Apple's much-hyped Liquid Glass redesign in iOS 26 provides a clean and visually sophisticated interface that permeates every element of your iPhone's operating system. Besides the noticeable visual change, the new mobile OS has many excellent enhancements and Apple Intelligence-powered additions you shouldn't overlook, like call screening for the Phone app and depth-altering Spatial Scenes for your photos. While most improvements are stellar, some feel unpolished due to bugs or odd design choices. Despite these relatively minor issues, Apple delivers the improved AI functionality it originally promised with iOS 18, earning iOS 26 our Editors' Choice award for mobile operating systems.

How to Download Apple iOS 26

Want to upgrade from iOS 18 to iOS 26? The operating system is a free update compatible with the iPhone 11 series and newer, as well as the second-gen iPhone SE and newer. Older models like the iPhone XS, iPhone XR, and iPhone X are unsupported.

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Liquid Glass and Spatial Scenes: Eye-Catching New Additions

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.

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Call Screening and Hold Assist: Your New Phone Buddies

The Phone app UI has a beneficial redesign that displays favorited numbers as card icons at the top of the Calls tab, rather than in a separate tab. The more impressive Phone app update involves two new features: Call Screening and Hold Assist. The former filters your calls, and the latter monitors when you're placed on hold so you can do other things.

Call Screening gives you three options: Never, Ask Reason for Calling, and Silence. Never is the default option, meaning your Phone app works just as before the iOS 26 update. With it, calls from unsaved numbers ring as usual, and missed calls are logged in the Recent Calls list. The Silence option directs calls from unknown numbers to voicemail without ringing, and also logs them in the Recent Calls list. It's a helpful addition for your Personal Focus or Sleep Focus settings, as it restricts incoming calls to those from saved contacts.

The Ask Reason for Calling setting provides a more nuanced solution to unknown calls. When Call Screening detects a call from a strange number, the caller is prompted to state their purpose. In testing, the responses were transcribed in real-time, which allowed me to make an informed decision about whether or not to accept the call. One flaw with Ask Reason for Calling compared with Android's version: You cannot hear the caller's voice. Hearing the caller’s speech during an Android transcription is handy for determining whether or not to answer a call (it could be a loved one calling from a new phone, for example). That said, call screening is a fantastic tool I'm glad to see added to iOS.

Likewise, Hold Assist is new to iOS 26, and it works similarly to Google's Hold for Me feature for Pixel phones. In testing, the iPhone gave me the option to select Hold This Call the moment it detected hold music. Selecting it muted the call and took me back to the Home Screen, where I used my iPhone for other tasks. A notification at the top of the screen displayed the call status, but that eventually disappeared, only reappearing when an agent picked up. I have enjoyed this feature since its introduction during the iOS 26 beta. Still, I have one gripe: My iPhone didn't always automatically detect the hold music and offer Hold Assist. However, you can manually select that option from the More menu during a call. I didn't appreciate how sorely I needed this feature on the iPhone until iOS 26's release, but its impact is a game-changer since you no longer have to wait around for a service agent to pick up.

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Live Translation: Bringing People Together

Since iOS 14, the iPhone has had a built-in Translate app with Live Translation functionality. However, with iOS 26, Live Translation is integrated into FaceTime, Messages, and the Phone app. This feature works with Apple Intelligence-enabled phones, starting with iPhone 15 Pro and newer models. When enabled, it automatically converts incoming messages or audio into English, French, German, Portuguese, or Spanish.

The Phone app has the best implementation of the technology, with text transcription and AI voice dictation of the translated text. Live Translation works shockingly well, so much so that my wife held an entire phone conversation with my Spanish-speaking mother.

Live Translation also works in FaceTime and Messages, but it lacks AI voice diction in those apps—it's text only. You can also use the tech with compatible AirPods Pro models to enjoy spoken translations directly in your ear.

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Camera App and Visual Experience Improvements

Like other iOS 26 aspects, the Camera app receives excellent and intuitive changes. The UI is cleaner and more minimalistic, but it does a good job of putting necessary controls at your fingertips. For example, you can swipe left or right to swap between Video, Photo, Portrait, Panorama, and other modes. You could do that with iOS 18, but the Liquid Glass interface makes it clear that more Camera options are to the left and right of the Video and Photo buttons, thanks to its slick, scrolling animations.

One big addition is the ability to access more formats directly in the Camera app. Previously, if you wanted to change a video's frame rate or resolution, you needed to exit the app and visit Settings. Now, you can access and change these values directly from the top of the screen.

Visual Intelligence is Apple tech that scans whatever you're looking at on screen so you can gather more information or perform specific actions. For example, it can summarize text, save important dates to your calendar, search Google, or ask ChatGPT for more details about a subject. In iOS 18, this feature worked exclusively with the Camera app; with iOS 26, Visual Intelligence works with anything on your iPhone's screen.

I rifled through my photo library to test Visual Intelligence and found it useful. When testing a photo of a jellyfish display that I snapped during a trip to Japan, Visual Intelligence served up similar photos and revealed the name of the aquarium that houses it.

(Credit: Apple/PCMag)

Other Notable Changes in iOS 26

Many smaller changes throughout the OS make for a smoother and more useful iPhone experience. Here are some of the most notable ones:

• The Games app has been reworked into an all-in-one gaming hub. It's a handy library for your iPhone games, which you can launch directly from the app. It also provides recommendations, Apple Arcade access, and friends lists for multiplayer fun.
• The Messages app lets you add backgrounds to conversations, which is a nice touch. It changes the flat, white background in texts to something more visually appealing. You can use preset images, your own photos, or a dynamic image created via Image Playground.
• The Photos app's Library and Collections tabs now have larger, cleaner visuals; Liquid Glass controls that refract dynamically as you browse images; and Spatial Scenes, which let you transform almost any photo in your library into a 3D image.
• Safari enjoys a Liquid Glass glow-up, with glassy, rounded tabs that dynamically shrink to the bottom of the screen when you scroll through a page.
• In the past, if you created an Apple account for your kid using the Family Share feature, the youngster was locked into either the Children (under 13) or Teen (13-17) accounts. Now you can change the accounts if you made a mistake or want more restrictive controls for a teenager.
• A new Adaptive Power Mode that aims to extend battery life.