iOS 26 Public Beta - First Impressions
Yesterday I finally got around to downloading the public betas for iOS 26 and iPadOS 26, and so here are some of my quick thoughts on them!
I have been following the developer betas pretty closely, so I already had a good idea of how the new design would look like, and what changes I could expect for when the public beta released. I've been really excited to finally try this out! As I've talked about before I've been really hyped for the new look, but of course I've also been looking forwards to the actual new features.
So first of all, the liquid glass looks amazing! Apple have been tinkering around with it for a while now, but I've honestly liked all iterations and its current look is very good. Apple have been specifically hyping up the slightly transparent look, but to be honest what I've liked the most about the design is its reactivity.
The design reacts to everything I or even the phone itself does. When I press a button the colours pulse and the button itself pops a bit, and the way that the buttons refract light from the surrounding objects just looks so good. There is something about not just how all the new elements look, but how much they interact with each other that I just really love.
This reminds me a lot of what Gabe Newell had to say about reinforcement in video games. Not to say that Apple's previous UI wasn't also very clean and responsive, but with the new look that's all been amped up to 11.
Now for some of the actual new features.
iMessage now allows for custom backgrounds, which I adore, but I feel like the contrast between certain backgrounds and the bubbles could definitely be improved, as the blue bubbles just remain plain. There were some other new things added too, but unfortunately, I use iMessage with very few people, so I won't really use them much anyways.
The Camera app has had its UI changed completely, and in my opinion for the better! By default the app now shows much less information, with only the really vital stuff always being displayed and everything else being in selectable menus. This might sound like it's bad, but actually the new pop-ups from the menus make everything much easier to find, which I sometimes struggled with in the old design.
A lot of smaller specific things have been adjusted too, like how there's an actual dedicated menu for the quality and frame rate of videos, which you previously had to rotate through individually. Now you can just click the tab, and you can change them easily!
Apple Music got a new AutoMix mode which automatically mixed songs in playlists and stuff! It doesn't mix fully with all (even most) song combinations, usually just fading in and out from them, however there are a few where it mixes and those go hard. Also for some reason I love how its new UI looks more than any other app so far.
The Preview and Games apps are neat! I haven't really used them much yet but I definitely see myself doing so in the future.
And lastly (of the big changes at least), they finally somewhat reverted the Photos app UI back to how it originally was! With the library separate from everything else, which is a very welcome change for me.
And that's it! Again, more than anything, I absolutely adore the new look and really wanted to talk about that, but I still felt like bringing up some of the other new things that have been on my mind!
It is still a pretty beta beta, as it's occasionally slow and there have been some bugs that have popped up, though thankfully all the very bad stuff has been ironed out.
