7 iOS 26 features that I look forward to (apart from liquid glass)

iOS 26 arrives, and it’s a big problem. The new operating system obtains a brand new name scheme, deleting version numbers and sticking to the next year numbers in place. But it is not only the denomination convention that changes. iOS 26 brings a series of new major features, a whole new design, and more. In fact, this could well be the biggest iOS update in many years.

So, what are the most important new features to hope? I have been using the beta version of iOS 26 since the end of June. Here are my favorite new features.

A unified phone application

Liquid Glass is the great design language throughout Apple software – but liquid glass itself is not really a functionality. However, it brings with it a series of secondary design modifications to Apple applications, such as the new telephone application.

In the new phone application, the tab at the bottom of the screen is transformed into a pill -shaped bar with only three tabs: calls, contacts and keyboard. So where are your voice messages and your favorites? They are integrated into the main “calls” tab, where you can display the voice messages attached to all recent calls, and see your favorite contacts at the top of the screen. This helps make the telephone application less congested, but if you prefer the old one, you can return to the “classic” view to separate things. Before doing it, note that you can filter the calls in the calls tab – so that you can filter the view to display only voice messages, without having to scroll constantly through all these spam calls just to find a voicemail that remains last week.

Calls

The iPhone is also doing a better job to keep spam calls remotely. There is a new feature of screening for calls that gives you some control over what is happening when a call comes from someone who is not in your contacts. It is accessible by opening the Settings application, scrolling the applications and selecting the phone. From there, you can choose from three call screening options under the title “Unknown appellants screen”.

The first option is to never detect, which essentially means that your phone will always sound, whether the call is of an unknown or not person. The second option is “ask the reason to call”, which means that a caller will be asked a few questions about the reasons why they call, before your phone rings, and you benefit from a transcription of its answers so that you can decide for yourself if you have to answer or not. The last option is “silence”, which essentially silenced all calls from unknown numbers and sends them directly to voicemail.

Better visual intelligence

Apple Intelligence may not have enough Had at the height of the IOS 18 of last year, but it improves. In iOS 26, you will notably get better visual intelligence features. Visual Intelligence essentially gives Apple Intelligence an access to the world around you, using the iPhone camera – so you can point it to a translation sign, for example. In iOS 26, the big change is that it will not just help you to better understand the world around you, but also what is on your iPhone, thanks to the possibility of using Apple Intelligence with screenshots.

To use this feature, all you have to do is take a screenshot, after which you can save it on your photos, as you have always done, but you will also receive new “ask” and “search” buttons in the lower corners. These are the same buttons you will see on the ordinary visual intelligence screen. Press one of them depending on what you want to do.

Spatial scenes on your lock screen

Spatial scenes use AI to give your photos a whole new depth. Basically, the space scenes can take 2D photos and give them depth by taking objects in the photo and creating layers, then filling some of the missing information with AI. When a space scene is created, you can tilt your phone to see the image change speed. It is a neat effect and definitely adds a whole new dimension to the photos. And, to be clear, you can do it with many photos directly from the Photos application.

But my favorite use case for the functionality is to put them on the lock screen. To do this, simply keep your locking screen to customize it. Along the way, you will see a new hexagonal button, which is the button to create space scenes. You can activate or deactivate it, and the effect should appear in real time, so that you can preview it before saving it.

Backgrounds in the cats iMessage

Imessage also becomes a little more customizable. In iOS 26, you can add backgrounds to your cats, which can be a photo, a simple color or one of the predefined images of the sky, water, etc. This is not a major change, but it is an interesting way to add a little more personalization to your cats imessing.

To add a background to a cat in Imessage on iOS 26, open the cat and press the name of the contact or group cat at the top. Then press the background tab and choose from one of the options. The background will be visible for all the participants of the cat who direct iOS 26 or later, so keep this in mind.

Safari is more minimalist

Safari is another application that obtains the treatment of minimalism in liquid glass. In iOS 26, Safari moves away and puts content on the web page before and in the center. When you open Safari for the first time in iOS 26, you will see the same buttons, but transformed into bubbles by flying instead of a standard menu bar. You will get the buttons for the front and back, the three -point menu button and the main URL bar. However, when you scroll through a web page, all these controls shrink from a small representation of the URL bar, maximizing the space that the web page can occupy on the screen.

The compromise is that the controls are not enough as accessible. To recover the commands on the screen, scroll a little or press the small URL bar. Having used iOS 26 for a few months now, I can say that he has not really interrupted the way I use the web on mobile. I tend to open and close the tabs as you go, so I do not use the URL bar or controls beyond this initial navigation to a web page. But others may not have exactly the same experience.

Live translation

Yet another telephone call feature in iOS 26 is in the form of a live translation, which does exactly what it looks like. With functionality, you can mainly have telephone calls in two different languages. When the person at the other end of the call speaks, a voice of AI will say the translation in your language and you will see the words translated on the screen. Then when you talk, your words will be translated and the person at the other end of the call will hear a translation of what you say.

Maybe the best thing about this feature is that everything is going your iPhone. This means that the other person in the call can be on any random phone – your iPhone is translation and send the audio of your translated voice in place of your real voice. The functionality only works for individual calls and supports English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish – although other languages ​​will likely be added to the line.