Let’s collect the posts about your impressions of iOS 26 here.
I’ve always been a bleeding edge adopter. Probably crazy. I installed the PB on my iPad a couple weeks ago. I installed the RC candidate of Tahoe last week on my MacBook Air. Today I updated everything, iPhone, MBA, Mac mini, iPad, including watchOS. I don’t see an update for tvOS yet. I’m always very hesitant about updating the AppleTV. I’ve had problems with it before; if it has problems we lose TV, and my wife will not be a happy camper.
I am less unhappy with the look and feel of the 26 group than most people, apparently. Some visual glitches make me crazy. Some of the transparency makes it difficult to read text (notifications on the iPhone lock screen is an example for me). Overall I’m happy with Tahoe. I had a concerning glitch with Spotlight this morning on my M4 Mac mini – nothing (apps, files, etc.) would launch. Indexing had completed. It found the app or file, but it just wouldn’t launch/open. A restart fixed it.
I installed OS 26 on my M4 Mac mini, iPhone 15 Pro Max, and a watch 8 last night. No problems with any of the updates.
To my surprise, after reading all the wailing about the liquid glass interface, I find it’s just fine on all three devices but that may be because I’ve had reduced transparency turned on ever since they first started using transparency. 
I’m sure I’ll find things to bitterly complain about but at the moment I’ve noticed a number of small design changes that actually improve things: the redesigned Mac email message window, for example.
Dave
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iOS 26 installed on my iPhone 16 last evening.
Other than things being a little easier to find (!), I don’t understand the complaining about the Glass interface. As others have said, I have pre-existing selections to overcome Apple’s allergy to contrast and legibility. If I felt like experimenting, I’d revert all that to experience what the designers intended. But I don’t feel like it.
Everything seems a little faster, a little more responsive. There is a little less white space between tiles on each screen. The tiles themselves are easier to identify and tap. So far no issues with existing apps, of which I have too many, going back to iPhone 3.
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One small improvement I have noted is the integration with my hearing aids. I have the kind that my iPhone 16e can talk too. iOS 26 has improved the adjustments one can make directly on the iPhone instead of an app made by the hearing aid company.
My upgrade went badly.
I was upgrading my iPhone 13 to iOS 26 connected my 2024 MBP (running Sequoia 15.7) and doing an upgrade the way I have done them for a long time.
Midway through the upgrade my MBP told me the upgrade failed.
My iPhone was black but with the Apple logo and the progress bar just past the beginning of the apple logo.
Could do nothing.
Chatting with Apple Support - they said it needs to go in for repair/replacement.
That will be a pain and I have no phone. Just messaging on my MBP and some phone capability on my iWatch (not much volume).
Not very satisfactory. I’ve gone through the standard attempts to get the phone working (volume buttons and then side button and a restart - side button and volume button) but no joy!
Anyone know of something else to try. Don’t want to have to drive to the Apple store - no longer close by.
David
Before you do that, see if you can recover using DFU mode.
After putting the phone into DFU mode, connect it to your Mac with a USB cable and see if you can restore it from the Finder. If that works, you can then restore your stuff from a backup (hopefully you have a recent one, either locally or in iCloud).
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So far I have updated my 15 Pro to iOS 26 (my spare 16e was on the public beta all summer, but that’s now off the beta and will stay on the normal release track). First impressions for me after less than 24 hours of constant use (though with the understanding that I played with it a bit over the summer, just a couple of hours at most):
iOS 26/iPhone is running great for me. No glitches so far.
- I like the liquid glass implementation here for sure. The Lock Screen for my photos Lock Screen (which changes photos from my library for city, nature, and people) looks GREAT. The time increases and decreases based on the current photo really well.
- Thankfully I can summarize news notifications again. While the glass translucent notifications on the lock screen/notifictaion screen aren’t preferable to something less transparent, they are fine for me so far.
- I like the more compact phone app style - I always hated it the old way, so anything is better than having it the way it always was.
- I think I prefer the photos layout now to the change they made on iOS 18.
- I kind of like how the controls move to a more compact layout when you start to scroll. I see this in the music app, for example.
[edit - 2 days later]
One minor glitch I’ve noticed so far is when I am listening to podcasts on the phone (I use the app Castro), if I unlock the phone and then press the side button, I will get some interference in my earbuds (crackling/static/etc.).
It took several tries to put it in DFU mode and went to a YouTube video as well.
But
Success
Am restoring now.
David C - Many thanks.
David T
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I ran the update overnight and woke to the new welcome message. General impressions are good, no major issues. It will sound contradictory but I find Liquid Glass a little more obvious, but also a little more subtle, than its counterpart on Mac. The glass effect seems more suited to the phone.
Minor things; the fonts, and particularly some iconography, look very ‘chunky’. As my eyes are aging I’ve always had ‘Bold Text’ turned on but now it seems a little too bold. If I turn it off, the system level fonts are too fine to read comfortably so I’m sticking with the bold.
Sleep Score displaced Sleep in my pinned health elements. It was easily switched back but another case of Apple over-riding personal choice for their choice.
Overall, the glass effect is nice, but with folders with only a few items, the distortion of the background when moving between screens is a little distracting. As someone who primarily uses their phone as a phone, the update will offer little change other than maintaining OS synchronicity between my devices.
In recent years I’ve had zero success with updating iphone Mini 13 via usb connection to a Mac and selecting to update in the iPhone’s Finder window.
Usually it bricks the phone.
Tried lots of different possibilities, including the steps on Apple sites and VPN on/off, different cables, different ports, different user accounts on the mac, and one time had success only when using same iphone, same cables, connected to another Mac running Monterey OS.
Ever since, I gave up with using usb cables and Mac for updates, instead backing up iPhone and syncing at least twice to the Mac, running all backups of the Mac a couple of times (in case update bricks again and I need to restore), then I turn on wifi on the phone and update directly from it. That procedure has worked at least once or twice.
I have a nit to pick with alarms: the buttons (which appear to be larger and therefore easier targets to hit) don’t actually work reliably. To wit: a few moments ago one of my alarms went off. I immediately clicked on “Stop.” The Stop button blinked, but the alarm didn’t stop. So I clicked the button again. Once again, the Stop button blinked, but the alarm still didn’t stop. Finally, the third time I clicked on the Stop button the alarm stopped. If the button hadn’t blinked, I would have assumed that I somehow missed clicking it, but all three times the button blinked. So whatever mechanism causes the button to blink isn’t the same as the one that causes the alarm to actually stop, which is annoying.
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After suffering Liquid Glass on my M1 MBP I decided to upgrade my iPhone 12 Pro Max to iOS 26. I have, by necessity, always enabled “Reduce Transparency” and “Reduce Motion” wherever I could. I also have used “Download Only” for updates since it limits my direct time involved in OS upgrades and updates. I plugged my iPhone into a multiport Anker charger and told the iPhone to do it now. Relatively soon I saw the Apple symbol signifying some boot process. When I entered my PIN, there may have been some suggestions which I refused, but I almost could not tell any difference. The Phone app gave me a chance to return to the older format with more extensive screen use for a function instead of the new layout which crammed snippets of each function into a crowded and confusing mess on one screen. Close up, the icons seem brighter and more readable than before. Much better than the distant view on a large macOS screen. I am especially pleased with the large buttons on Alarm and Timer alerts. Finding the tiny stop button on wakeup had been nearly an exercise in futility. I do find myself looking for the bar to start a swipe up, like turn signals on cars, the bar appears after the swipe begins.
Bottom line: I am well satisfied by my iOS 26 upgrade on my iPhone 12 Pro Max. So far, the preferences set by Apple have been easily reset to mine.
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Actually, despite much of the bad press Liquid Glass is getting, I actually like it. I just picked up my new iPhone 17 pro max and have been playing with it a bit but decided to turn off Liquid Glass due to one major and unexpected problem: scrolling.
I am extremely sensitive to scrolling irregularities in iOS and actually returned an iPhone 10s due to occasional scrolling jitters (my 7+ scrolled much more smoothly). It wasn’t until the iPhone 12 that these were resolved.
I noticed on my new phone that were these tiny jitters when scrolling in safari and I was a bit disappointed that the new extremely competent GPU should have this problem. I decided to turn off (reduce) transparency and scrolling became buttery smooth again. I wonder if anyone else has noticed this?
I do too, on the phone.
After tweaking a few settings on Tahoe, I’ve become a bit more attuned to it, but on my iPhone I actually quite like it.
A small glitch with CarPlay: iPhone 16 connected directly to Honda 2019 head unit. I was listening to the radio but using CarPlay for the map. I received a phone call and when I answered, the CarPlay audio did not switch to the call.
Could be transient but will be looking for it.
It’s possible that this was just an anomaly caused but the newly-installed phone running a lot of background processes to build the spotlight index, etc. It’d be interesting to see if you try again in a few days to see if it’s better.
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I’d tend to agree with this. I got the same phone, have not adjusted any UI bits from the factory settings, and scrolling in Safari is smooth for me.
Oh, and I’m also a fan of iOS 26. So far I’d say it’s certainly no worse than iOS 18, and in many ways better.
26 seems to work fine on my 13 mini.
On the initial post-upgrade boot, it wasn’t making any sounds when connecting a charge cable. A shutdown/restart fixed that.
I turned transparency and motion back on - I had them off for years. The effect is much less annoying than in the past.
The clear/tinted icons are a waste. I thought they’d look more glass-like (as in the Apple press packets), but it really just changes the graphics to gray scale. Looks terrible.
One thing that surprised me is that I can now move an icon to anywhere on a home screen. It is no longer necessary for the icons to be a continuous stream from the upper-left corner to the bottom of the screen.
I was also surprised to see that you can long-press an icon and convert it into its widget representation via a button on the popup menu (if the app supports the capability, of course). And a long-press on a widget can let you pick one of its alternate shapes or set it back to an icon. You used to (I think) have to delete and re-add a widget in order to make this change.
Maybe someone already mentioned these features - I really want’s paying attention to all the fiddly details - but I was pleasantly surprised to find them there.
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That feature was added last year 
I got my new 17 Pro Max yesterday and while I haven’t had time to explore everything, I am wondering about all the fuss with “Liquid Glass.” I really don’t notice much difference. I had worried about readability, but it seems fine. Icons are fine (even old apps).
I am pleasantly surprised my many interface improvements. The new Camera app is much better (simplified, but with quick access to advanced features if you need them). The same with Photos which now splits the view of your library and “collections” (categories of photos, which you can reorder).
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