The future of the iPhone is here. Today, Apple previewed iOS 26, a truly monumental update that transcends a simple collection of new features to profoundly reimagine the entire iPhone experience. Prepare for a breathtaking new design that literally reflects your surroundings, alongside groundbreaking Apple Intelligence capabilities that anticipate your needs and a comprehensive overhaul of your everyday applications. iOS 26 is ready to make your iPhone more intuitive, powerful and delightfully personal than any version before it.
The “Liquid Glass” Aesthetic
At the heart of this transformative update is a stunning visual refresh that Apple dubs “Liquid Glass.” This revolutionary translucent material isn’t just a design choice; it’s an engineering marvel that imbues the entire system with a sense of depth, vitality and focus. Your app icons, widgets and even core system controls subtly reflect and refract their surroundings, drawing your eye directly to the content that matters most. This captivating aesthetic extends to a more personal and expressive Home Screen and Lock Screen. The time on your Lock Screen will fluidly adapt to the available space within an image, while spatial scenes bring your wallpapers to life with a mesmerising 3D effect as you move your iPhone.
Beyond the Lock Screen, the “Liquid Glass” philosophy pervades the entire OS. Apps like Camera receive a simplified, streamlined layout, ensuring your attention remains firmly on the moment you’re capturing. The Photos app gains clearer organisation with separate tabs for Library and Collections. Even Safari adopts a more immersive feel, with web pages flowing seamlessly from the top edge to the bottom of the screen, maximising content visibility while keeping essential actions like refresh and search readily accessible. In apps like Apple Music, News and Podcasts, the tab bar has been ingeniously redesigned to float above your content, dynamically shrinking as you browse to put content front and centre, then expanding when you scroll back up. Crucially, Apple is also providing developers with a new set of APIs, granting them access to these “Liquid Glass” materials and components to ensure their own apps can seamlessly integrate and appear just as dynamic and delightful.
The Dawn of True Intelligence: Powered by Apple Intelligence
While the visual enhancements are immediately striking, the true revolution within iOS 26 lies in Apple Intelligence. This advanced, privacy-first system is intricately woven throughout every facet of the iPhone experience, elevating its capabilities and transforming how you interact with your device. Its not just about Siri getting smarter, it’s about your iPhone anticipating your needs, understanding context and seamlessly assisting you.
Consider the power of real-time communication: Live Translation. It’s integrated directly into Messages, FaceTime and the Phone app, allows for on-the-fly text and audio translation breaking down language barriers effortlessly. Critically, these translations are powered by Apple-built models that run entirely on-device, ensuring your personal conversations remain just that – personal.
Building on this foundation, Visual Intelligence extends the iPhone’s understanding to what’s on your screen. You can now ask ChatGPT questions about whatever you’re looking at, or search Google, Etsy or other supported apps for similar images and products directly from your view. Visual Intelligence even recognises when you’re looking at an event and intelligently suggests adding it to your calendar, pre-populating key details like date, time and location, eliminating tedious manual entry.
For the creatively inclined, Genmoji and Image Playground open up entirely new avenues for self-expression. Mix your favourite emoji, Genmoji and descriptions together to create something truly unique and personalise your communications like never before. Shortcuts, a beloved feature for automating tasks, are now more powerful and intelligent than ever. Users can tap into a whole new set of “intelligent actions” enabled by Apple Intelligence, with dedicated actions for features like Writing Tools and Image Playground, streamlining complex workflows with remarkable ease.
Apple Intelligence also takes the mundane out of everyday taste. It can now automatically identify and summarise order tracking details from emails sent by merchants and delivery carriers, giving users the ability to see their full order details and progress notifications all in one convenient place – even for purchases not made with Apple Pay. Furthermore, a new Foundation Models framework provides any app with direct access to the on-device foundation model at the core of Apple Intelligence, offering developers powerful, fast, private and offline intelligence for free AI inference.
Seamless Connectivity and Uninterrupted Focus
Call Screening builds on Live Voicemail and helps eliminate interruptions by gathering information from the caller and giving users the details they need to decide if they want to pick up or ignore the call.
Communication, the very cornerstone of the iPhone experience, has received a significant and thoughtful overhaul in iOS 26. The Phone app now boasts a unified layout, bringing Favourites, Recents and Voicemails into one streamlined view, making it easier than ever to manage your calls. Say goodbye to unwanted interruptions with Call Screening, a feature that builds on Live Voicemail to gather information from unknown callers before you even pick up, giving you the details needed to decide whether to engage or ignore. And for those frustrating moments stuck on hold, Hold Assist will intelligently notify you the moment a live agent becomes available, freeing you from endless waiting.
In Messages, you gain unprecedented control over your conversations. Users can now screen messages from unknown senders, diverting them into a dedicated folder. This gives you the power to decide whether to mark the number as known, ask for more information or simply delete the message, ensuring your main conversation list remains clear and focused. These messages will remain silenced until you choose to accept them. iOS 26 also introduces rich enhancements to conversations, including custom backgrounds and the ability to easily create polls. With Apple Intelligence, Messages can even detect when a poll might come in handy and suggest one, while Image Playground allows you to generate unique backgrounds that perfectly fit your conversation’s mood. Additionally, in group chats, you can now see typing indicators, bringing a more dynamic and real-time feel to your interactions.
Enhanced Experiences Across Key Apps
The improvements in iOS 26 extend far beyond the core system, bringing exciting updates to some of Apple’s most popular applications:
CarPlay
The smarter, safer way to use iPhone driving, CarPlay now receives updates that make it even more beautiful and intuitive. A new compact view for incoming calls allows you to see who’s calling without obscuring crucial information like upcoming directions. iOS 26 also Tapbacks and pinned conversations to Messages in CarPlay and with widgets and Live Activities, drivers can stay informed without losing focus on the road. These updates will also extend to CarPlay Ultra, promising an even deeper and more unified experience across every screen in compatible vehicles.
Apple Music
Elevating your listening experience, Apple Music introduces Lyrics Translation, helping you understand the words to your favourite songs across languages. Lyrics Pronunciation allows everyone to sing along, regardless of language proficiency. For music lovers who appreciate seamless transitions, AutoMix uses intelligence to move from one song to the next like a professional DJ, employing time stretching and beat matching to create a smooth and immersive listening flow.
Apple Maps
Maps becomes a more personal guide with Visited Places, a feature that helps you remember all the places you’ve been. You can choose to have iPhone detect when you’re at locations like restaurants or shops and then view all of your Visited Places within Maps – all protected with end-to-end encryption, ensuring your privacy. Additionally, your iPhone can now use on-device intelligence to better understand your daily route, presenting you with your preferred route when you’re headed home or to the office, along with proactively notifying you of delays and offering alternate paths.
Apple Wallet
Everyday interactions with the physical world become easier than ever. Users can now choose to pay with instalments or rewards when making in-store purchases with Apple Pay using their iPhone. Refreshed boarding passes in Wallet offer the ability to see and share Live Activities for real-time updates on a flight and provide convenient access to a traveller’s most relevant information, such as Maps to navigate airports, Find My to track important items and report missing bags and more.
Additional Innovations and Accessibility Focus
Beyond the core updates, iOS 26 delivers a host of additional features designed to enhance every aspect of your iPhone experience:
Apple Games
A brand-new app, Apple Games, provides players with an all-in-one destination for their games. It helps players jump back into titles they love, find their next favourite and have even more fun with friends. They’ll find out what’s happening across all their games, including major events and updates, ensuring they never miss a moment. The Games app is also the best way to experience Apple Arcade, Apple’s game subscription service with more than 200 award-winning and highly rated games for the whole family.
AirPods Enhancements
Your AirPods are now more versatile than ever with new features for AirPods 4, AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) and AirPods Pro 2. Building on the benefits of Voice Isolation, studio-quality audio recording allows iPhone, iPad and Mac users to record their content with great sound quality and enjoy even clearer calls. With the new camera remote feature, users can simply press and hold the AirPods stem to take a photo or start and stop a video recording on their iPhone or iPad.
Streamlined Parental Controls
Parents can now create or move kids into Child Accounts even more easily, taking advantage of a wide set of parental controls designed to keep children safe. Enhancements across Communication Limits, Communication Safety and the App Store include parental approvals for contact requests from kids, blurring out sensitive content in FaceTime calls and photos in Shared Albums and enabling parents to grant an exception for their child to download an app with an age rating that exceeds the app content restriction they set.
Enhanced Safari Privacy
Browse in Safari gets even more private with advanced fingerprint protection extending to all Browse by default, offering users greater peace of mind while navigating the web.
Powerful Accessibility Features
Apple continues its commitment to accessibility with significant updates. These include Accessibility Reader, which provides a customised systemwide reading experience and Braille Access, an all-new interface for iPhone devices with connected braille displays. Updates to Live Listen, Background Sounds, Personal Voice and more bring a new level of accessibility across the Apple ecosystem, ensuring the iPhone remains a device for everyone
iOS 26 is a testament to Apple’s relentless pursuit of innovation and its commitment to creating a device that is not just smart, but truly brilliant. With its striking new design, and intelligent capabilities that anticipate your needs and enhancements across the apps you use every day, iOS 26 looks set to redefine the smartphone experience and solidify the iPhone’s place at the centre of our digital lives.
