I put the iOS 26 developer beta on my main phone the day it dropped after the WWDC keynote in June, which is the kind of decision I make every single year and regret by roughly day four. This year the regret has lingered a little longer than usual, so I figured it's worth writing down while it's still fresh instead of after Apple's quietly sanded off all the rough edges by the fall release.
Two things happened at WWDC that are worth separating, because they get talked about like they're the same announcement and they're not. First, Apple renamed everything. No more iOS 19 — we jumped straight to iOS 26, and macOS is now "Tahoe" instead of whatever sequential number was next. iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, visionOS, all of it lines up under 26 now, apparently to match the "model year" the way a 2026 car ships in mid-2025. Fine. Harmless, honestly, and it stops the mild confusion of iOS 18 shipping alongside macOS 15 like they're unrelated products when they're really running on the same review cycle.
The second thing is the actual redesign, which Apple's calling Liquid Glass, and this is the one I have opinions about. Every system surface (Control Center, the lock screen, notification bubbles, the dock, tab bars in first-party apps) now renders as this translucent, refractive material that bends and reflects whatever's behind it, like actual glass sitting on top of your wallpaper. The demo videos looked genuinely impressive. Apple's marketing team earned their paycheck this cycle.
Living with it is a different story. I've got a photo of my dog Biscuit as my lock screen wallpaper, mostly warm brown fur and a bit of grass, and by the second week I'd basically stopped using Control Center from the lock screen because half the icons disappear into it. Wi-Fi and airplane mode toggle fine because they're high contrast, but the little slider for brightness gets genuinely hard to locate against certain photos. Last night, half-asleep at around midnight trying to kill Bluetooth before bed, I fumbled it three times because the glass was doing its glass thing over a dark part of the picture and the icon just wasn't there to my eyes. That's not a one-off. It's the whole premise of the effect. Beauty and legibility are in tension here and right now beauty is winning, which feels backwards for a company that used to obsess over exactly this kind of detail.
Text over Safari's new tab bar has the same issue in busy pages. Some Control Center panels lag by a beat when you pull them open, which I assume is beta performance overhead and not intentional, but three weeks in it hasn't gotten noticeably snappier. Battery life is down maybe 15-20% on a normal day, which again, beta tax, expected, not really a complaint so much as a data point for anyone thinking about doing this to their only phone.
None of this is me saying the redesign is bad in concept. The first big visual overhaul since iOS 7 back in 2013 was probably overdue, flat design had gotten pretty stale, and there's something genuinely nice about app icons and widgets feeling like they're floating in actual physical space instead of just sitting flat on a grid. I like it more in daylight, on a plain wallpaper, than I do at night over a photo. That's a pretty narrow window of "like."
Unrelated aside because it's been bugging me all week: I also updated my Apple Watch to the matching watchOS beta at the same time, which is a mistake I make roughly annually and which I am once again writing down here as a note to future me: do not update both devices in the same week, you will lose the ability to reliably unlock your Mac with your wrist for about four days while the two betas argue about compatibility. Every year. Never learn.
If you're the type who installs betas on launch day, I'd wait for beta 3 or 4 before doing your daily driver, and definitely test how Control Center reads over your actual lock screen photo before you commit, not the default wallpaper, your photo, because that's apparently where all the readability problems are hiding. The public beta's supposedly coming in July, and for anyone who isn't already knee-deep in this like I am, that's probably the saner entry point anyway.