The wait is almost over. Apple is set to release iOS 26 on Monday.
It’s been three months since the company announced the software update at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June, with the first beta version released shortly after. Since then, I’ve been living with the beta software on two iPhones: my iPhone 16 Pro and 14 Pro. I would have downloaded it on my iPhone XR, too, but that device doesn’t support the software (sorry to anyone who still has an XR).
After using the iOS 26 beta for a few months, I found a lot of the new features to be fun and useful. The Liquid Glass redesign looks clean and is visually impressive. Call screening, a true game-changer, manages to protect you from robocalls while still allowing other folks to reach you. And iOS 26 brings other hidden upgrades to my iPhones that still manage to surprise me.
While most of these upgrades are good, iOS 26 takes half-measures at times. Some features are moving in the right direction but need work. The new Games app feels as though it hasn’t been fully built out yet, and Visual Intelligence’s ability to add information to your Calendar could use improvement.
But the Liquid Glass redesign helps usher in a more immersive visual experience for Apple users, and overall, the update adds more functionality to your phone. It’s not a fundamental reworking of the iPhone’s operating system, but it offers nice quality-of-life upgrades that help Apple stay apace with its competition.
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Call screening and Liquid Glass are the biggest (but not only) improvements in iOS 26
Call screening is the one feature I didn’t know I needed
I’ve never heard someone say, «Oh boy, a spam call! I love these!» So when Apple announced call screening at WWDC, I was interested to see how effective this feature was. And let me tell you, it’s awesome. It might be my single favorite feature in iOS 26.
There are two options for call screening: Ask Reason for Calling and Silence.
Apple describes the Silence option like this: «Calls from unsaved numbers will be silenced, sent to voicemail, and displayed on the Recents list.» The Silence setting means only numbers you have saved in your Contacts will cause your iPhone to ring.
That’s a little extreme for me, so I opted for the Ask Reason for Calling option. When a number outside of my Contacts tries to call me, the caller gets a prompt asking why they’re trying to reach me. When the caller responds, my device pings me and transcribes the person’s answer so I can decide whether to accept or not. Most spam calls don’t leave a response, and therefore don’t bother me, which I love. Leave me alone! Thanks to call screening, these spam calls aren’t wasting my — or the spam caller’s — time.
Liquid Glass looks good after tweaks during the beta process
The most dramatic change iOS 26 brings to your iPhone is the new redesigned Liquid Glass visual interface. This is the biggest visual update to your iPhone since the company released iOS 7 in 2013… back when Henry Cavill first put on Superman’s iconic suit and cape, and I had just graduated from college with a twinkle in my eye.
People were divided over the Liquid Glass design when Apple announced it. Some liked it, while others — myself included — thought the glass effects made things hard to read. But after trial and error during the beta process, I think Apple found the right balance of glass and frosted effects to make this design work.
I’m impressed with the overall look of Liquid Glass. Everything appears to squish and wiggle when you interact with it, which is fun, like the way the light refracts through the glass items. These affected items blend into Safari, Photos and other apps like chameleons, and items change font colors depending on what’s behind them. This makes for clean graphics and animations that are more immersive and less visually disruptive.
Apple also builds on the tinted app icons feature introduced in iOS 18, but now with clear icons. The clear option removes all color, giving your icons a translucent, ghostly look. While I was initially hesitant, the feature has grown on me. Some icons that are pretty busy still don’t play nice with this option, but I think Apple has struck a nice level of frostedness.
Many of the Liquid Glass changes are focused on aesthetics rather than function. So while menus look different and the controls in your Control Center have a polished look, almost everything should feel familiar when you use it.
I just wish Apple would address the transition between lock and home screens. When you unlock your iPhone and swipe up to get to your home screen, you can see the Liquid Glass layer move up the screen, but not the wallpaper beneath it. In past iOS versions, your lock screen wallpaper would roll up the screen as you switched to your home screen. With Liquid Glass, if your home screen wallpaper is different from your lock screen’s, it might look like your iPhone is glitching because your lock screen is seemingly not moving.
Otherwise, I like Liquid Glass in its current state. It appears that Apple took user feedback to heart in the beta process for iOS 26. If you still don’t like it, you can reduce the transparency in the Accessibility section of Settings.
Lock screen updates and big clock
Apple continues to make the lock screen more customizable and functional with iOS 26. The most significant change is the big clock. Note that «big clock» is not the official name of this feature, but it takes up almost half of your lock screen, so what else am I supposed to call it? As a visually impaired person, I really appreciate the big clock. Now, when I take my glasses off at night, I don’t have to bring my iPhone up to my face to check the time.
My one complaint about the big clock is that you can only use it with one clock font, and I’d like to spread the love to other fonts. Otherwise, you can change its color to match your background, make the numbers thicker or change its design between Glass (more transparent) and Solid (a more standard-looking clock).
I also appreciate being able to move my widget bar to a new home. You can house your widgets near the top of your screen, right underneath the clock, or you can move them to the bottom of the screen, just above your controls. This is partially an extension of the big clock option because if you enable that feature, your widgets automatically move to the bottom portion of your lock screen to accommodate the large numbers, though you can also move them around without it.
Just having the freedom to move widgets to another location on your lock screen is a huge plus for me. I’ve wanted the ability to move widgets and controls around the lock screen for years, and this change brings my iPhone one step closer to that reality.
iOS 26 has more upgrades below the surface
Apple has a lot of upgrades in iOS 26, some of which didn’t get a lot of airtime during the WWDC keynote. But that doesn’t make them any less important or helpful.
With iOS 26, you can adjust your alarm’s snooze length to anywhere from 1 to 15 minutes. This change makes me so happy. The old snooze length was 9 minutes — not 10 or even 5 minutes — which always irritated me because I think 9 is such an ugly number. So being able to adjust the snooze length is satisfying.
When you charge your iPhone with iOS 26, your lock screen will show how long it will take and whether your charger is working slowly or not. I have a charging pad that lets me charge two devices at once. When I had my phone on it with another device, my iPhone would say that it was plugged into a slow charger, and it would take at least an hour to charge fully.
Speaking of battery, iOS 26 also brings a new adaptive power feature that’s truly helpful, especially for gaming. It can detect when your iPhone is using more power than usual — say, to play a game like Retro Bowl ’26 — and it will make performance adjustments to extend your battery life. It saves power in small ways, like lowering the screen brightness or decreasing the power the processor is using, which can make some activities take longer.
The update is also close to making me an Apple Music subscriber. The biggest new feature in the streaming service is its lyric translation and pronunciation guides. These can be helpful when listening to popular artists like Bad Bunny (who raps in Spanish) and your favorite K-pop artists, if you’re curious about the lyrics. But these features aren’t available on every song or in many languages, so I’m stuck wondering what German bands like Rammstein are singing about.
iOS 26 introduces new filters to Messages, such as for spam and messages from unknown senders. My favorite filter is for drafts. With it, you can easily see messages you were working on but accidentally didn’t send, or messages you were going to send, but a push notification distracted you.
While those changes are more functional, some iOS 26 changes are more concerned with form and aesthetics. The new spatial scenes feature turns almost any picture in your Photos app into a 3D image, where elements shift and change perspective. You can also use spatial scenes on your lock screen to give your wallpaper some depth.
Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhones also get an upgraded Genmoji app that can now combine standard emoji into new ones. Previously, you had to either describe an emoji or use the Genmoji suggestions to create a new custom emoji. But using pre-existing emoji simplifies the process of creating a new emoji, like this Cincinnati Bengals emoji I made, which I’ll be using this football season.
Games and Visual Intelligence have some catching up to do
While there’s a lot I like about iOS 26, there are some things that I didn’t find that impressive or thought could use some more work. You might like these features, but they aren’t for me, at least not until Apple works on them some more.
Games app feels unfinished
When Apple announced the new Games app at WWDC and after I used the beta for a while, I was pretty excited about it. It can keep track of all the games you download, offer quick access to Apple Arcade, help you stay in touch with friends and compete with others in those games. It’s similar to a gaming console home screen. I liked the Games app at first, but I found some aspects of it annoying the more I used it.
My biggest issue is that you can’t delete games from the app’s library, even if those titles aren’t available to download and install from the App Store anymore. Once you download a game to your device or another device with your Apple ID, it becomes attached to your library seemingly forever. For example, Sega removed support for the mobile version of Crazy Taxi a few months ago. I stopped playing the game and deleted it from my device to make space, and now it sits in my library.
I can’t redownload Crazy Taxi from the App Store because Sega no longer supports the game. When I see Crazy Taxi in Games, it’s like I’m being taunted. You can filter out uninstalled games in the app, but I want to see all the games I’ve played in case I want to return to one in the future. Though I’d love to revisit Crazy Taxi and its awesome soundtrack, I can’t on my iPhone. So I wish I could just remove it and other unplayable games.
I also want a menu that shows which of my contacts have certain games on their device or connected to their account, so I can challenge them to play. I can still challenge or invite people to play a game like A Slight Chance of Sawblades but if they don’t have access to the game or have never played it, my invite feels like peer pressure.
I wish the Games app worked with other gaming apps, too. As of now, it works with games from mobile services, like Apple Arcade and Netflix Games, as well as any game you buy or download through Apple’s App Store, like Clash Royale or Roblox. But if you have the iOS Steam app, it won’t show up in Games. So it’s not a comprehensive hub for gaming on your mobile device.
I also want Apple to make it easier to connect a controller through the Games app. You can still connect an 8BitDo or Xbox controller through the Bluetooth menu, but it would be helpful if there was a shortcut button in the Games app that can search for connectable controllers nearby.
The Games app seems like a good start, but it leaves a lot to be desired. I hope Apple expands this app in the future and adds more functionality.
Visual Intelligence can be improved
Apple introduced Visual Intelligence with iOS 18 in the iPhone 16 lineup in 2024. It lets you do an image search with Google or start a prompt with ChatGPT about whatever your camera is pointed at. iOS 26 upgrades the feature to support screenshots. This is a nice touch, but the Google Search menu wouldn’t always immediately disappear when I wanted it to after searching for a screenshot online.
Adding events to Calendar from Visual Intelligence could also be frustrating if you’re using a picture or screenshot with multiple listings — while you can edit and customize calendar events, Visual Intelligence defaults to picking the first listed item. When you take a screenshot or use Visual Intelligence on a concert poster, a button appears to Add to Calendar. When you tap it, your iPhone creates an event based on the first entry in the list or on the poster which you can add to your Calendar by tapping Create Event. You can edit the information if it’s not correct by tapping Edit, but at that point, you might as well manually input it. Also, there didn’t appear to be a way to select a different date and location for Visual Intelligence if various options were available.
Final word on iOS 26
Overall, I like the changes Apple introduces with iOS 26. Call screening is super helpful, and the Liquid Glass design is aesthetically pleasing without being cumbersome. The update builds on aspects of iOS 18, in particular the ability to change app colors and customize your home and lock screen more. In that regard, iOS 26 feels like the natural next step after iOS 18. Just know that some new features feel incomplete, but maybe Apple will improve on these features in subsequent updates.
For more on iOS 26, here’s how to enable call screening and how to change your icons to clear in the update. You can also check out our iOS 26 cheat sheet.