(This about iOS, not Mac, but obviously a lot is similar.)
I might be in the minority on hn, but I’m using iOS 26 for the first time today and am pretty happy with the new design. For one, it’s a lot snappier and faster. I’m glad they finally did something about the slow-ass animations iOS had in a lot of places. Secondly, it has a lot more personality. I enjoy that. Thirdly, they finally moved more basic UI stuff close to the thumbs instead of literally 6 inches away at the top of the screen. Love that. Knowing app designers, my apps are about to get easier to use just by migrating to the new UX concepts Apple is pushing.
The glass look is mostly fine. iOS had contrast issues before, and I don’t think it’s any worse. If anything, it’s more adaptive to different types of backgrounds now.
There are some visual glitches and weird things, but they’re pretty minor and will be resolved with time. The glass panes for, say, folders look nice, and I like it more than the previous blur.
I don’t mind the visual appearance of iOS 26. My main gripe is that this update introduces some pointless additional taps for common interactions.
Here’s some of the UX regressions:
- Apple Music: the “next track” button is only visible if the tab bar is expanded. So now we have to scroll or tap, wait for an animation and then click next. - Web views search web for selected text: previously we could highlight, swipe the action menu and then tap the button. Now we have to highlight, tap the small arrow, wait for the horizontal list to animate into a vertical list, tap the button. They removed the ability to swipe the action menu. - Tab bars: since 2007, you could change tabs with one tap. Now it’s one or two taps, depending on whether it’s collapsed or expanded.
Personally, I like the vertical list in the web view for highlighted text. The action menu was so annoying. The items were always in a different order and I always had to highlight, tap, tap, tap… on small targets to get to what I wanted.
Agreed! Accidentally dismissing the old menu and needing to scroll again drove me up the wall. My phone has over 3 million pixels and I did not gain anything by having a small, horizontally scrolling menu specific to highlighted text.
The worst thing is Safari removing all tabs button.
Quick way is to pinch out with two fingers but that is impossible one-handed.
Another is to swipe up (or left/right) on address bar but that often triggers app switching because he indicator is 3mm lower
I’ve settled on swiping up on the (…) button. But yeah, either way I’m bummed that usability had been traded for shiny/trendy aesthetics here. Worst part is that they know and have provided options to have “classic view”/“try new ui” rather than iterating and polishing it to the point it’s substantially improved and there’s no choice but to release it.
Design is a series of decisions. Those decisions should be rooted in a strong, thoughtful, point of view. It’s a problem when the final product embodies multiple points of view; view options should be the extreme exception, not the norm we now see in phone, mail, safari, etc.
It’s still there, just moved. Tap the … icon next to the address bar. “All tabs” will be under your thumb.
Settings > Safari > Set tabs to “Bottom”. This gives you back the old style bottom bar, including the all tabs button.
The “Compact” UI option is complete and utter garbage.
The keyboard on iOS 26 is all messed up. Letters on the keys are no longer vertically centred and are shifted up slightly, while the shift and delete glyph are still in the middle. It looks like a mistake replicated 26 times.
Edit: Also, information density is down across the board. Of course.
Interesting. Looks like they decided to vertically center lowercase letters at the expense of the rest. The lowercase L key looks particularly bad.
I don't really like the look, but I noticed it feels a lot faster, too. That is certainly welcomed!