPadOS 26 does not yield the same expansive windowing experience as, say, a 13” iPad Pro. Windows are small, and unless you enlarge them so they overlap with each other, you’re going to end up with a bunch of iPhone-sized windows floating on screen at once.

Small iPad, small windows.

And that’s exactly the point. iPadOS 26 on the iPad mini makes me appreciate touch interactions with iPad multitasking more than the iPad Pro, which I tend to always leave in the Magic Keyboard in laptop mode. As my third place device, the iPad mini is the kind of tablet that is designed to be held, touched, and directly manipulated. For this reason, I keep getting the feeling that the combination of iPadOS 26 and the iPad mini is like a peek into the future of a foldable Apple device that I can hold in my hands while multitasking at the same time.

The iPad mini with iPadOS 26 feels fundamentally different from the iPad Pro. It does not replace the productivity powerhouse that is the M4 iPad Pro, but rather complements it at the end of the day when I want to catch up on the news and social media. An iPhone does not let me multitask the same way; an iPad Pro – even the 11” model – does not feel as portable as the iPad mini, either. iPadOS 26 on the iPad mini feels like a separate branch of iPadOS: it unlocks the kind of delight that is often overshadowed by the iPad Pro’s pursuit of laptop features. Indeed, it makes me wonder if I’m witnessing a public preview of what a foldable Apple device may feel like next year.

The performance of iPadOS 26 on the iPad mini is a testament to Apple’s work on the system’s new windowing engine, but it’s also a reminder that iPadOS is not monolithic. Now more than ever, iPadOS 26 feels like a new beginning for an OS that can be as powerful as a desktop and as portable as a phone, but greater than the sum of those two parts.

What Is Still Missing from iPadOS

As it’s clear by now, Apple has made a lot of progress with iPadOS from where we left the company last year. But that does not mean there is nowhere left for the iPad’s software to go. In addition to the missing features I’ve shared above, here’s a grab bag of additional items I’d like to see Apple address in this release cycle and beyond, ideally with iPadOS 27:

There is still no real “desktop mode” on external displays. When I connect my iPad Pro to my monitor, the Home Screen and Control Center are only accessible from the iPad Pro’s display. I’d love to be able to set my external monitor as the primary display for the iPad, allowing me to use widgets and access Control Center from there.

Clamshell mode is still nowhere to be found. This one is likely related to the aforementioned missing feature: if an external monitor can’t be set as the primary one with access to key iPadOS functionalities, then we can’t expect to use the iPad Pro when closed in clamshell mode. This feels like an obvious next step for iPadOS now.

Animations still feel slower compared to macOS. Despite all the multitasking improvements this year, it still feels like everything on iPadOS takes a fraction of a second too long to complete. The Mac feels snappier when it comes to opening windows, invoking Spotlight, and generally navigating the UI. I’d like to see Apple make the entire iPadOS interface a little bit faster with speedier animations.

Where is the new Spotlight? I suppose that it’s a good practice to “always leave them wanting more”, but I’m so incredibly jealous of the Spotlight overhaul on macOS this year. A clipboard manager and deeper integration with Shortcuts? I really hope this is in the cards for iPadOS 27.

A Persistent Absence of Apps

My enthusiasm for iPadOS 26 and the work that has gone into windowing, local capture, and other enhancements like the menu bar and Files improvements should not be confused for an implicit acceptance of the iPad’s other, ongoing limitations.

The reality is that despite its dozens of improvements, iPadOS 26 is not a miracle update that suddenly turns iPadOS into a 1:1 match for macOS. The reason is simple: while Apple can control the operating system and change it however they like, they cannot control the third-party app ecosystem and magically ensure that all the apps you can use on a Mac are now available on iPad as well.

This is the problem I wrote about a few months ago in my story about the iPad’s “sweet” solution. Without rehashing that article, the crux of the problem here is that for a variety of technical, political, and financial reasons over the years, the iPadOS app ecosystem simply can’t match the flexibility of the Mac’s. There are more indie and power user apps on the Mac than there are on the iPad. And even when the iPad does have a native app equivalent for a particular service, it’s often a glorified version of its iPhone app that cannot match the design and feature set of the desktop version.

As a result, whenever I want to work with Notion, an LLM, a terminal, or my email inbox on my iPad, I often have to use a web app instead of a native iPad app. That’s not ideal, and there’s nothing iPadOS 26 can do to suddenly fix that state of affairs.

That is, in fact, another lens we should consider iPadOS 26 through: you can have the best multitasking experience for the most powerful modular computer in the world, but there’s very little you can do with it if your favorite app doesn’t have a good iPadOS client…or even one at all.

Let me give you a frame of reference. At the moment of writing this, I have received 112 emails from third-party developers who are releasing new or updated apps for iOS 26. Of those 112 emails, only two of them are about iPad apps with iPadOS-specific enhancements. My question is simple: who’s left making highly-specialized and optimized iPad apps at this point? What happened to all the developers who used to design iPad-specific user interfaces for hybrid experiences that were somewhere in between an iPhone and Mac app?

Increasingly, and especially when it comes to productivity software, it seems like there’s a missing middle of prosumer apps that are no longer being made for iPad, with iPhone apps or web apps sucking most oxygen out of the App Store. Apple will have to do something completely different from a windowing engine to turn that ship around. Unfortunately, I’m afraid it may be a little late for that.

The Future of iPadOS

Despite some lingering issues about the viability of the platform for third-party apps, the reality is that iPadOS 26 makes me want to work from the iPad again, even when I could have more choice in apps and automations on macOS. That says something about the nature of this operating system, which I continue to see as Apple’s most exciting and unique work in a long time.

iPadOS 26 makes me want to work from the iPad again.

I’ve written this on several occasions before: there’s something special about working with a device that can morph from tablet to laptop or desktop workstation, and vice versa. In a way, the shape-shifting nature of the iPad is a perfect match for Liquid Glass and its fluid interface. iPadOS 26 feels like the logical conclusion for a platform that needs to accommodate deeply different use cases: with a non-mandatory windowing system that borrows from the long tradition of the Mac, Apple successfully managed to have its cake and eat it too. You can still use an iPad like an iPad if you want to, or you can use it like a Mac. And the two modes aren’t mutually exclusive.

With iPadOS 26, we’re seeing the first sign of a massive change that I’m convinced will turn out to be extra relevant in the near future: Apple figured out how to make a hybrid computer that is true to itself in both hardware and software. By and large, no matter which mode you want to use your iPad in now, there are no compromises. An iPad running iPadOS 26 can be a fantastic tablet and a great laptop as well. Having tried a whole bunch of Windows and Android tablets over the years, let me tell you: only Apple is making this kind of computer now, and everything else sucks. This market is only Apple’s to lose.

iPadOS 26 also reveals an underlying narrative that will deserve careful exploration in the future: a single iPad app can now have wildly different layouts or “postures”. This feels like the sort of characteristic that may come in handy for a potential foldable device. With iPadOS 26, there is no longer a single concept of what “a true iPad app” should be like.

There’s always going to be something for iPad users to wish for. In previous years, I would have said, “These features are never going to happen”. But having experienced iPadOS 26 and witnessed Apple’s realignment of the platform and the company’s commitment to it, I feel much more optimistic.

The increased flexibility of iPad multitasking, inspired by the Mac but still rooted in the iPad’s touch-driven interactions, makes it feel like age-old shackles have been taken off the platform, which is now ready to soar to new heights.

I don’t know how long this feeling will last, but for now: hello iPad, it’s good to be back.

Apps

Given the growing number of built-in Apple apps, regional restrictions for certain features, the cross-platform nature of those apps, and the simultaneous release of iOS, iPadOS, and macOS 26, we think it’s only logical to split coverage of apps between my review and John’s review of macOS. We debuted this approach last year, and readers seemed to like it.

For the past few years, we’ve each felt like we were doing double the work to cover the same apps and features on two distinct platforms in two separate stories. This made sense years ago, when the Mac didn’t have the same apps as iOS and region-locked features weren’t as common, but it doesn’t apply to our current reality anymore.

This year, you’ll find the following apps covered in John’s upcoming review of macOS Tahoe:

FaceTime

Games

Journal

Maps

Notes

Passwords

Podcasts

I’ll be covering the rest here. Let’s dive in.

Camera

While I may not be an “average user” of most iOS features because of my job, I absolutely think I’m the most average user of Apple’s Camera app. I use the Camera like most people do: I don’t fumble around with advanced settings; I never fully figured out the deal with Photographic Styles; I have no idea how to take advantage of RAW file formats; I just like to open the camera to take pictures, and the most tweaking you’ll see me do is tapping the lens buttons to switch zoom levels. Very frequently, I take silly videos of my dogs. I tried using an iPhone 16 Plus as my main iPhone for a while and eventually switched back to the 16 Pro Max – not because I’m a professional photographer; I just missed the 5× camera too much.

Because of all this, I’m very into the much-needed simplification of the Camera UI in iOS 26. With the redesign, Apple decided to streamline the Camera app and elevate the two capture modes people use the most: photo and video. Gone is the scrollable row of modes above the shutter button always shown by default; when you open the camera now, it defaults to showing you just two tabs for photo and video modes.

The simplified Camera UI in iOS 26.

This is the right decision. The other modes are still there. The Liquid Glass segmented control hints at their presence by briefly expanding when switching modes, and you can always scroll the row of items to switch to other modes like portrait and slow-mo. The Camera app is also a good showcase of another subtle change Apple introduced with Liquid Glass: the Home indicator at the bottom of iPhone apps is hidden by default, allowing apps to feel more spacious than before. The Home bar still briefly appears on screen when you first launch an app, but then it disappears again.

Swiping across the new camera controls.

The simplification of the Camera app doesn’t stop at fewer tabs for shooting modes, though. Apple took advantage of Liquid Glass to condense other controls into sub-menus, leaving only the essentials always visible by default and making the secondary ones bigger and easier to use.

At the top of the screen, you’ll now only see two items: resolution on the left and a toolbar with night mode, flash, and more settings on the right. The most important change is in the “overflow” menu for all other settings, which is also mapped to a swipe up on the viewfinder. Tap the six dots in the upper-right corner or swipe up anywhere on the camera, and you’ll get a brand new Liquid Glass menu for all other camera options:

This is so much more intuitive than the old narrow strip of buttons! Each option is clearly labeled and easier to tap, and there are beautiful animations that playfully interact with the Liquid Glass material and content underneath in real time. Select any item from this menu, and it will elegantly morph into the related sub-menu with dedicated controls. If you’re looking for the perfect Liquid Glass demo to show off what Apple built in iOS 26, this is it.

Interacting with the Camera app in iOS 26.

You can long-press the night mode and flash icons to reveal a sub-menu with settings for both.

On balance, I think Apple has done a solid job simplifying the default UI state of the Camera app without removing any functionality for advanced users who need additional controls. From my perspective, the Camera app had gotten too complex for its own good; not everyone needs to be a professional photographer, including those who buy a ‘Pro’ iPhone model every year.

There are some other changes in the Camera app I want to highlight. First up is a new technology Apple is debuting this year that allows the system to detect if the iPhone’s lenses are smudged. If so, you’ll get a message in the Camera app telling you to clean them in order to get the clearest possible photo.

In Settings ⇾ Camera ⇾ Camera Control ⇾ Customize, you can now choose the controls that are available when navigating Camera Control’s list of items inside the Camera app. Personally, I only ever use Camera Control to open the app, but it’s nice to see Apple adding some personalization options here.

Customizing Camera Control.

Lastly, I’ve already covered AirPods’ superior audio recording capabilities in iOS 26 in a separate article on MacStories earlier this year, but I want to mention another AirPods integration that is new in this update: you can now use AirPods as a remote shutter for the Camera app.

Using AirPods as a camera remote.

By default, you can press and hold the stem of an AirPod while inside the Camera app to take a picture or record a video, depending on which mode is selected. When you press and hold, you’ll see a three-second timer in the camera, then the selected action will be performed. This is particularly handy for group shots and self-portraits when the iPhone is far away or you don’t want to set a timer on the phone itself.

You can also adjust the behavior of this feature in Settings. Under the new Camera Remote page of the AirPods preferences in the Settings app, you can choose to only press once to control the camera. If you enable that, media playback controls won’t be available when wearing AirPods and using the Camera app, whereas with the press and hold mode, Siri gestures won’t be available.

Clock

There are two notable changes to the Clock app in addition to a Liquid Glass redesign (a common refrain throughout this chapter): an updated look for the alarm clock on the Lock Screen and the ability to set a custom snooze duration.

In the ‘Edit Alarm’ screen, there is a new ‘Snooze Duration’ field that lets you set a custom snooze in one-minute increments from 1 to 15 minutes. I don’t like snoozing my alarms, so this feature isn’t really for me, but I think a lot of people will like the addition.

The new snooze options in iOS 26.

When an alarm goes off on the Lock Screen, it also has a new look in iOS 26 with two extra-chunky ‘Stop’ and ‘Snooze’ buttons at the bottom of the screen.

The new alarm clock UI on the Lock Screen.

My understanding is that some folks don’t like the placement of two equally sized buttons at the bottom of the Lock Screen. I am not one of those folks. I always disliked the small ‘Stop’ button at the bottom of the screen when waking up in the morning; I’m glad the new one is larger and easier to tap.

Honestly, though, this doesn’t really matter for me. I’m lucky enough to have my dog Ginger wake me up – right on schedule – every morning with a kiss on my face because she wants to eat and nothing beats a dog’s internal clock. iOS 26’s Clock app ain’t got nothing on Ginger.

Files

In addition to the features I mentioned for the Files app in the iPadOS chapter, I want to highlight the ability to set custom folder icons and colors, as well as Apple’s new ‘Open With’ menu.

Customizable folders are an interesting spin on Files’ and Finder’s longstanding support for file system tags, and they’re presented in the 26 line of OSes with a user-friendly interface that makes folders visually stand out. Long-press a folder in the Files app and select the new ‘Customize’ option, and you’ll be able to choose a tag and a symbol. The tag is the usual colored indicator that now gets applied to the entire folder and makes it look, say, yellow or green instead of the default blue. The symbol options appear to be a selection of SF Symbols that, unfortunately, cannot be searched, but you can also pick any emoji as well. Once you’ve customized a folder, your color and icon selections will sync with iCloud Drive and show up on iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS.

Customizing folders in the Files app.

I like this change a lot. I’ve been able to make folders I frequently use appear more prominent in the Files app’s grid view, and the addition of custom symbols is a nice touch.

At long last, Apple is providing a solution for document defaults in iOS 26. I’ve complained about the Files app’s confusing system for picking which apps could open which file types many times over the years. In iOS 26, Apple is solving this problem with the most obvious solution: a user-configurable ‘Open With’ menu.

This menu works in two distinct ways. You can choose to open a specific file with a specific app by long-pressing it and picking a compatible app under the new ‘Open With’ option of the context menu. This action is temporary and specific to the selected file. You can still choose to preview a file with Quick Look, but if you know you want to open that particular item with a specific app that one time, you can now do that.

Opening a specific file in a specific app one time.

If you then decide that, going forward, you no longer want to play the document type lottery with the Files app, you can set a permanent default for specific files or specific file types. To do this, long-press a file and select the ‘Get Info’ option. In the inspector, you’ll see a new entry labeled ‘Always Open With’. Here, you can choose which app you want to use to always open either the selected file or all files with that document type. In my case, I wanted to set Runestone to always open .js files on my iPhone, and iOS 26 finally allowed me to do that.

Changing the default app for a file type.

I’ve been complaining about this stuff since iOS 6. In case it’s not clear enough, this is what an iPhone file manager looked like at the time. We didn’t even have a Files app.

Yeah, I don’t miss this one bit.

So forgive my enthusiasm when it took Apple 13 years – a third of my life – to realize they needed a menu to let users control which apps are supposed to open which documents.

Phew.

Messages

Apple’s steady re-implementation of popular WhatsApp and Telegram features, but with a nicer design, marches on as always in the Messages app. This year, there are better features for group chats we’ve already seen elsewhere, chat wallpapers that WhatsApp users should be familiar with, and other features that – due to Apple’s de facto texting monopoly in the U.S. – I believe most American users think never existed anywhere else before.

As always, Apple has more taste than those other companies, so even if they’re copying their features, they work and look better than the WhatsApp or Telegram counterparts ever did.

Conversation Updates

The entire Messages app has been redesigned for Liquid Glass: there’s a search bar at the bottom, floating buttons everywhere, and more compact UI elements that morph into buttons and toolbars depending on where you are in the app.

The most notable redesign is the conversation detail panel. In any conversation, tap on the person or group name at the top, and you’ll be taken to a redesigned page with new tabs for info, media, documents, links, and – new in iOS 26 – backgrounds.

The redesigned conversation detail page.

The new sections to browse attachments and links. Lots of Oasis going on in the group chat.

I like how you can scroll the new Photos segment of the detail page and even filter the gallery of media items shared in a conversation by type.

Aside from the fact that I prefer this tabbed view to access different conversation settings and shared items over iOS 18’s vertically stacked sections, we have to mention backgrounds because Apple seems very proud of this feature, and I think it’ll be popular with users. There is a selection of default “wallpaper styles” you can quickly apply as a background for your conversations, which will fundamentally alter the look of the Messages app’s transcript interface. The default backgrounds even support multiple modes. There are different types of “sky”, for instance, as well as light and dark versions of the “water” background that you can swipe through the same way you swipe through Lock Screens. I like how you can preview these before setting them, and I appreciate the way Liquid Glass elements in the transcript reflect and refract colors from the background.

Setting a chat background in iOS 26. You can also long-press an image in the transcript to instantly set it as a background.

You can also set your own photos as chat backgrounds or, God forbid, use Apple Intelligence’s Image Playground to create some sloppy “illustration” to torture your family with. My recommendation: use AI-generated iMessage wallpapers only in conversations with your enemies.

I’m too boring to use custom chat backgrounds and never have in WhatsApp. I also think they’ll be very popular with a lot of people, and they’re admittedly fun to use and tinker with.

If you don’t want to use conversation backgrounds, you can disable them in Settings ⇾ Apps ⇾ Messages ⇾ Conversation Backgrounds.

There are other, perhaps smaller, features of iMessage chats in iOS 26 worth mentioning. When sending a large attachment, a progress bar is now shown in the “bubble” for the contact or group at the top of the window.

You can now select a portion of text within a message. Long-press any text in the transcript and choose ‘Select’, and you’ll be able to select text within it instead of copying the whole thing.

Selecting text in Messages.

There are now typing indicators in group chats! WhatsApp has long offered this feature in groups, and I’m so happy this feature has been implemented in iMessage too. I need to see all those people who start typing a message and then change their minds.

Also coming straight from WhatsApp: polls. If you’re in a group thread and want to make a shared decision about something, or if you want to poke fun at someone with an amusing set of interactive questions, you can now create and share polls for other participants to vote on. You can create a poll with multiple choices and send it in a group; then, as everybody votes, you can see the results reflected in real time in the transcript. At any point, you can long-press on the poll and view more details about who voted and who didn’t.

The new iMessage polls in iOS 26.

Anyone is able to add new options to the poll, so you can get into a fun little “war” with your friends about options that people can vote on. Apple Intelligence may also suggest polls when helpful, but I haven’t run into this feature myself. I don’t think I’m ever going to use polls in iMessage because most of my conversations with family and friends are happening in WhatsApp, but I suppose it’s good that Apple is reaching feature parity here as well.

And More…

Here’s everything else that’s changing in the Messages app this year:

Drafts filter. If you start writing a message but get interrupted by something else, Messages in iOS 26 lets you easily find it with a new drafts filter. In the main view of the app, tap the filter icon in the top-right corner, then select ‘Drafts’, and you’ll be able to see all the conversations where you began a message that wasn’t sent.

Screening and spam protection. The Messages app is joining the Phone app in adding screening and spam protection for unknown senders (which John will cover more extensively in his macOS review since it’s not available in Italy). With unknown sender screening in Messages, you can automatically move texts from people or businesses you don’t know into a separate section of the app and filter them out of the main view. This goes in tandem with on-device spam protection, which Apple says is powered by an updated model that should be more reliable than before.

With the unknown senders filter turned on, those texts will be hidden, and you won’t receive notifications for them. They’re placed in a dedicated area where you can manually approve specific unknown senders, and the approval will enable the contact across Phone, Messages, and FaceTime for future calls or texts. I have this feature turned off on my devices because I didn’t like the friction of going to a separate place and manually approving senders; since I don’t receive that much spam on a daily basis, I prefer to block the occasional spammer manually.

You can always enable or disable this feature by going to Settings ⇾ Apps ⇾ Messages and toggling the ‘Screen Unknown Senders’ switch. In a nice touch, you can choose to screen unknown senders but allow notifications for verification codes, and you can also apply additional third-party text message filters using apps like Truecaller.

Music

After a year spent using Spotify, I decided to switch back to Apple Music about a month ago for a variety of reasons:

I’m disgusted by the company’s tacit acceptance of so-called “AI Music” as long as it serves their algorithm;

I’m disgusted by the CEO’s investment in “AI weapons” (seriously: what the heck);

I missed Apple Music’s superior audio quality and lyrics feature. Lyrics are very important for my enjoyment of music, and I couldn’t stand Spotify’s lackluster availability and poor performance anymore.

So it’s quite nice to be back on Apple Music just as the app is getting a fresh Liquid Glass redesign, which I showcased in the Design chapter and like a lot. Beyond the fancy visuals of Liquid Glass, there are a handful of other changes to Music worth noting this year.

The first one is AutoMix, which intelligently mixes from one song into the next like a virtual DJ. I think this is going to be extremely popular with a huge swath of Apple Music subscribers. These seamless transitions between songs are powered by an algorithm that uses time stretching and beat matching at just the right time to move from one song to the next. I think Apple’s done an excellent job with it because, for the most part, you don’t notice AutoMix is on. That’s exactly the point.

AutoMix working in Apple Music.

When AutoMix is working, you’ll briefly see a “Mixing” message in Music’s Now Playing screen (where the audio quality label usually appears). If you don’t like this transition mode and want to go back to Crossfade (or use nothing at all), you can do so by going to Settings ⇾ Apps ⇾ Music ⇾ Song Transitions. I’m a fan of AutoMix, but I know some folks genuinely dislike it, so it’s only fair for Apple to offer a setting here.

My favorite addition to the Music app in iOS 26 is the ability to pin any item (an artist, album, or playlist) to the top of your library for easy access. Anytime you find something you want to pin for later, use the ‘Pin’ button in the context/overflow menu, and it’ll be saved at the top of the library – kind of like pinning a conversation in Messages.

Pins in the Music app. Pinned items also support “tap actions” to choose what Music should do when you tap on them.

Pins sync across devices via iCloud; on iPad, they’re readily available in the sidebar at the top of the Library section:

Pins in the iPad’s sidebar.

There are also Home Screen widgets for pinned items, available in both medium and large sizes:

Configured tap actions apply to pins in Home Screen widgets too, which means you can start playing or shuffling a playlist without even opening the Music app.

My only complaint about pins in Apple Music is that I can’t set more than six. What if I have 12 favorite items? What if I listen to a lot of music every day and want to pin 30 items? Apple shouldn’t decide how many favorites I have in life; users should be able to pin more than six items and make the pinned section as big as they want. Otherwise, this feature is great, and other music apps should copy it.

Also new in iOS and iPadOS 26, the Music app lets you create playlist folders and manage their contents without having to use a Mac. When tapping the ‘+’ button in the Playlists page, you can now choose between creating a playlist or a folder. Once you have at least one folder, you can long-press a playlist and use the new ‘Move to Folder’ option. I’ve created folders for all of Apple’s weekly mixes and the nine playlists I’ve shared over the years with my favorite songs from each year. I like how much more organized my library is now.

Playlist folders in the Music app. (On iPad, playlist folders can be expanded and collapsed in the sidebar.)

Rounding out the Music app’s update in iOS 26:

There is now a Live Radio widget for quick access to radio stations;

Apple Music Replay is now a fully native feature and no longer opens in a web view inside the Music app. This means that you can explore years, monthly stats, artists, and albums directly inside the Music app all year long – a much nicer experience than before and, at this point, something I find superior to Spotify’s Wrapped feature, which only appears for a limited time period at the end of the year.

Apple Music joins the rest of the system’s translation features with the ability to translate lyrics in other languages as well as lyrics pronunciation, which provides assistance for singing along to a language you don’t know well.

Replay is now a native feature of the Music app instead of an integrated web view.

Looking ahead at the future of Apple Music, it seems obvious to me that there’s going to be an Apple Intelligence angle here soon enough – where by “soon enough”, I mean “as soon as Apple has a model big and intelligent enough”.

Beats Music showed us the future 11 years ago.

If I were to guess, I’d say that Apple may want to tackle creation of natural language playlists and mixes first. Imagine if the company could bring back the dynamic nature of Beats Music’s old ‘The Sentence’ feature, but powered by an LLM that could be a lot more flexible and multilingual. I also imagine that Apple may want to consider natural language search (think Shazam-like discovery, but based on text descriptions of songs) and some kind of Apple Intelligence “daily mix” personalization that suggests the right music at the right time based on device signals and patterns during the day. None of these features are in iOS 26, but I’d be very surprised if they didn’t show up alongside a Siri LLM in Music for iOS 27.

Phone

I was recently explaining iOS 26 and Liquid Glass to a non-techie friend, and when I mentioned that the Phone app had a new look, she looked at me with a genuinely puzzled expression and asked, “What’s the Phone app?”

I think that says a lot about how people like me and my friend (we’re both in our mid-30s) – but also younger generations – think of the Phone app. Who wants to actually spend time in the Phone app? I call my mom or my mom calls me every day (I usually use Siri to call her), and the other phone calls I get are usually from spammers whom I ignore or hang up on. I do not actively spend time in the Phone app, and it hasn’t been on my Home Screen in more than a decade.

Still, in a move that epitomizes the aging nature of Apple’s leadership (no offense, it’s just biology and a fact), the Phone app is getting a big redesign in iOS 26 with a unified layout that combines your favorites, recents, and voicemails into a single view.

record scratch

Wait, wait a second. This is the design Apple tried with the Photos app last year, isn’t it? Let’s take a look:

Two takes on a unified layout, a year apart.

Well, sort of. In both iOS 18’s Photos app and iOS 26’s Phone app, Apple is trying to use a unified layout to embed multiple functionalities into the same page. I don’t mind the look of favorites at the top of the screen, and I never receive voicemails, so I’m not able to comment on how those look in this design. I just think it’s funny that, in the same year that Apple is getting rid of the unified layout in Photos (more on this in the next section), the company is also shipping a unified layout in the Phone app.

It seems Apple learned its lesson from last year’s criticized rollout of the unified Photos app: if you don’t want the unified layout in the Phone app, you can revert to the classic layout at any point.

Reverting to the classic layout.

As I mentioned before, I haven’t been able to test call screening because it wasn’t available for my region. I also couldn’t test new voicemail features (with summarization powered by Apple Intelligence), live translation, or SharePlay support for phone calls. (I would love to know who is actually doing this and why.) John will have more to share about the Phone app and these new intelligent features in his review of macOS Tahoe. I will note, however, that the Phone app is now available on iPad, so you can join Tim Cook and Eddy Cue in making old-school phone calls from your fancy tablet.

The new Phone app on iPad.

Photos

It’s fair to say that last year’s redesign of the Photos app didn’t go as planned. I liked it a lot – and still do – but the adoption of a unified layout has been heavily criticized on social media, Reddit, tech publications, and more. Anecdotally, all my IRL friends hated the look. So Apple listened to the majority of people and, in iOS 26, alongside introducing a Liquid Glass redesign, they went back to a tab bar that separates the Library from Collections.

The re-redesigned Photos app in iOS 26.

Photos is a great example of what I explained in the Design chapter: in previous years, an app with just two tabs at the bottom would have looked silly. With Liquid Glass and its compact, floating tab bars, it doesn’t. I’m not sure how I feel about the return of a pure grid view for my library with nothing else at the bottom; I miss the ability to see my Recent Days with highlights for each day under the grid. I’m sure that I’m in the minority here and most people will be happy to just have their grids back, but I wish Apple implemented the same approach as the Phone app here and offered a setting to choose between a classic and unified layout.

In any case, the Photos app has one of my favorite implementations of Liquid Glass’ visual effects because the content that scrolls underneath buttons and tab bars is so diverse. Scroll up in the grid, and the tab bar will morph into Liquid Glass segmented controls for the Years, Months, and All views, joined by a convenient search button in the bottom-right corner of the screen. If you like Liquid Glass, the Photos app is the best way to see how it interacts with colors and light.

The Liquid Glass effect looks beautiful in Photos.

While splitting collections back into their own separate view, Apple took this as an opportunity to add more layout options to the page. Using an ellipsis button at the top, you can now open a menu that lets you adjust the size for collections, choosing between larger tiles, a denser layout, and another option that emphasizes whatever you put in the top row. You can now also expand and collapse collections to make the overall layout even denser.

Also new in iOS 26, you can manually create photo shuffle wallpapers by selecting multiple items in the Photos app and choosing ‘Create Photo Shuffle Wallpaper’ from the share sheet. Doing so will bring up a Lock Screen creation UI inside Photos where you can see what the photo shuffle will look like before saving it.

Creating a photo shuffle wallpaper from selected photos.

My favorite addition to the Photos app this year isn’t really new. Apple advertises it as such, which is kind of odd, but there are objectively changes in this functionality that I appreciate. Let me explain.

Apple says that Photos in iOS 26 can now recognize events like concerts, sports, “and more” so that you can pull up details for the show or game right from the Info panel in Photos. Here’s what I wrote in September 2018 in my iOS 12 review:

There are two remarkable additions to Photos’ search and classification capabilities in iOS 12. The first one is a new built-in index of over 4 million public events that can automatically recognize photos taken at concerts, sporting events, and even festivals. Without having to do anything on my end, Photos recognized pictures taken at Justin Timberlake concerts in 2014 and 2018 (and suggested I share the most recent ones with my girlfriend, who was at the concert with me).

And in the associated footnote:

It’s unclear what database of events Apple is using, but it seems like only bigger events are understood by the app. More intimate concerts I went to in recent years, such as The Naked in Famous or The Shout Out Louds, which took place in smaller venues in Italy, couldn’t be searched for in Photos. On the other hand, the WWDC 2018 Bash was tagged as a “festival”, which seems fair given its location. If you go to concerts or other sporting events often, try to search for pictures taken there; you should be positively surprised.

The Photos app has long been able to tap into an unnamed database of public events. The feature is not debuting in iOS 26 – it’s evolving. Now, if Photos recognizes a public event (again, the database isn’t clear), it’ll put a ticket button in the bottom toolbar when viewing a photo. Tap it, and the Info panel will show you the event matched to that photo.

I’ve been able to test this feature with photos and videos I took at the Oasis concert in London on July 25. What’s really new in iOS 26 is the much nicer and more integrated experience Apple has built around a recognized event. In a dedicated page, you’ll find details for the date and venue, top songs and playlists for the artist on Apple Music, and even a calendar of upcoming events that you can browse and open inside Photos.

Notably, artists can embed special extras inside these pages in iOS 26. For Oasis, tapping an ‘Explore’ button reveals a page with bonus content that includes wallpapers and watch faces you can download to personalize your iPhone and Apple Watch.

In an interesting limitation, this feature cannot set wallpapers directly; it just saves images to the Photos app.

I know what you’re thinking: why isn’t this concert schedule and bonus content experience baked right into Apple Music, too? I have no idea, but I hope that this “new” Photos feature eventually finds its way to the Music app as well. This cross-pollination of services (Photos, Maps, Music, and Calendar) reminds me of Stocks’ integration with Apple News in iOS 12 and iOS 18’s integration between Notes and Calculator, and it’s something I want to see the company continue doing.

Preview

I covered Preview in the iPadOS chapter, but it deserves a second mention here, too, since it’s available on iPhone as well, and it’s a solid debut for a new system app that builds upon the long history of Preview for Mac and Quick Look’s integration in Files.

Preview is a document-based app on iOS, which means you can browse any location from the Files app to open images or PDFs in Preview. The app acts as an all-in-one collection of editing, auto-fill, and preview features that had been previously made available in Files and Quick Look. You can fill and rotate PDFs; you can rename and duplicate documents; and for the first time, you can also crop pages of PDFs.

Cropping PDF pages in Preview for iOS.

There isn’t a lot to cover here because you’ve seen a lot of these features and tools elsewhere in iOS and iPadOS before, just not in the same place, all at once. I appreciate the addition of an inspector panel for PDFs and images. On iPad, as we’ve seen, it’s a sidebar; on iPhone, it opens with a delightful Liquid Glass morphing transition from the bottom of the screen.

The Preview app won’t win any awards for the most innovative experience. At the same time, it’s long overdue, works well, and finally gives some clarity on how, exactly, you’re supposed to work with PDFs on an iPhone without downloading a third-party app.

Reminders

I’ve already mentioned Reminders’ integration with Apple Intelligence, but there are a couple of smaller enhancements to the app I want to cover here as well.

The most important one is the new control for quickly creating reminders that you can use in Control Center, on the Lock Screen, or via the Action button.

The new control to quickly create reminders from anywhere is terrific.

This control is an interactive snippet that supports keyboard input for task creation but also lets you interact with other elements of the window. You can change the list the task will be saved to, pick dates, select locations, and mark an item as flagged. This is a fantastic way to quickly create tasks from anywhere on iOS and iPadOS, and if you’re a Reminders user, I think you’ll be happy to have a method that is even faster than the Remind Me Faster app. Sadly, this control is based on private APIs, so apps like Things and Todoist won’t be able to offer a similar quick capture feature system-wide.

Reminders is also integrated with the Phone app now: swipe left on any recent call, and you’ll be able to set a callback reminder.

I have no more excuses for my mom’s missed calls!

Individual reminders can now be set to a specific time zone. Add a reminder with a due time, and you’ll get access to a ‘Time Zone’ field to set the time according to a different location’s time zone.

Changing the time zone for a reminder.

Reminders for iOS 26 also supports a manual time zone override in Settings ⇾ Apps ⇾ Reminders ⇾ Time Zone. By default, reminders automatically use the time zone of your location, but if you want to always set them to a different location, you can do so with the ‘Set Manually’ toggle.

Safari

With iOS 26 and Liquid Glass, Apple is changing the default layout of Safari with an even more compact address bar floating at the bottom of the screen. After upgrading to iOS 26, Safari’s existing ‘Bottom’ layout will be replaced by a new ‘Compact’ mode that turns the toolbar and address bar into a row of Liquid Glass controls that take up less screen space and, in the process, hide the share, bookmark, and tab buttons in a menu.

The new Safari layout, called ‘Compact’.

Fortunately, if you don’t want to use this layout, you can revert to the previous one in Settings. The ‘Bottom’ layout displays all existing controls but, rather than presenting them in an edge-to-edge toolbar at the bottom of the screen, they’re now contained in a floating “capsule” with a scroll edge effect at the bottom.

You can revert to the old Safari layout with the ‘Bottom’ option, which shows more controls at once.

The old ‘Single Tab’ top layout has been updated for Liquid Glass too and renamed ‘Top’:

No matter the layout you choose, when scrolling inside a webpage, Safari will always minimize the address bar into an element much smaller than before that is also made of Liquid Glass:

You can long-press the minimized address bar to access a context menu. (The visual glitch with the gray rectangle on the right is shipping in iOS 26 today.)

I’ve gone back and forth on this compact design over the summer. Initially, I deeply disliked how it hid the share and tabs buttons, which always required an extra tap. Over time, the more minimalistic look of the address bar has grown on me, and I like how webpages feel taller (and I can see more text at once) because of it. I’ve also gotten used to swiping up on the address bar to go back to the tabs view rather than always pressing the ‘All Tabs’ button. I recommend giving it a try, and if you don’t like it, Apple is keeping the older view mode around.

There are other nice quality-of-life improvements in Safari this year. With the compact layout enabled, you can press the ellipsis button and find a new option for quickly adding the current webpage to one of your bookmark folders. It’s not clear, however, how Safari picks the folder to surface at the top level here.

When a webpage is playing audio in a Safari tab, iOS and iPadOS 26 offer you the ability to mute and unmute the tab from the action menu:

Muting tabs in Safari. Notice the red mute icon on the tab thumbnail (right).

When you’re on a Google search results page and long-press the address bar, you’re now presented with separate buttons for copying the link of the page and copying the search terms you used:

Copying search terms in Google search results in Safari.

Lastly, Safari has an updated flow for saving websites to the Home Screen. In iOS and iPadOS 26, you can choose to save any webpage as a bookmark on the Home Screen (which will reopen in your default browser) or as an app.

The new flow for saving web apps to the Home Screen.

MacStories added as a web app to the Home Screen.

When saved as an app – regardless of whether the website supports PWAs or not – the selected website will open in full-screen, and you’ll see it in the app switcher. This is a nice feature, and clearly everyone should be saving MacStories as an app to their Home Screens now.

Shortcuts

There are two noteworthy changes to the Shortcuts app this year. One is the Use Model action, which I’ve covered in the Apple Intelligence chapter; the other is that I don’t know what Apple has done behind the scenes, but they’ve made the Shortcuts editor so much better.

I’m not sure if it’s Liquid Glass, or perhaps Shortcuts shedding some of its problematic SwiftUI in favor of UIKit, or a mix of both, but the reality is that editing long workflows in the Shortcuts editor no longer drives me insane in iOS 26. When I want to pick a Magic Variable and actions expand to reveal their outputs, the editor doesn’t jump around and lose my place anymore. The variable toolbar has been redesigned with Liquid Glass, and beyond looking nice, it feels much more stable and less glitchy than before.

It may not look so different from iOS 18, but the updated Shortcuts editor feels so much better to use in iOS 26.

There’s an overall sense of speed, reliability, and, as a result, trustworthiness that just wasn’t there with the old version of Shortcuts. It’s the kind of change that won’t get a mention in any press release, which few people will notice, but those who do will be thankful that someone at Apple took charge of this project. I know I am.

I’m a little bummed that Shortcuts for iOS and iPadOS didn’t get support for file and folder automations like the Mac version, but such is the ebb and flow of the Shortcuts app over time. The Mac version didn’t have personal automations for several years, and now that it does, they’re actually more powerful than the ones on iOS and iPadOS. We know Apple at this point: they always have to keep us wishing for more.

Interactive Snippets

One of the changes for third-party developers in Shortcuts that deserves a special mention is support for interactive snippets. In iOS 26, developers can create visual actions that, when invoked, can embed interactive buttons and toggles with UIs provided by the apps themselves. This way, users can perform actions in an interactive snippet that looks like a third-party app without having to actually open the app.
I have two favorite third-party implementations of interactive snippets I want to call out. In Alyx, the great-looking caffeine tracker from indie developer Jordan Morgan, there are two Shortcuts actions that support interactive snippets: Log Multiple Espresso Shots and Log Caffeine. When you invoke these actions (from Shortcuts, Siri, the Action button, Control Center, etc.), you’ll be presented with a custom, interactive UI that features tappable buttons to log your drinks in the app. The snippet looks like Alyx, but it doesn’t open Alyx. Logging actions are even reversible thanks to an interactive Undo button.

Interactive snippets to log caffeine intake with Alyx.

Another excellent example is World Clock Widgets by Adam Overholtzer. The app now comes with a Convert Time action that lets you interactively compare the time between two different time zones. The snippet borrows from the app’s aesthetic while also embedding button presets for different times of the day as well as an undo action:

Snippets to convert time zones.

I hope that more third-party developers add support for interactive snippets in iOS 26, but I’d also like to see Apple extend the API with support for keyboard input and more complex UI elements. Developers should be able to build something akin to Apple’s new quick entry control for Reminders in iOS 26, but they can’t.
I believe interactive snippets are the first sign of what future interactions with a screen-enabled HomePod may look like for third-party apps. And, if nothing else, this new feature is further confirmation that the App Intents API continues to be one of the most relevant and important technologies at Apple these days.

Everything Else

As is always the case with new versions of iOS and iPadOS, changes in the operating systems run the gamut of tentpole features, quality-of-life improvements, and smaller features that you may not notice at first.

Let’s take a look at everything else that’s new in iOS and iPadOS 26.

Battery

In hindsight, Apple’s decision to overhaul the Battery screen in Settings should have telegraphed the announcement of the iPhone Air with its reduced battery capacity compared to other models in the lineup. iOS 26 brings a lot of small features to help you save power and know how quickly you’ll be able to top up your iPhone’s battery.

For starters, when your iPhone is charging, you’ll see a message on the Lock Screen (above the clock) that tells you how long it’ll take to reach 80%.

In Settings ⇾ Battery, you’ll see a new graph at the top of the page with a progress bar that shows charging estimation to reach 80% and 100%. And, when your battery is running low, you’ll see a new (and nicely animated) alert in the Dynamic Island as soon as you reach the dreaded 20% mark.

The new battery alerts in the Dynamic Island.

The most important feature, however, is the brand new Adaptive Power mode, which you can enable from the new Settings ⇾ Battery ⇾ Power Mode page (where Low Power Mode has also been moved to). Adaptive Power works by taking a look at your battery usage and, when the system determines it is higher than usual, extending your battery life by making “performance adjustments” such as lowering display brightness, throttling CPU-intensive tasks, or enabling Low Power Mode.

The new Adaptive Power mode.

Now, this mode is not for me because I like to live my life fast and dangerously; I set my iPhone to a 100% charging limit, and I can’t accept any form of throttling in a device I pay good money for. But this is a great feature to have if you plan on keeping your iPhone around for several years, or if you want to buy a new iPhone Air and know it’ll come with serious battery-related tradeoffs.

AirPods

I’ve already mentioned AirPods’ integration with the Camera and written about their improved recording quality in iOS 26, but there’s even more to cover for Apple’s popular line of wireless earphones this year.

Automatic Switching now covers CarPlay too, so if you get in your car while wearing AirPods and jump on a phone call there, CarPlay will automatically pair with your AirPods.

Also, AirPods can now automatically pause media playback when they detect you’ve fallen asleep courtesy of a paired iPhone or Apple Watch. I love this feature. As someone who’s been falling asleep to music for almost 20 years now, I can’t begin to express how happy I am that Apple figured this one out. Now, my girlfriend doesn’t get upset anymore that music is playing out of my AirPods in the middle of the night, and I can still fall asleep to Death Cab for Cutie like I’ve been doing for ages. Who needs a sleep timer when your earbuds can detect when you’re actually sleeping?

Lastly, in keeping with the theme of battery-related improvements, iOS 26 can notify you when your AirPods’ batteries are running low and when your AirPods are fully charged again.

AlarmKit

In iOS 26, Apple is opening up the ability for third-party apps to trigger native, full-screen alarms that – just like Apple’s Clock app – can play sounds and appear on screen even if a Focus is active, or even if you’re on the Lock Screen. This framework is called AlarmKit, and it’s been the sleeper hit of the third-party apps I’ve tested this summer.

The idea’s pretty simple: if apps integrate with AlarmKit, they can send their own alarms and display a Clock-like full-screen alert with custom text and buttons. To do this, apps must first present a permission prompt, which you’ll have to authorize.

Permission prompts for two AlarmKit-enabled apps.

I’ve been able to test a variety of apps that integrate with AlarmKit in iOS 26. From what I’ve seen, a common trend among developers is the idea of offering two types of “alerts” in iOS 26: regular notifications and, if you really don’t want to miss something, an alarm powered by AlarmKit.

A great example of this new approach is Daylish, a delightful new daily planner from Zenitizer developer Manuel Kehl that lets you choose whether you want to add a notification or an alarm to an event. If you want to be extra safe, enable the ‘Alarm’ option for a specific event, and Daylish will go off on the Lock Screen and play sounds, just like the alarm clock in the Clock app does.

Daylish lets you choose whether you want regular notifications or more “serious” alarms.

In Your Face is another calendar-adjacent utility whose purpose is to make sure you don’t forget about upcoming meetings and Zoom calls in your calendar. When an event is coming up, In Your Face will trigger an alarm. Thanks to the ability for developers to inject custom buttons into the full-screen alarm UI, In Your Face’s alarm includes a ‘Join’ button that you can press to instantly open a meeting via the link included in the calendar event.

A full-screen alarm powered by AlarmKit.

There’s also going to be a deluge of alternative alarm clocks based on this feature. One of them is Awake, which supports AlarmKit and puts a unique spin on interacting with an alarm in the morning. When the alarm goes off, you can press a button to start a “mission”, which is essentially a task you have to complete to ensure you’ve really woken up. These may include rotating your phone three times, solving a puzzle in the Art of Fauna app (which is teaming up with the Awake team for this integration), and, in the future, solving a math problem.

Alarms scheduled with AlarmKit support the Dynamic Island as well. Pictured: Awake.

I love it when a new Apple framework allows third-party developers to come up with a new category of apps that wasn’t possible before. This is exactly why we need Apple to open up more APIs on their operating systems, and I’m glad they did it with AlarmKit.

Background Tasks

In iOS and iPadOS 26, Apple is providing a solution for one of the longstanding limitations of both systems: with the new Continuous Background Task API, apps will be able to continue performing long-running processes even after an app is closed. These tasks will appear as Live Activities in the Dynamic Island and Lock Screen, and they will be automatically dismissed once the task is finished.

With this API, apps that want to render 4K video in the background, download large files, run a local AI model, or do anything that involves a long execution time will finally be able to do so without the risk of getting terminated by the system. Previously, such privileges were only reserved to the likes of AirDrop transfers and Safari downloads; now, every app can take advantage of them.

I haven’t tested any app that uses the updated Background Tasks API, but I’m sure that folks who rely on Final Cut Pro for iPad will be ecstatic once this feature lands in Apple’s app.

Screen Capture and Screen Recordings

In addition to the integration with Visual Intelligence, Apple is bringing a couple of other noteworthy additions to screenshots and screen recordings in iOS 26.

In the new Settings ⇾ General ⇾ Screen Capture page, you’ll be able to adjust the aforementioned full-screen previews and automatic Look Up, but there’s also a toggle to choose whether you want to capture screenshots from cars connected via CarPlay.

A screenshot of my Volvo’s portrait CarPlay Home Screen captured via iOS 26.

There is also an option to capture screenshots in HDR with their full dynamic range in the HEIF format, as opposed to the standard PNG format used for SDR screenshots. I’m a little wary of enabling this option after my bad experience with wide color gamut and Shortcuts automations last year; for maximum compatibility reasons, I’ve chosen to keep capturing screenshots in SDR for now. HDR capture is also available for screen recordings; if it’s enabled, videos will be captured in HEVC HDR10 instead of regular HEVC.

Speaking of screen recordings, Apple recently bumped the resolution of videos captured on iOS 26, which should result in crisper (and larger) screen recordings.

Lastly, after being removed a few years ago, the loupe tool is returning to iOS 26’s Markup mode when editing screenshots:

Welcome back, loupe tool.

I’ve always liked this tool as a way to highlight and zoom in on specific parts of images. It supports two distinct controls for its size and zoom level, and it also lets you choose whether you want to have a stroke around the shape, as well as its color and thickness if enabled. Nice.

And More…

Here’s a grab bag of even more changes in iOS 26:

Changes for sounds. There are two interesting sound-related changes in iOS 26. The first one is a new option in Settings ⇾ Sounds labeled ‘Reduce Loud Sounds’, which will limit the volume range of your device and create softer sound effects without losing the quiet details of the original audio. The other is a new set of background sounds that you can enable in Control Center.

In iOS 26, you’ll find the following new background sounds:

Babble

Steam

Airplane

Boat

Bus

Train

Rain On Roof

Quiet Night

Rain On Roof is so cozy, it’s going to be my new aesthetic for the fall.

Verification code autofill now works for third-party browsers, email apps, and messaging apps. Every few months, someone goes viral on social media with a screenshot of Apple’s verification code autofill in the system keyboard saying that whoever came up with that feature deserves a raise, which they absolutely do. (Someone even tries to occasionally take credit for the feature; oh, the things people do for social media clout.) In any case, one of Apple’s best features in recent years is getting even better in iOS 26 with support for third-party browsers, email apps, and messaging apps.

I accidentally noticed that this was working when I could suddenly autofill codes in webpages based on emails I was getting in Superhuman via push notifications. This is another excellent change from the team that brought one of the best quality-of-life improvements to Apple platforms in recent memory; I’m very happy the work that started in iOS 12 and expanded in iOS 17 is continuing with support for third-party apps in iOS 26.

Updates to the system document scanner. Apple’s document scanning feature (which is available in Files and Notes, but is also an API for third-party developers) is getting some nice improvements in iOS 26.

The redesigned system scanner in the Simple Scan app.

The document scanner received the Liquid Glass treatment and a new placement for buttons: flash, filters, and shutter control buttons are now at the bottom of the viewfinder so they’re easier to reach, and they morph into menus when selected. As a result, the system scanner is much easier to use, and apps like Greg Pierce’s Simple Scan get all of these improvements “for free” since it’s a system-level API.

Redesigned AirPlay menu. The AirPlay menu has been subtly redesigned with Liquid Glass in iOS 26:

The new AirPlay picker.

Notably, you can now control the volume of connected destinations (headphones and speakers) directly from the AirPlay picker instead of going to Control Center, which is a welcome change.

Ringtones? Ringtones. I want to wrap up this review in the most anachronistic way possible: let’s talk about getting phone calls and ringtones.

First, there is a fresh collection of ringtones in iOS 26; specifically, Apple created a series of remixes for the default ‘Reflection’ ringtone that explore Apple’s classic tune in different styles. All of these ringtones play haptics synchronized with the music, which feel great, and I just have to say that ‘Dreamer’ didn’t have to go this hard. It’s my favorite thing Apple has composed in a while. Major props to the sound designer at Apple who came up with it.

Second, you can now easily create custom ringtones in iOS 26 from the Files app. Find an MP3 or M4A file that is less than 30 seconds long, then tap on the share sheet and select ‘Use as Ringtone’. The file will show up as an option in Settings ⇾ Sounds & Haptics ⇾ Ringtone, ready for you to use.

Making custom ringtones in iOS 26. We’re so back.

Most people will likely never hear Apple’s new ringtones in iOS 26 because – let’s face it – we all tend to keep our phones on silent these days. Personally, I’ve found myself disabling silent mode only to hear ‘Dreamer’ play when my mom calls me. It’s so good, sometimes I let it play and don’t pick up, and I have to call her back.

Sound on. (You may want to use a desktop browser for this.)

Conclusion

It’s hard to be optimistic and positive about Apple these days, for reasons that are pretty obvious. But I like to remember two things when trying to do my job and covering this company’s products: there are people who work at Apple who may also disagree with some of their CEO’s political moves, and they still have to get their jobs done with passion and care; and Apple is serving billions of users who rely on the company’s computers to stay in touch with friends and family, be productive, and create memories.

I try to keep in mind that I still write about and for those people. CEOs come and go; hopefully, people’s work has a more lasting impact over the long arc of time.

Novelty and nostalgia coexist in iOS and iPadOS 26. With Liquid Glass, Apple is betting heavily on the concept of “new”, and, in the process, they’re trying to tell a more cohesive UI story across their platforms. With iPadOS 26, the company is intentionally embracing the past: after more than a decade of multitasking experiments, the iPad is coming home and realizing that, after all, nothing beats good, old-fashioned windowing.

There’s a thought I keep coming back to after three months spent testing iOS and iPadOS 26: I don’t think these two approaches are mutually exclusive. I think it’s a sign of maturity in Apple’s software team that they can embrace and celebrate the past while still daring to take a leap toward new ideas. Liquid Glass is such a leap, and while it’s not perfectly polished and will require plenty of refinements over time, I’d rather see Apple take big, imperfect swings than stand still and relish their status quo. The path to irrelevance is paved with many such companies.

I’d rather see Apple take big, imperfect swings than stand still and relish their status quo.

A lot of folks in our community like to say that Apple “should have a Snow Leopard year again”. Besides being historically inaccurate, I don’t think many of them truly believe that, either. Plus, the majority of iPhone customers – the ones who do not read these reviews – would not appreciate it. We’re people, and we naturally gravitate towards “new”. Like it or not, we constantly seek it. There’s nothing wrong in accepting that.

I have a feeling that Liquid Glass and iPadOS 26 are ushering us into a new era for Apple’s software – one that is more fluid, where the lines between phones and tablets, tablets and laptops, and wearables and AI are less demarcated.

An era where – hopefully – Apple will be unafraid to lean into their past while walking boldly toward the future.

Credits

My annual iOS and iPadOS reviews are a labor of passion, curiosity, and – to an extent – sheer endurance. I do them because I still love everything about the process. The review wouldn’t have been possible without the support from the following people people and dogs:

My girlfriend Silvia, for her wisdom, unending support, love, suggestions, and patience. This review wouldn’t be possible without you. I love you.

Zelda and Ginger, my two dogs and the love of my life. Thank you for making me happier every day.

John Voorhees, a friend and tireless business partner. Running MacStories with you is more fun and interesting every day.

Devon Dundee, for his outstanding editing skills and suggestions.

Basic Apple Guy, for his work on the iOS 26 icon comparisons and wallpapers used in this review.

Widgetsmith, the sponsor of this review and one of the all-time great iOS apps.

The entire MacStories team, for putting up with me while I finish this project every summer.

Noah Herman, for taking the time to capture photos of an original iPhone.

Lachlan Campbell, for their invaluable, detailed feedback and suggestions.

Steve Troughton-Smith

Myke Hurley

Stephen Hackett

Notion, Drafts, Shareshot, Shortcuts, Pixelmator Pro, Readwise Reader, SnapMotion, Claude, Perplexity, Lire, Working Copy, HandBrake, and Superhuman – the tools behind the making of this review.

Every app developer who sent me betas during the summer.

Every engineer at Apple who always makes reviewing iOS and iPadOS each summer fun.

Every Club MacStories, Club MacStories+, and Club Premier member, for supporting us directly in everything we do.

Our Discord members, for always pushing me to do my best.

And finally, every MacStories reader, for allowing me to do what I love every single day. Thank you.