I installed iOS 26 on my iPhone 13 Pro. I think a couple of apps, like LINE, have not been restored yet. Basically it seems to work fine and looks nice though.
But in Messages, what’s with the “glowing” when you select a word, or send a message? That gets a bit annoying. Is there a way to suppress that?
I’m waiting a bit to install 26 on my 13 Mini so haven’t seen this, but perhaps a screen shot would help, I’m not 100% clear what you mean. Hopefully it shows up in same.
Sorry, although I have installed iOS 26, I don’t understand what you’re referring to. Do you mean when you edit a message that you’re writing and select a single word? I don’t see a glow effect.
I’m not seeing it either, but “Reduce Transparency” might tone that down. I already had that a few other settings enabled that will “tone down” Liquid Glass (and the install didn’t overwrite them, imagine that).
Liquid Glass introduces various effects and animations. The settings to reduce those are mostly in Settings > Accessibility … Unfortunately it may take some trial and error to figure out how to mitigate them.
Conceptually, everything you see and do is “on top” of something else. The most ubiquitous effect is the partial transparence of just about any app with your wallpaper bleeding through, and when there’s a popup it effectively shows up (partly transparent) on top of everything else. To mitigate that, go to
… > Display & Text size > Reduce Transparency and turn that on.
Separately, to mitigate various animations, go to
… > Motion > Reduce Motion and turn that on.
If you have any vision issues, I’d recommend turning both on. Also, turning them on should give better battery time.
If those don’t minimize the glowing and and other annoying effects, please let us know!
Since most people here seem to be saying they don’t see the same glow effect when selecting a word or sending a message, here is a short screen recording showing what I see. That’s sort of annoying.
Click on it and go to the video and play it.
Indeed. On that animation alone, I feel justified in waiting a while before going to OS 26. I would guess that “reduce motion” or “reduce transparency” will help.
From Apple community forums, where I also posted a link to the screen recording. So I’m not the only one seeing it.
Hard for me to understand how this glowing effect could be useful, though I guess some people must find it so. You have probably noticed that it is not just Messages where this happens. I explored Accessibility settings for a while (including trying the helpful tips suggested by @bob32 above), but could not find a way to turn off this effect. If anyone finds a way please post here. Thank you!
I haven’t seen that, but I did turn off predictive text a while ago because I play a puzzle game called Alphaguess and predictive text was ruining the game for me (it was predicting words that might be answers to the puzzle after typing one or two letters.)
I wonder if that’s the setting that affects this? (Settings / General / Keyboard). I do still have everything else turned on (except slide-to-type - I’ve always hated that, going back to my first Android smartphone in 2009), so I do get autocorrect, check spelling, etc. - just not in the area above the keyboard.
The effect is far more noticeable when dark mode is on. I wonder if that explains why some of us are not seeing it?
I too have predictive typing turned off, and still see the effect … very obviously when in dark mode, and less so when in light mode.
Thanks for the video. I now see it in Messages but I’m not using Dark mode so it wasn’t obvious to me.
My interpretation is that it’s a quick selection highlight being drawn when your entry is corrected or replaced via text substitutions. Perhaps in response to people complaining they want such actions to be more noticeable.
That appears to be the issue - dark mode vs light mode. I set mine to Automatic (light mode is just too light at night) so it’s light mode during the day and dark mode after sunset, and in light mode the “glowing” issue isn’t obvious.
Thanks.
Wow! Totally annoying!
For me, it happens every time I tap in the text field, regardless of whether anything is being corrected or replaced.
