Apple elevates the iPhone experience with iOS 26

Apple elevates the iPhone experience with iOS 26

The release delivers a stunning new design, powerful Apple Intelligence capabilities, new ways to stay connected in the Phone and Messages apps, and exciting updates to CarPlay, Apple Music, Maps, and Wallet

Apple have previewed iOS 26, a significant update that brings a beautiful new design, intelligent experiences, and improvements to the apps users rely on every day. The new design offers a more expressive and delightful experience throughout the system, while maintaining the instant familiarity of iOS. Integrated throughout the system and built with privacy from the ground up, Apple Intelligence gets even more capable. Updates to the Phone and Messages apps help users stay connected while reducing distractions, such as unwanted calls and messages. iOS 26 also introduces new features in CarPlay, Apple Music, Maps, and Wallet, as well as Apple Games, a brand-new app that gives players a single destination for all their games.

“iOS 26 shines with the gorgeous new design and meaningful improvements to the features users rely on every day, making iPhone even more helpful,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “Experiences are more expressive and personal, from the Lock Screen and Home Screen, to new capabilities across Phone and Messages that help users focus on the connections that matter most. And with powerful new Apple Intelligence capabilities integrated across the system, users can get things done easier than ever.”

A Beautiful New Look

The new design makes apps and system experiences more expressive and delightful, while keeping iOS instantly familiar. It’s crafted with Liquid Glass — a new translucent material that reflects and refracts its surroundings, bringing greater focus to content, and delivering a new level of vitality across controls, navigation, app icons, widgets, and more. The new design extends to the Home Screen and Lock Screen, making them more personal and expressive than ever. Liquid Glass also brings new customisation options to app icons and widgets, including a stunning clear look.

On the Lock Screen, the time fluidly adapts to the available space in an image, and spatial scenes bring wallpapers to life with a 3D effect when users move the iPhone. Updated design elements also deliver fresh experiences in apps. A simplified, streamlined Camera layout helps users keep their attention on the moment they’re capturing, and the Photos app is updated to feature separate tabs for Library and Collections views. In Safari, web pages flow from the top edge to the bottom of the screen, allowing users to see more of the page while maintaining access to frequently used actions, such as refresh and search. In Apple Music, News, and Podcasts, the tab bar is redesigned to float above users’ content, dynamically shrink when users browse, and then expand when they scroll back up.

An updated set of APIs provides developers with access to Liquid Glass materials and components, allowing them to make their apps appear just as dynamic and delightful.

New Capabilities Powered by Apple Intelligence

Apple Intelligence enhances the iPhone experience, enabling users to accomplish tasks more easily than ever, while unlocking new ways to communicate and do more with what’s on their screen. Live Translation is integrated into Messages, FaceTime, and Phone to help users communicate across languages, translating text and audio in real-time.¹ Live Translation is enabled by Apple-built models that run entirely on the device, so users’ conversations stay personal.

Building on Apple Intelligence, visual intelligence extends to a user’s iPhone screen, allowing them to search and take action on anything they’re viewing across apps. Users can ask ChatGPT questions about what they’re looking at onscreen to learn more, as well as search Google, Etsy, or other supported apps to find similar images and products. Visual intelligence also recognises when a user is looking at an event and suggests adding it to their calendar, repopulating key details like date, time, and location.²

Genmoji and Image Playground provide users with even more ways to express themselves, including mixing their favourite emoji, Genmoji, and descriptions to create something new.³

Shortcuts are now more powerful and intelligent than ever. Users can tap into intelligent actions, a whole new set of shortcuts enabled by Apple Intelligence, and will see dedicated actions for features like Writing Tools and Image Playground.

Apple Intelligence can now automatically identify and summarise order tracking details from emails sent from merchants and delivery carriers, giving users the ability to see their full order details and progress notifications all in one place, even for purchases not made with Apple Pay.

Additionally, a new Foundation Models framework opens up access for any app to tap directly into the on-device foundation model at the core of Apple Intelligence, providing developers with direct access to powerful intelligence that’s fast, built with privacy at its core, and available offline, utilising AI inference that’s free of charge.

Features for Staying Connected and Eliminating Interruptions

Fundamental to the iPhone experience, the Phone app now offers a unified layout that combines Favourites, Recents, and Voicemails all in one place. Call Screening builds on Live Voicemail, helping to eliminate interruptions by gathering information from the caller and providing users with the details they need to decide whether to pick up or ignore the call.⁴ And for the times when a user is stuck on hold, Hold Assist notifies the user when a live agent is available.⁵

In Messages, users can now screen messages from unknown senders, giving them more control over who appears in their conversation list. Messages from unknown senders will appear in a dedicated folder, where users can then mark the number as known, request more information, or delete it. These messages will remain silenced until a user accepts them.

iOS 26 also offers enhancements to conversations, including custom backgrounds and the ability to create polls. With Apple Intelligence, Messages can detect when a poll might be useful and suggest one, and users can create unique backgrounds that fit their conversation with Image Playground. Additionally, in group chats, users can now see typing indicators, and request, send, and receive Apple Cash.⁶

Enhancements to CarPlay

CarPlay — the more innovative, safer way to use iPhone while driving — is used over 600 million times per day, and now with iOS 26, it receives updates that make it even more beautiful and easy to use. The stunning design features a new compact view for incoming calls, enabling users to see who’s calling without missing key information, such as upcoming directions. iOS 26 also brings Tapbacks and pinned conversations to Messages in CarPlay, and with widgets and Live Activities, users can stay in the loop without losing focus on the road. These updates also come to CarPlay Ultra, which brings the best of iPhone and the best of the car together for a deeply integrated, unified experience across every screen.

Updates to Apple Music, Maps, and Wallet

In Apple Music, Lyrics Translation helps users understand the words to their favourite songs, while Lyrics Pronunciation allows everyone to sing along, regardless of language. AutoMix utilises intelligence to transition smoothly from one song to the next, much like a DJ, employing time stretching and beat matching to move from one track to the next seamlessly.

In Apple Maps, Visited Places help users remember the places they’ve been. Users can choose to have iPhone detect when they’re at a place like a restaurant or shop, and view all of their Visited Places in Maps. Visited Places are protected with end-to-end encryption and cannot be accessed by Apple. Additionally, iPhone can now use on-device intelligence to better understand a user’s daily route, presenting them with their preferred route when they’re headed home or to the office, along with notifying them of delays and offering alternate routes.

Updates in Apple Wallet help make everyday interactions with the physical world easier than ever. Users can choose to pay with instalments or earn rewards when making in-store purchases with Apple Pay using an iPhone. Refreshed boarding passes in Wallet offer the ability to see and share Live Activities for real-time updates on a flight. They also provide convenient access to a traveller’s most relevant information, such as Maps to navigate airports, Find My to track essential items and report missing bags, and more.

Additional features in iOS 26:

• Apple Games is a new app that offers players a comprehensive destination for all their gaming needs. 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 significant events and updates, so they never miss a moment. The Games app is also the best way to experience Apple Arcade, Apple’s game subscription service featuring over 200 award-winning and highly rated games for the whole family.

• AirPods are 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 a camera remote, users can press and hold the AirPods stem to take a photo or start and stop a video recording on an iPhone or iPad.

• Parents can now create or transfer children into Child Accounts even more easily, taking advantage of a wide range 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.

• Browsing in Safari becomes even more private with advanced fingerprinting protection, which is enabled by default for all browsing.

• Powerful accessibility features 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.

Availability

All of these features are available for testing starting today through the Apple Developer Program at developer.apple.com. A public beta will be available through the Apple Beta Software Program next month at beta.apple.com. New software features will be available this fall as a free software update for iPhone 11 and later. The Apple Intelligence features detailed require supported devices, which include all iPhone 16 models, iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, iPad mini (A17 Pro), and iPad and Mac models with M1 and later that have Apple Intelligence enabled and Siri and device language set to the same supported language: English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish, Japanese, Korean, or Chinese (simplified). More languages will be added by the end of this year, including Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Portuguese (Portugal), Swedish, Turkish, Chinese (traditional), and Vietnamese. For more information, visit apple.com/apple-intelligence. Features are subject to change. Some features may not be available in all languages or regions, and availability may vary due to local laws and regulations. For more information about availability, visit apple.com.

About Apple: Apple revolutionised personal technology with the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984. Today, Apple leads the world in innovation with iPhone, iPad, Mac, AirPods, Apple Watch, and Apple Vision Pro. Apple’s six software platforms — iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS — provide seamless experiences across all Apple devices, empowering people with breakthrough services, including the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay, iCloud, and Apple TV+. Apple’s more than 150,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth and to leaving the world better than we found it.

1. Live Translation in Messages supports English (U.S., UK), French (France), German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish (Spain), and Chinese (simplified). Live Translation in Phone and FaceTime is available for one-on-one calls in English (U.S., UK), French (France), German, Portuguese (Brazil), and Spanish (Spain).
2. The ability to add an event to a calendar with visual intelligence is available in English on all iPhone 16 models, iPhone 15 Pro, and iPhone 15 Pro Max.
3. Genmoji and Image Playground are available in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish, and Japanese.
4. Call Screening supports Cantonese (China mainland, Hong Kong, Macao), English (U.S., Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, Singapore, South Africa, UK), French (Canada, France), German (Germany), Japanese (Japan), Korean (Korea), Mandarin Chinese (China mainland, Taiwan, Macao), Portuguese (Brazil), and Spanish (U.S., Mexico, Puerto Rico, Spain).
5. Hold Assist supports English (U.S., Australia, Canada, India, Singapore, UK), French (France), Spanish (U.S., Mexico, Spain), German (Germany), Portuguese (Brazil), Japanese (Japan), and Mandarin Chinese (mainland China).
6. Apple Cash services are provided by Green Dot Bank, a member of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Apple Payments Services LLC, a subsidiary of Apple Inc., is a service provider of Green Dot Bank for Apple Cash accounts. Neither Apple Inc. nor Apple Payments Services LLC is a bank. Learn more about the terms and conditions. Only available in the U.S. on eligible devices.

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