I’ve Tested iOS 26 for More Than a Week and It’s My Favorite iPhone Update In Years

The most immediate and noticeable difference between iOS 26 and iOS 18 is the new Liquid Glass design language. This system-wide aesthetic overhauls many graphical effects and gives UI elements a translucent, glass-like quality. It permeates everything in iOS 26, from the Home Screen icons to toolbars within Apple Music, Safari, and other apps. Practical improvements come with Liquid Glass, too. Menu bars shrink fluidly as you scroll, giving you more space to read or navigate the screen. Touches like these make Liquid Glass feel more intuitive than UI updates in previous iOS releases.

The new glass motif brings significant customization options that rival Android’s Material You. You can universally tint app icons to give your Home Screen a fresh, cohesive look. You can apply these tints to the new glass graphics in light or dark mode, or stick with the default icon look instead. The Lock Screen enjoys all the customization elements introduced in previous iOS releases, including app icon and widget resizing, the clock customization from iOS 18, and the photo layering effect from iOS 17. In a nice touch, the Lock Screen’s clock dynamically resizes to better suit your wallpaper. However, you can manually shrink or expand the clock, giving it as much as half of your Lock Screen’s real estate. With iOS 26, Apple has finally loosened its customization grip, so personalizing your iPhone feels more rewarding.

As cool as Liquid Glass looks, I found some design oversights and bugs. In some situations, Liquid Glass’s transparency reduces legibility. For example, the date and time details in Photos now occupy a transparent tab at the top of the screen. The aesthetic is cool, but the text is virtually impossible to read when viewing an image with a dark background. Icon tinting on the home screen can be buggy, as well. In two instances during my tinting tests, changing the color of my Home Screen icons glitched the display, so all the icons appeared as transparent, indistinct glass buttons with no logos. It required a phone restart to correct in both instances. In addition, some iPhone users have stated that Liquid Glass causes dizziness.

On the upside, you can now give wallpapers and photos a terrific 3D depth effect, one of iOS 26’s best additions. This feature, called Spatial Scenes, separates and overlays foreground and background elements of an image, generating a wallpaper with eye-catching 3D effects. I spent hours modifying and customizing photos and images in my album to create cool photo edits and wallpapers.

(Credit: Apple/PCMag)