Apple iOS 26 Update Brings Liquid Glass and New Features
Apple has officially released iOS 26 for iPhone 11, iPhone SE 2, and later models. The standout feature is the Liquid Glass design, inspired by its mixed reality interface, giving apps and menus a translucent, “glassy” appearance. This change represents the most significant visual shift in years.
While the redesign improves consistency across Apple’s platforms, it introduces challenges for readability and background clarity. The stable release is available now, but additional visual refinements are expected. Users may need time to adjust, since not everyone will like the changes immediately.
The Camera app now uses the Liquid Glass interface with simplified Photo and Video modes, while other settings appear through swipes and taps. The Photos app restores familiar tabbed navigation, making browsing easier than before.
Expanded Features Across Apps
The Phone app gains a unified look, placing favorites, recents, and voicemails on one screen, with filtering options available. Call screening has also been introduced, allowing unknown callers to provide details before the phone rings. Additionally, holding assist notifies users when an agent returns on the line.
Messages now compete with leading chat apps by offering backgrounds, polls, group typing indicators, and improved SMS filtering. Unknown senders are moved into a new folder, reducing clutter. Meanwhile, a redesigned Games app organizes current titles, achievements, and friend activity in one place, with recommendations included.
Apple has also added the Mac Preview app to iOS 26, enabling editing, annotation, and signing of PDFs. Apple Music now supports automixing for seamless transitions, as well as lyrics translation. Maps introduces preferred route selection with real-time notifications for traffic or incidents, while the new places library shows visited locations.
Other updates include customizable snooze times for alarms, a redesigned Wallet app with digital ID support, and intelligent reminders that extract grocery lists from recipes or suggest tasks from websites and emails.
Smarter AI and Productivity Tools
Although iOS 26 offers fewer new AI features than last year, system-wide translation is now available across Messages, FaceTime, and Phone. Supported languages include English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. AirPods Pro and the latest AirPods models now support live translation.
Visual intelligence has been improved, allowing users to analyze on-screen content and create reminders directly. Highlight, Apple’s answer to circle-to-search, helps identify items or events with a quick gesture. Genmoji and Image Playground receive new options for blending emojis and modifying attributes like hair and style.
For productivity, iOS 26 introduces local voice and video capture for recordings, offering creators better isolation and clarity. App Store Accessibility Nutrition Labels now highlight features like VoiceOver, captions, and text contrast. Parental controls are expanded, allowing stricter monitoring of communication and third-party app use.
Users can install iOS 26 by navigating to Settings > General > Software Update on their iPhones.
