Apple Notes gets more powerful every year, and iOS 26 brought its own set of new features. New features bring the threat of feature glut, but Notes offers a smart solution that makes its ever-expanding toolset more easily accessible in iOS 26.
Notes used to be an extremely simple iPhone app. Features were minimal, as Apple’s priority was to make it a quick place to take notes.
But at some point, the company began aggressively integrating Apple Notes into a powerful tool. Today, it can compete with the best third-party apps.
However, any time you make a simple application more powerful, there is a risk of feature bloat. Notes, for its part, does a good job of keeping the app experience simple and intuitive despite a growing feature set.
However, in iOS 26, there is a key change on this front.
Notes now uses an adaptive toolbar, which brings the most relevant tools to the forefront.
The previous iOS 18 toolbar, located just above the software keyboard, had the following buttons:
- Format menu
- Check-list
- Paintings
- Attachments
- Markup
- Apple Intelligence Writing Tools
Many of them had additional options hidden behind them.
In iOS 26, Apple completely revamped this toolbar.
It now has 18 buttons in total, with the first six being the same as before. But you can now swipe horizontally to access more tools.
18 tools is a lot, and that’s where the “adaptive” part comes in.
When you write or edit text in a note, the toolbar automatically starts showing the most relevant tools based on what you’re doing.
So if you’re editing standard text, Notes will display options like bold, italics, underline, and highlighting in the toolbar.
If you select multiple lines of text, the toolbar changes to show options like indent and indent, lists, and more.
You can always browse the full toolbar at any time. But hopefully, thanks to Apple making the toolbar adaptive, you shouldn’t have to do this very often.
What do you think of the new Notes Adaptive Toolbar in iOS 26? Let us know in the comments.
