iOS 26: What You Need To Know

With the latest OS release from Apple, we are experiencing changes to the iPhone and iPad experiences not seen since the shift to iOS7 over ten years ago. Here’s some of what you need to know, if you have apps on Apple’s app store.

Liquid Glass

Liquid Glass is the most prominent and likely impactful change to Apple’s mobile OS’s. The new Liquid Glass design language combines transparent and reflective elements with liquid animations that bounce and morph as the interfaces are interacted with.

Added to this is a broadening of the screen real estate and the removal of the old-style blocks of colour most often taking up visible space in the form of navigation bars at the top, and tab bars at the bottom. In favour of these old elements, we now see gradients where content fades out gradually as it passes off-screen, and menus and tab bars are subsumed into floating buttons that expand and collapse on command.

The look and feel of icons on the home screen has also changed, with deeper corner radii, and the implementation of glass layers that show the background through under different UI settings.

Additionally, the iPad has gone another step to become a fully windowed OS, allowing apps to be resized and placed anywhere on screen alongside other apps.

Impact on Existing App Store Apps

Experience is showing that the impact of these OS changes ranges from subtle to catastrophic. The most obvious things to be affected are tab bars, which are changing from the solid block to a floating bar, and can, under certain circumstances, be rendered unusable. On the iPad, the tab bar now has the possibility of floating at the top, or being moved to the side. Suffice it to say the block at the bottom of the screen is now gone for good, and tab bars, particularly custom tab bars, will need to be updated to handle the change of position and colours now put in place.

The navigation bars have been removed, replaced with more dynamic screen headers that will again need to take into account the content behind and the colours required to remain visible. Buttons will need to be laid out correctly, and in some cases necessitate submenus that morph into position for a greater degree of control. Needless to say, with so much see-through content, the correct use of colour will be paramount.

With the advent of flexible windowed content on the iPad, the notion of static sizes is all but gone. App owners will need to decide how to handle this flexibility to give end users the best and most up-to-date experience alongside other apps from the app store. And with rumours of foldable phones circulating for next year, the iPhone may well follow the iPad’s lead. Text layout, image sizing, button arrangements, everything will need to be taken into account, to maximise the experience of an app that can now be used on a screen of any size.

Disclaimer:

This article is for informational purposes only and is intended to provide a general overview of the changes in iOS 26. The specific impact on your app may vary depending on its unique design and functionality.