Transcription
So, Apple has just released iOS 26 to the public. This is undoubtedly the biggest redesign of iOS in well over a decade. It's a very different version of Apple's operating system, and it's packed with some really cool quality of life improvements and features. If you've just installed it on your phone, you might not know where to start. So, I'm here to help.
In this video, I'm going to show you the 10 things I think you should look at first, along with five honorable mentions at the end of the video. Okay, let's get into it.
I can't really make an iOS 26 video without talking about the complete visual overhaul that Apple has made to the operating system. They're calling it liquid glass, and there isn't really much I can say to prepare you for how it looks because you're going to experience it for yourself as soon as you load iOS 26 onto your device, but what I can do is give you a few tips to help you get used to some of the layout changes that Apple has made to the look and feel of the system.
So, the first tip is that search bars have generally moved to the bottom of the screen. So, for example, in messages, there's now a search bar at the bottom. Same in music, there's a dedicated search button at the bottom right. Photos also has the search button down in the bottom right. And even mail has moved its search bar to the bottom. So, as a rule of thumb, if you're trying to find something in a first party Apple app, check the bottom of the screen because that's probably where the search bar now lives.
Next, ellipsis menus are back in a big way. They've always been a part of iOS, but they're much more prominent now, and typically live in the top right corner. You'll find that tapping one often opens a full screen or floating menu with loads of extra options. In some apps like Mail, you'll even notice that as you navigate in and out of different views, the ellipsus icon itself can morph into different buttons, so the visual transitions are much more animated now.
And finally, if you're not a fan of the see-through aesthetic of Liquid Glass, you can tone it down. Just go into settings, then accessibility, then display and text size, and turn on reduce transparency. Once that's enabled, you'll find that a lot of the frosted glass look gets replaced with more solid backgrounds, making things a bit easier to see, especially in Control Center and other layered UI elements.
The customization options for your iPhone home screen are now much more streamlined in iOS 26. I'm going to cover these in more detail in a separate video, but here's a quick overview of how it works. If you long press on the home screen to enter edit mode, you'll now see an edit button in the top left corner. And when you tap on that, you'll see a few familiar options: add widgets and customize, as well as two that used to be hidden in different places: edit wallpaper and edit pages. Those last two aren't new, but it is nice that everything is now brought together into one place.
If you tap into customize, you'll see a few new additions here, too. There's a new toggle for small or large app icons, represented by two different sized squares, and there's now a clear option, which gives your app tiles a frosted glass style transparent background. That one's definitely going to come down to personal taste. I'm not a huge fan myself, but I can see why some people will like it. You'll also still see the options for default, dark, and tinted styles. And if you tap into dark, there's now an extra setting where you can choose between auto, so it switches between light and dark depending on the time of day, or always, which will keep dark mode active all of the time, even during the day.
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The entire screenshot process has changed in iOS 26, and it is such a significant change that Apple has even added a new dedicated section for it in settings. To find it, open settings, then go into general, and scroll down until you see screen capture. Tap into that, and you'll see a few options that are worth looking at. The first is full screen previews. If this is turned on, you'll get the new screenshot workflow, which I'm about to walk you through. If you turn it off, your phone will revert back to the older screenshot method with a thumbnail in the bottom left corner. So, choose whichever style suits you best.
Next is automatic visual lookup, which will try to automatically identify and give you information about things in your screenshot. Personally, I've always found visual lookup a little bit hit and miss. So, this one's really going to come down to how useful you find it. Then, there's CarPlay screenshots. This is where if your phone is connected to CarPlay and you take a screenshot, your phone will actually capture two screenshots: one of your phone and one of your CarPlay display. Great if you're someone who creates tutorials or reviews. Probably not something that most people will need enabled. And finally, format. By default, this is set to SDR, which is what we've always had. HDR screenshots look better, but they do take up more space and aren't always compatible with other devices. So, unless you have a specific reason for needing HDR, I would leave this as SDR.
Now, let's take a look at how screenshots actually work under this new system. I'm going to go into Instagram and find a product, then take a screenshot. Straight away, the screenshot opens in full screen edit mode. You can crop the screenshot by dragging the corners and edges directly. At the top, there's a markup tool if you want to draw or write on the screenshot, and a share button for sending it wherever you need to. In the top right corner, there is a tick button. Tap this, and you'll see options to save the screenshot to photos, save it to files, save it to a quick note, copy it to your clipboard, or delete it entirely. So, you've got all the usual options in one place. If you find that you don't really want this edit screen at all, just disable full screen previews in the settings that we looked at earlier.
Down at the bottom, if your screenshot contains foreign text, a translate button will appear. Just tap that to translate directly. If your device supports Apple Intelligence, you'll also see an ask button in the bottom left that lets you run a chat GPT conversation based on what's in the screenshot. And finally, down in the bottom right is the image search button. This is a reverse Google image search that can scan the screenshot and find visual matches. You can also highlight a specific part of the image by drawing a circle over it and then swipe up to view the matching results. I showed this using a product screenshot because honestly, I think that's one of the main ways that people will use this feature. It's a really quick and effective way to find out more about what you're seeing on screen, especially for things like clothes, gadgets, or anything else that catches your eye.
The new photos app in iOS 26 includes a really clever feature that can turn an ordinary two-dimensional photo into something that looks and feels three-dimensional. To try it out, open any image and look for the spatial photos button. It's just underneath the ellipsus up in the top right corner of the screen. Tap on this. Give your phone a second to process it. And then as you tilt and move your device around, you'll see that it's created a really convincing 3D scene. Foreground elements appear to move independently from the background, giving your image real depth and motion. You can also use this as a wallpaper. So, if you take that same image and press the share button, you'll see an option to use it as wallpaper. Once you do that, you'll notice the same spatial button appears again. Tap on that. And now, when you lock your phone and wake it, your wallpaper comes to life with that same 3D depth effect as you move your phone around.
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The Photos app has seen a big improvement in iOS 26, with Apple keeping a lot of the things that worked well in the iOS 18 redesign while fixing some of the most common complaints. The first thing that you'll notice when you open the app is that there's now a much clearer separation between your photo library and your collections. You can easily switch between them using the buttons down in the bottom left corner of the screen.
Search has also been improved. There's now a dedicated magnifying glass icon in the bottom right corner, which is much easier to spot than the old blue icon that used to blend into your photos. Tap on it, and you can search through your photo library just like before. Up at the top, there's a filter button that lets you apply filters or change your view. And the select button is now up in the top right corner. Once you've selected a few photos, you'll see the familiar share button down in the bottom left and the delete button over in the bottom right.
If you switch to collections, you'll see everything organized into different categories. Tap on the ellipsus at the top and choose reorder. And then you can use the drag bars to move different collections up or down based on what matters most to you. One thing that's changed is that you can no longer remove collections entirely. That option has been taken away in iOS 26, but you can now collapse any collection that you don't really care about. Just tap the arrow next to it, and it will disappear from view, which helps keep the app tidy and makes it much easier to focus on the things that you actually want to see.
The camera app, arguably one of the most used apps on your iPhone, has had a complete redesign from the ground up in iOS 26. And I'll be honest, the jury is still out on whether I actually think this is better. But regardless, let me show you how it works. Everything centers around two buttons at the very bottom of the screen: video and photo. These act like anchor points. Any video-related capture modes are to the left of video, and any photo-related modes are to the right of photo. So, for example, time-lapse, being a video mode, is to the very left of video. Pano, being a photo mode, is all the way over to the right of photo. You swipe sideways to move through them, and you might need a bit of time to get used to where everything now lives.
Once you've landed on the mode that you want, you've got your usual shutter button and your lens option just above that. But if you swipe up from the bottom of the screen, you'll get access to your capture options. So, in photo mode, for example, this is where you'll find things like flash, live photo, exposure, and aspect ratio. Just tap on the setting that you want and tap again to close it. You've still got quick flash options at the top of the screen. And if you see a little 2x3 grid icon, tapping on that will bring up the same menu that you'd otherwise get by swiping up. Other than that, everything else works exactly the same as before. It's the layout that's changed, not the functionality. The real challenge here is just going to be building up the muscle memory to navigate the new layout. What do you think? Is this an improvement, or do you prefer the old version? Let me know in the comments.
Apple has added a few really useful new features in the battery section of settings. So, if you open settings and then choose battery, you'll see everything that's new. If your phone is charging, you'll see a new charging section right at the top of the screen. And this gives you a quick visual guide showing how long it's going to take for your phone to reach 80% charge and then how long until it reaches 100%. So, if you're just looking to grab a quick top-up, this makes it really easy to know when you'll hit that 80% mark, which is often enough to get you through the rest of your day.
Beneath that, you'll also see a clearer breakdown of your usage. And something that I've noticed is that Apple seems to be doing a much better job this time around of presenting that data in plain English rather than bombarding you with stats that you just don't care about. The battery health section is still here as it was before. And in the charging section, if your phone supports it, you can now set a charge limit. This can be anywhere between 80% and 100%. And you can also enable or disable optimized battery charging depending on what works best for you.
But the brand new option here is power mode. If you tap into this, you'll see a feature called adaptive power. This allows your phone to identify when your battery usage is unusually high and then make subtle adjustments to help extend your battery life. That might include slightly dimming the screen or letting some background tasks take a little longer than usual. It's a smart way to squeeze more life out of your phone without needing to turn on low power mode all the time.
If you've never really been a fan of the default 9-minute snooze that the iPhone has had forever, you can now finally change that in iOS 26. Just open the clock app and set an alarm. And down at the bottom, you'll see a new option for snooze duration. It'll be set to 9 minutes by default, but if you tap into it, you can now choose anywhere from 1 minute, which honestly, why would you ever do that, all the way up to 15 minutes, which is way too dangerous for my taste. Choose whichever option works best for you, and enjoy those extra few minutes in bed.
One of the more surprising features added in iOS 26, and one that I think is going to be a genuine quality of life upgrade for just about everyone, is a set of improvements to the phone app. When you open the phone app, you'll now see a filter button in the top right corner. Tap on this, and you can choose between the classic layout or a new unified view. This is very much down to personal preference, but if you prefer to have most of your recent calls, voicemails, and contacts all in one place, the unified look is worth a try.
Then, in terms of the actual phone functionality, there are three new features that are genuinely useful. If you go into settings, scroll to the bottom, and tap on apps, then choose phone, you'll find them in the calls from unknown numbers section. First, you can now choose between two options for handling unknown callers: either silence, which is what we've had before, or ask reason for calling. If you enable ask reason for calling, your iPhone will automatically answer calls from numbers that aren't in your contacts and ask the caller to state their name and reason for calling. Once that info has been collected, your phone will ring as usual and display what the caller said, so you can decide whether or not to answer.
Second, there's a new call filtering option. If you get a lot of calls during the day, especially from unknown numbers, this can help tidy things up. It moves missed calls and voicemails from unsaved numbers into a separate unknown callers list within the phone app, so your main call history stays less cluttered. And finally, there's a really clever new option called detect call waiting. When this is enabled, if you're on a call and get placed on hold, your phone can recognize that hold music is playing and give you the option to step away from the call. It will keep your place in the queue, and when it detects that a human has returned to the line, it will ask them to hold for a moment while it alerts you to come back and resume the call. It works surprisingly well and could be a big time-saver if you find yourself on hold often.
There are a couple of really useful new features in the reminders app. The first one is only available if you have a device that supports Apple Intelligence, but if you do, you can now tap the ellipsus menu in the top right corner of any reminders list and choose autocategorize. When you do this, your phone will use on-device AI to automatically sort your list into sections. In my experience, it actually works really well. So, for example, if you've made a packing list for a trip, it'll automatically break it up into different categories like clothes, toiletries, tech, without you having to do a thing.
The other new feature is about how you create reminders. Of course, you can still add them manually in the reminders app or by using Siri, but there's now an additional option. You can add a new reminder directly from Control Center or by using the action button if your phone supports it. I honestly thought this was already there in iOS 18, but it turns out it wasn't, and it's genuinely a really helpful addition. To add this to Control Center, open Control Center, long press to enter edit mode, then tap add a control. Search for Reminder at the top, and you'll see new reminder in the list. Tap on that to add it. Now, whenever you open Control Center, you'll have a dedicated button that opens a quick reminder window at the top of your screen, making it much easier to jot something down on the fly. You can also assign this to the action button. Just head into settings, tap action button, swipe to the controls card, and then tap choose a control. Search for reminder, and once it's assigned, you can long press the action button to instantly bring up that same quick reminder window.
So, those were 10 features, but here are five honorable mentions that I'm not going to go into a huge amount of detail, but still thought were worth highlighting. First, in the notes app, there's now a brand new toolbar just above the keyboard. This makes it much easier to access all of the formatting and media options without having to go hunting through menus.
In the music app, if you go into playlists and tap the plus button, you now have the option to create a new folder as well as a new playlist. This means that you can now organize multiple playlists into folders, which is really handy if you've built up a lot over the years.
The podcast app now includes a small but very useful upgrade. While you're listening to a podcast, tap the 1X button just to the left of the player controls to adjust playback speed like before, but you'll also see a new enhanced dialogue option, which boosts the clarity of voices, making them easier to hear.
In messages, if you tap the plus button to open the messages app drawer, you will find a new polls option. You can create a quick multi-choice poll that can be shared in group chats, making it much easier to get a group decision on something.
And finally, there is a brand new app on your iPhone called Preview. This is where you can quickly view files like PDFs or images, make simple edits or markups, and carry out light document work without needing a third-party app.
So, there you go. Those are the 10 things I think you should check out first in iOS 26, plus five honorable mentions. What do you think? What features have you been most impressed by? Or is there something that you're still waiting for Apple to add to iOS? Drop me a comment and let me know. And as ever, if you found this video useful, do please consider leaving me a like and subscribing to my channel for more content like this in the future. See you on the next video.