Critiquing iOS 26 App Interfaces on The Talk Show

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Originally published at: Critiquing iOS 26 App Interfaces on The Talk Show - TidBITS

I had the pleasure of joining John Gruber for the “Serious Opinionators” episode of The Talk Show to geek out about user interface issues in iOS 26, and particularly the new Unified view in the Phone app (see “Comparing the Classic and Unified Views in iOS 26’s Phone App,” 10 November 2025), the Filter menu in Phone and Messages, and the truly odd hidden setting that appears in Settings > Apps > Phone only when the Phone app is in Unified view (see “Hidden Setting Controls What Happens When You Tap a Call in the Phone App,” 7 December 2025). It’s worth adding to your queue for several hours of relaxed listening. Gruber has also reacted to both of my articles on Daring Fireball.

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I enjoyed it, and found it interesting. I’m genuinely trying hard not to complain, but I am truly struggling with seeing UI elements, despite tweaking. I’m going all-in on keyboard shortcuts, and I was already a hands-on-the-keyboard not the mouse person. Thing that are hard or even impossible to see are even harder to click and drag.

I’m really wishing I had not upgraded my Mac.

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I put some thought and research into an article about the possibility of divorcing interface from function—in essence, was there a path that made sense for developers to allow users to remain on an older interface or create their own—but I concluded that it’s just too hard. In short, long-standing users are at the mercy of developers’ whims when it comes to changing interfaces.

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On the one hand, that’s a very traditional way to architect software the “right” way, i.e. to specify the data layer and the business logic layer separately from the presentation layer(s). On the other hand, in today’s vibe-coding, devops, one-size-fits-all UX environment, it’s not clear to me how many development organizations even know that used to be considered best practice.

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That was a good episode - what a surprise that it had been so long since you were on the Talk Show.

If you’ll excuse a snarky comment, it was interesting to hear so much complaining about a setting which disappears when the phone app is in a particular state, followed a while later by the appreciation of the filter edit control in the messages and the phone apps redirecting to the proper spot in the Settings app including a comment that there are pages in the Settings app that have grown very large over time. One may argue that one way to combat that issue is to include options in the settings app in a stateful way and remove them if they do not apply at any particular time.

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Glad you liked it! Frankly, I think the whole question of where settings should go and how they should be displayed is ripe for a rethink. I feel that the Settings app has been overloaded for a long time, and building app settings into it doesn’t help. Arguably, breaking them out into Settings > Apps at least clarified that a little, though it added a step for every app.