iOS 26: The Best New Features Unveiled At WWDC 2025

Well, WWDC 2025 certainly didn’t disappoint, did it? Apple unveiled the next major iteration of their iPhone operating system, and surprise, surprise, they’ve skipped a few numbers to land on iOS 26, aligning it with their other platforms like macOS Tahoe 26. This isn’t just a simple refresh; Apple is calling it the most significant visual overhaul in a decade. We got our first official preview on June 9, 2025.

While the full, polished version is slated for release in autumn 2025, developers already have access to the first beta, with a public beta expected next month, in July. Apple is offering a first look at some of the most impactful iOS 26 features.

A New Look: Liquid Glass Design

The most immediately noticeable change is the introduction of a fresh design language called ‘Liquid Glass’. This aesthetic employs translucent, glass-like layers throughout the system, aiming to add depth and subtle visual effects. The goal is to create a more dynamic and immersive interface experience not just on iPhones, but across other Apple devices too.

On the Lock Screen, this translates to a clean, minimal look where the clock and widgets dynamically adjust their position and size based on your wallpaper. The clock now appears integrated into the background, rather than just sitting on top. New ‘spatial scene’ wallpapers add subtle 3D parallax as you tilt your device.

The Home Screen also adopts the Liquid Glass style, offering app icons and widgets with a translucent, glassy appearance as an optional view, alongside the classic light and dark modes. The interface features consistent rounded corners and translucent layers for a unified and polished feel. There’s even an ‘All Clear’ look where icons are clear glass with no colour.

Interestingly, the response to Liquid Glass has been varied. While Apple touts it as revolutionary, some feel it’s a noticeable but not groundbreaking aesthetic change. Comparisons to Android interfaces have quickly emerged, with some noting a stronger resemblance than ever before. Some initial impressions suggest the translucent icons can make it harder to quickly spot specific apps.

Updated Core Applications

Several of Apple’s built-in apps have received significant updates in iOS 26, bringing long-requested features and design refinements.

• Messages: Catching up to modern chat platforms, Messages now includes a separate inbox for unknown senders to filter spam. Group chats finally support instant polls, and members can add their own items to a poll. Typing indicators for group conversations are also here. You can now customise chat backgrounds. Apple Cash payments within group chats are easier.

• Phone: The Phone app offers a unified view combining Favourites, Recent calls, and Voicemail. Call Screening automatically answers unknown callers and transcribes their message in real-time, allowing you to decide if you want to pick up. A new Hold Assist feature monitors calls when you’re on hold and alerts you when a human agent becomes available.

• Camera & Photos: The Camera app features a polished interface that minimises distractions, putting the viewfinder centre stage. Controls and buttons are neatly tucked away. While no flashy new modes were added, subtle improvements include using AirPods as a remote shutter. AI enhancements work behind the scenes for smarter search and identification later. The Photos app gets a subtle makeover, reorganising Library and Collections for clearer navigation. The Memories feature is smarter, using on-device intelligence to highlight meaningful moments. Editing tools blend smoothly into the Liquid Glass design.

• Safari & FaceTime: Safari now uses the Liquid Glass design for its tab bar, which floats above the web page and shrinks as you scroll. Web pages occupy the entire screen, and the address bar shrinks. FaceTime adopts a minimal look, with controls in the lower-right corner that disappear during calls. The landing page features contact posters and video clips.

• Apple Music: AutoMix is an AI-powered DJ mode that blends songs in playlists with smooth transitions. Lyrics Translation provides real-time translations for foreign-language songs, and Lyrics Pronunciation guides help you sing along. You can also pin favourite artists and albums. For Apple TV and Fitness+ users, the iPhone can be used as a karaoke mic.

• Games: A brand-new Games app acts as a central hub for mobile and Apple Arcade titles. It offers personalised recommendations, highlights new releases and events, shows friend activity, syncs progress across devices, and serves as a single gateway to your gaming life.

• Preview: iOS 26 finally introduces a dedicated Preview app for viewing PDFs, images, and documents without needing third-party tools. It offers quick markup and annotation features and integrates seamlessly with Files and Notes.

Expanded Apple Intelligence

Apple continues to build on its AI capabilities, integrating new Apple Intelligence features directly into iOS 26.

• Live Translation: This allows communication across languages in near real-time within Messages, FaceTime, and even live phone calls. Everything is processed on your device for privacy. Major languages like English, Spanish, French, German, and Chinese are supported initially, with plans for more. Apple Intelligence will also expand to other languages like Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Portuguese (Portugal), Swedish, Turkish, Chinese (Traditional), and Vietnamese by the end of the year.

• Visual Intelligence: This feature can understand what’s on your screen. You can point your camera at an object or photo and ask questions, or take a screenshot and use the new Image Search option to find results online or in other apps. It can identify plants, landmarks, products, and more. It can also recognise events in images, like posters, and suggest adding them to your Calendar. This feature is similar to Android’s Circle to Search.

• ChatGPT Integration: Apple integrates OpenAI’s ChatGPT to answer queries, keeping most processing on-device for privacy. You can ask ChatGPT questions about what you see on screen.

• Genmoji and Image Playground: The Playground app, powered by AI, allows users to generate images and emoji. You can combine multiple emoji, use text prompts, or remix visuals locally on your iPhone. Updates allow mixing emoji, Genmoji, and descriptions to create something new.

• Shortcuts: The Shortcuts app gains smarter, AI-powered actions to automate tasks. Dedicated actions for features like Writing Tools and Image Playground are added.

• Order Tracking: Apple Intelligence can automatically identify and summarise order tracking details from emails sent by merchants and carriers.

• Foundation Models Framework: Apple is providing developers with direct access to intelligence features, available offline, using free AI inference.

Apple Intelligence features are available on iPhone 15 Pro and newer devices, as well as iPads and Macs with M1 chips or later. Newest Apple Watch models will also gain Apple Intelligence features in 2025.

CarPlay and More Notable Improvements

CarPlay also receives notable upgrades in iOS 26. It gets a smarter, slicker interface that incorporates the Liquid Glass design. Incoming calls now show as a compact banner instead of taking over the full screen. Messages support Tapback reactions and pinned conversations for easier hands-free chatting. Crucially, CarPlay finally supports widgets and Live Activities, allowing you to see things like your ETA or sports scores at a glance without opening apps. Widgets were previously limited to CarPlay Ultra. Maps in CarPlay now supports typing search, not just Siri.

Beyond the core apps and AI, several other iOS 26 features enhance the user experience:

• Adaptive Power: A new battery conservation tool in Settings, Adaptive Power automatically throttles certain background tasks and makes minor performance adjustments (like lowering brightness slightly) when detecting high-performance workloads or unusually high battery usage. This is particularly noted as beneficial for smaller and thinner iPhone models, potentially improving battery life on devices like the rumoured iPhone 17 Air.

• Maps: Adds Visited Places, a private log of places you’ve been, encrypted end-to-end. It also learns your routines and suggests preferred routes or alerts you about delays proactively. Visited places can be organised by category or city.

• Wallet: Introduces a new Digital ID for age and identity verification for domestic travel (e.g., TSA screening), though it doesn’t replace a physical passport. You can use rewards and set up installment payments for in-store purchases. Apple Intelligence helps track product orders by pulling details from emails.

• Settings (Families & Safety): Makes it easier to create child accounts and manage communication limits. Parents can get approval requests for new contacts and sensitive images shared via Messages, AirDrop, FaceTime, or shared albums can be blurred to protect children.

• Accessibility: Continues to be a focus, with new features like an Accessibility Reader for reading text aloud. There’s a new Braille Access interface and improved Live Listen. Refined Background Sounds are included. New Background Sounds options include Babble, Steam, Airplane, Boat, Bus, Train, Rain on Roof, and Quiet Night. The Personal Voice feature is enhanced. More options for Vehicle Motion Cues and a customizable reading experience are also added.

• AirPods Integration: You can now use AirPods as a remote shutter for the Camera app. For AirPods or AirPods Pro with the H2 chip, you can start video recording by pressing and holding one AirPod. High-definition audio recording in the Camera app is supported with H2 AirPods/AirPods Pro.

• Alarms: Users can now choose a custom snooze duration of between 1 and 15 minutes.

WebKit and Safari 26 Updates

Safari, now version 26 to match the OS number, also receives a host of updates, particularly relevant for web developers but with implications for users. WebKit, the underlying engine, includes 67 new features and 107 improvements in the beta.

• Web Apps: A significant change is that by default, every website added to the Home Screen on iOS and iPadOS will now open as a web app. Users can still choose to open it as a bookmark in their default browser if they prefer. This simplifies the process compared to previous requirements for specific meta tags or manifest files.

• Icons: Safari 26 beta supports SVG files for icons (like favicons) across the interface, allowing for infinite vector scaling. Data URL images are also supported for icons.

• Images & Video: Support for HDR images on the web is added. The dynamic-range-limit CSS property allows controlling how SDR and HDR content are displayed together. On visionOS, Safari now supports the <model> HTML element to embed interactive 3D models. It also supports a wider range of immersive video and audio formats.

• WebGPU: WebKit adds support for WebGPU, a JavaScript API for running programs on the GPU, offering compute shaders and superseding WebGL for graphics and rendering.

• CSS Features: New CSS features like Anchor Positioning with position-area for easier element placement, Scroll-driven Animations for tying animations to scroll progress, text-wrap: pretty for improved text wrapping, the contrast-color() function for choosing contrasting text colours, the progress() function, margin-trim: block inline, and logical overflow-block/overflow-inline are added.

• APIs: Support for the Digital Credentials API allows websites to securely request identity documents from apps like Apple Wallet in supported jurisdictions. The Trusted Types API helps prevent XSS issues. The URL Pattern Standard provides efficient URL matching. The WebAuthn Signal API allows reporting credential updates. The File System WritableStream API enables direct file writing.

• Privacy & Security: Safari beta prevents known fingerprinting scripts from accessing APIs, setting long-lived storage, or reading state for navigational tracking. Lockdown Mode now uses a Safe Font Parser to allow almost all web fonts.

• Developer Tools: The Web Inspector gets improvements for Service Worker inspection/pausing, debugging Worker memory/performance, and a debugger that steps over await statements. A web-based Safari Web Extension Packager helps prepare extensions for testing and distribution.

Alongside these major additions, there are numerous bug fixes across Accessibility, CSS, Canvas, DOM, Editing, Forms, JavaScript, Media, Rendering, SVG, Safari View Controller, Scrolling, Service Workers, Tables, Text, URLs, Web API, Web Animations, Web Extensions, Web Inspector, and WebRTC.

iOS 26 brings a significant visual overhaul with the Liquid Glass design, alongside a wealth of new features across core apps, expanded Apple Intelligence capabilities, and welcome improvements to areas like CarPlay and Accessibility. Many of these iOS 26 features address long-standing user requests and aim to make the iPhone experience more fluid, intelligent, and personal. While some design changes might take getting used to, the breadth of functional updates is certainly impressive.