Member-only story
I Installed The iOS26 Beta So You Don’t Have To
Early impressions of the new GUI.
iOS26 is here and with it a dramatic overhaul in the user interface of your iPhone. Like a lot of people, I was hammering the early developer beta servers last night to get a play with it. The actual initial download was 15GB and eventually took around 2 hours over my domestic 1.1Gbit WiFi. That should give you an impression of how busy Apple’s servers were!
If you’re thinking about doing so yourself I’d stop now. This is v1.0 of a developer beta. Its full of glitches and far from the slick animations Apple showed off at WWDC. But its also pre-release and to be expected. Apple has 3 months to iron out these kinks following user feedback. I actually spent a couple of hours this morning restoring back to iOS18 because of the bugs.
All this said though, from my time with it was it any good? Are the animations and visual effects as cool as they look? Arguably I’d say yes. Once you’ve gotten over the initial shock of how different it is the changes do grow on you. I’ll leave a look at specific apps for another time and concentrate on the overall look and feel.
