Apple unleashed an assortment of recent options throughout its working techniques at its Worldwide Developers Conference final week. Tying the updates collectively is a brand new design language known as Liquid Glass that can ultimately discover its option to your iPhone, iPad and Mac. Inspired by the VisionOS on the Vision Pro headset, Liquid Glass provides a translucent glass impact to elements of the person interface that you could hold refined or dial it up. In addition to the translucency results, the brand new design provides a shiny glass-like edge to icons and menus and has a liquid-like, improved responsiveness.
The visuals are glossy, to make sure, however this improve from iOS 18 is not as dramatic as it would initially appear. (Right, Apple is skipping 19 and the opposite intervening numbers.) Think of it as touch-up fairly than reconstructive surgical procedure, with iOS 26’s different, extra mundane options tucked beneath.
Liquid Glass on the house display screen is a reasonably minimal change, which is an efficient 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 best way as much as its last launch.
Below, we’ll take a better take a look at each iOS 26 and iOS 18 to see what’s completely different between the 2. For extra, here is why you would possibly wish to maintain off putting in the iOS 26 developer beta.
Home display screen
Apple stored the brand new Liquid Glass minimal on the house display screen, with solely minor modifications to the default residence display screen look versus iOS 18’s.
Looking on the residence screens, the first distinction you may discover is that in iOS 26 the background of the dock and the search choice that sits in between the dock and the house display screen icons are extra clear and have a sheen to the sides, whereas in iOS 18, these are barely darker.Â
Other smaller modifications are that the icons on iOS 26 look barely bigger, and a few app icons appear to have been extra influenced by the redesign than others, most notably (from the screenshots) Settings, Camera and Mail.Â
For Liquid Glass to essentially shine on the house display screen, you may wish to go for the “All Clear” mode, which can create probably the most dramatic change to your icons and widgets. Going this route may doubtlessly introduce some viewability points, however the “cut back transparency” setting treatments this fairly effectively.
Control Center
Things listed here are largely unchanged. Outside of the brand new glassy look in iOS 26, the 1Ă—2 and 2Ă—1 controls are extra rounded than that of iOS 18.Â
Lock display screen
It’s simple to see the variations that Liquid Glass brings to the lock display screen of the iPhone. The digital clock in iOS 26 dynamically resizes relying on the wallpaper and the variety of notifications you’ve at any given second, which is fairly cool. The clock itself on iOS 18 will be modified, but it surely will not change in dimension in response to content material displayed on the lock display screen.Â
The background on notifications is clearly completely 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.Â
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 present it type while you start to slip your finger up.Â
Menus and dynamic tab bars
iOS 26’s new Dynamic Tab provides you a cleaner look and extra space 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 on whether or not you are scrolling or making an attempt to carry out a selected motion. Apple says this may create a extra intuitive expertise whereas releasing up area in your content material. If you had been to switch 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 appear so much alike. But in comparison with iOS 18, this new dynamic tab bar mustn’t solely cut back sifting by a number of menus, but it surely seems fairly good within the course of.Â
iOS 26 will dynamically adapt to mild 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 coloration. For occasion, while you’re scrolling by an app with a light-weight background, the floating menu choices will seem with black textual content for simpler viewing and can routinely change to white upon scrolling to a darkish background.
in iOS 18, some apps facets of the person interface would seem darker relying on the colour of the background, however much less so than how Liquid Glass handles it now.Â
iOS has had this sort of characteristic present up in a much less dramatic trend earlier than, as you may inform from the photographs app screenshots above. Comparing these to what’s on the horizon, it is exhausting to not get excited in regards to the small tweaks Liquid Glass has in retailer, too.Â
Those are just some of our preliminary findings, and we’ll probably add extra as soon as we floor them. If you need extra about iOS 26, try three upcoming options which can be an even bigger deal than Liquid Glass.
