Last week, Apple unveiled a bevy of updates coming in iOS 26, together with a brand new design referred to as Liquid Glass that can span throughout all of its working techniques. Inspired by VisionOS on the Vision Pro headset, Liquid Glass provides translucency to elements of the consumer interface, together with shiny glass-like edges on icons and an improved responsiveness.
The visuals are modern, to make sure, however this improve from iOS 18 is not as dramatic as it’d initially appear. (Right, Apple is skipping 19 and the opposite intervening numbers.) Think of it as touch-up slightly than reconstructive surgical procedure, with iOS 26’s different, extra mundane options tucked beneath.
Liquid Glass on the house display is a reasonably minimal change, which is an effective factor. We’re solely on the first developer beta of the brand new OS and design, although, and Apple will undoubtedly make tweaks all the way in which as much as its last launch.
Below, we’ll take a better have a look at each iOS 26 and iOS 18 to see what’s totally different between the 2. For extra, this is why you may wish to maintain off putting in the iOS 26 developer beta.
Home display
Apple saved the brand new Liquid Glass minimal on the house display, with solely minor adjustments to the default dwelling display look versus iOS 18’s.
Looking on the dwelling screens, the first distinction you may discover is that in iOS 26 the background of the dock and the search possibility that sits in between the dock and the house display icons are extra clear and have a sheen to the perimeters, whereas in iOS 18, these are barely darker.
Other smaller adjustments are that the icons on iOS 26 look barely bigger, and a few app icons look to be influenced by the redesign greater than others, most notably (from the screenshots) Settings, Camera and Mail.
For Liquid Glass to essentially shine on the house display, you may wish to go for the “All Clear” mode, which can create essentially the most dramatic change to your icons and widgets. Going this route may probably introduce some viewability points, however the “scale back transparency” setting treatments this fairly nicely.
Control Center
Things listed below are largely unchanged. Outside of the brand new glassy look in iOS 26, the 1×2 and 2×1 controls are extra rounded than that of iOS 18.
Lock display
It’s straightforward to see the variations that Liquid Glass brings to the lock display of the iPhone. The digital clock in iOS 26 dynamically resizes relying on the wallpaper and the variety of notifications you’ve gotten at any given second, which is fairly cool. The clock itself on iOS 18 may be modified, but it surely will not change in measurement in response to content material displayed on the lock display.
The background on notifications is clearly totally different between the 2 OS variations, with iOS 18 offering extra opacity and a black textual content versus iOS 26’s near-transparent background on white textual content. The controls on the backside in iOS 26 additionally seem extra like bodily buttons with depth and extra of a see-through background.
The new unlock impact in iOS 26 is that the movement of unlocking your iPhone will seem as if you are lifting a sheet of glass, highlighted by a shiny edge to offer it kind whenever you start to slip your finger up.
Menus and dynamic tab bars
iOS 26’s new Dynamic Tab provides you a cleaner look and more room to view your content material.
A brand new addition in iOS 26 is the introduction of dynamic tab bars in apps that can change relying whether or not you are scrolling or attempting to carry out a particular motion. Apple says it will create a extra intuitive expertise whereas liberating up area in your content material. If you had been to interchange the glass impact with closely saturated colours, nobody would blame you for mistaking this new tab bar with what Google’s doing in Android 16 in a few of its apps — they give the impression of being rather a lot alike. But in comparison with iOS 18, this new dynamic tab bar shouldn’t solely scale back sifting by way of a number of menus, but it surely appears to be like fairly good within the course of.
iOS 26 will dynamically adapt to gentle and darkish backgrounds
In iOS 26, the colour of menu icons and icon textual content will adapt relying on the background.
While it is tougher to check Liquid Glass to iOS 18 right here, an upcoming characteristic is that buttons and menus will adapt relying on the content material’s background colour. For occasion, whenever you’re scrolling by way of an app with a light-weight background, the floating menu choices will seem with black textual content for simpler viewing and can mechanically change to white upon scrolling to a darkish background.
in iOS 18, some apps elements of the consumer interface would seem darker relying on the colour of the background, however much less so than how Liquid Glass handles it now.
iOS has had such a characteristic present up in a much less dramatic style earlier than, as you possibly can inform from the images app screenshots under. Comparing these to what’s on the horizon, it is onerous to not get excited concerning the small tweaks Liquid Glass has in retailer, too.
Those are only a few of our preliminary findings and there is probably extra that we’ll replace this text with as soon as we floor them. If you need extra about iOS 26, take a look at three upcoming options which might be an even bigger deal than Liquid Glass.
